Al-Qaeda attacks Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt’s worst terrorist incident
This is horrifying:
A rapid series of car bombs and another blast ripped through a luxury hotel and a coffeeshop in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik early Saturday, killing at least 83, a hospital official said. Terrified European and Arab tourists fled into the night, and rescue workers said the death toll could still rise.
The attack, Egypt’s deadliest terror hit ever, appeared well coordinated. Two car bombs, possibly by suicide attackers, went off simultaneously at 1:15 a.m. just more than 2 miles apart. A third bomb, believed hidden in a sack, detonated around the same time near a beachside walkway where tourists often stroll at night.
I dived at Sharm in the mid-1990s when I lived in Egypt, and it is (or at least was at that time) a tiny village on the coast of the Red Sea. Even “village” overstates how small it is — it’s certainly not the size of something Westerners would think of as a resort. These attacks had to have been devastating.
Sharm caters to scuba divers, especially from Europe and America. (Cousteau once said the Red Sea is the greatest diving in the world, and it’s hard to argue with him.) When Egypt was hit by terrorism in the 1990s, also directed at tourism, which provides nearly all of Egypt’s revenue, it had horrible effects for the country and its economy — and this in a country where, even during the good times, many Egyptians have a quality of life that Americans would see as far, far below the poverty line.
The country (with American help) responded by hitting back brutally at the (mostly) homegrown terrorists. That worked, for a while at least. I suspect that Al-Qaeda has just bitten off a lot more than they can chew here and will, in the end, get chased out of Egypt, and rightly so. But American (and Egyptian) hopes for real democracy in Egypt will likely be a casualty along the way, again.
Contrary to what many Americans believe, Egyptians tend to love Americans. You don’t have to tell someone without a real democracy that disliking a nation’s politics doesn’t mean much about how you feel about a citizen of that country, and Egyptians can easily separate Americans from the American government’s policies. As a consequence, they gobble up America with a fork, whether it’s endless movies and television shows (“The Bold & The Beautiful” was the #1 show when I lived in Egypt, and its stars were treated like royalty whenever they visited), American fast food (two hour lines in the hot Egyptian sun to get McDonald’s, if you can imagine it) and America’s values.
Americans who like to tell people they love our freedom are like a fish saying it likes water: If you’re raised in that environment, it’s hard to know what the rest of the world is really like. I had a Cairo cabbie once stop the cab, turn around and tearfully quote large portions of the Declaration of Independence to me, finishing by pointing his finger at the sky and say “I love America! I love that system!” Ask someone who’s never been free, but has watched it from afar, what freedom and democracy are worth.
The attack on Sharm was an attack on Egypt, for all that the bombs were used in a tourist locale. Dead Westerners are certainly something Al-Qaeda would be happy about, but forcing a confrontation with Egypt that radicalizes Egyptians is also part of their long-term agenda.
Egyptians are a friendly, sweet, wonderful, warm people. They don’t deserve any of this. I mourn the dead and I mourn the living victims, too.
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