This is so sad. I've spent a fair bit of time in Egypt - it is one of my absolute favourite destinations (the diving is amazing!). Thoughts to those caught up in this murder.
Video grab from Egyptian television shows victims in body bags inside an ambulance.
OMG, how horrible. All those innocent people! Why on earth are these animals doing this?
The Big Pharaoh
http://bigpharaoh.blogspot.com/2005/07/this-is-egypt-you-dogs-of-hell-terror.html
Friday, July 22, 2005
This is Egypt you dogs of hell
Terror hit the nerve of Egypt's tourism. The Sharm El Sheikh resort is literally the epicenter of the tourism industry. One of Egypt's most beautiful spots. The terrorists knew where to hit. They knew where it will hurt. Up till now we know that 4 car bombs killed 43 people. The explosions were in different places across the resort.
The attacks were very well organized and very sophisticated. We truly entered world war 3.
I have been to Sharm countless times. As I was hearing the eyewitness reports, I could feel I was standing right there. The attacks are very serious and deadly to Egypt.
I just remembered the headline of an article written by Sayed El Qimni (who stopped writing after receiving threats) right after the Taba bombings last year. The headline read: This is Egypt you dogs of hell.
May God save us and have mercy on those who perished.
Update: News reports say 49 dead and 7 car bombs.
Update: The front side of a hotel was completely destroyed. Bodies were all over the place. The dead included Egyptians, Britons, French, Spaniards, Dutch, Qataris, Kuwaitis. You can almost find any nationality in Sharm.
Update: 85 people killed. I called someone I know who owns a shop in the Sharm market. He was in Cairo on his way to Sharm when his bus was ordered to return back to Cairo. He told me that he plans to shut down his shop in Sharm and return back to his hometown of Luxor. "Tourism is over in Sharm" he told me.
A friend of mine called me and told me that one of his friends was sitting in a cafe 50 meters away from one of the explosions. He told him that he saw pieces of body parts all over the place and burned bodies that looked like charcoale.
Update: Police say that 2 cars and a possible suitcase full of explosive might be behind the attacks. Most of the dead are Egyptians.
Update: I am trying to contact people so that we can carry out an anti-terrorism demonstration anywhere with any number of protesters. I am not sure if I will succeed or fail.
Update: I was in a cab today. The can driver told me that he was shocked by what the barbarians did. "What did those innocent people do to derserve such a death" he said. "These are people who just want to earn money to feed their children".
The radio in the cab was on. Egypt's foreign minister was talking about a phone call he got from Britain's Jack Straw. He went on to add that in the past Britain always issued warnings against traveling to areas that were hit by terror attacks. Now the British government adopted a new policy that do not issue such a warning. "They believe today that we cannot defeat terror by hiding but by confrontation" he said.
I am not sure if that will help Sharm. I read reports that tourists are already leaving. But this is defintly a good move by the British.
I hope that we as Egyptians would take such a confrontational stand. I hope that any protest can be organized. I hope that our "intellectuals" will abandon their "this-is-because-of-dictatorship" and "this-is-because-of-Iraq" and "this-is-the-work-of-the-mossad-no-egyptian-can-carry-out-such-an-attack" arguments and other excuses that come out of their mouth. I hope they see the only truth I am seeing which is that innocent Egyptians and others were killed on Egyptian soil. PERIOD.
Give 'em hell, Mubarak!!
Egypt is predominately Islamic - I'm surprised they're allowing this to happen. When all those tourists were machine gunned in Luxor it almost killed their tourist industry. I bet there are a lot of trip cancellations.
The Egyptians had better pull out of Muslim lands.
I wish the Egyptians success in rooting out the cancer that would commit such acts of evil.
I would like to say something like "well, this will anger the peaceful muslim population" or "committing horrors like this will certainly cause people to turn in the terrorists", but I know that I would be lying. This kind of horror is exactly what they want. This is Islam. The wholesale murder of masses of innocent people defines the religion of Islam. This is Islam, and this is why Islam must be destroyed.
Shame on all those who support these terrorists through actions or words.
Two Islamic groups took "credit".
You mean it wasn't the JOOOOOOOOOOOOZ?
What does Allah the Invincible say about Muslims killing Muslims?
Are most Egytpians considered apostate by the Wahhabists and their spawn?
Most polls I've seen describe most Egyptians as being sympathetic to Bin Laden....hmmmm
did the terrs figure on some foreigners being there?
I wonder if this is finally enough for the "moderate" Islamic countries to quit shrugging their shoulders when events like this happen. I realize that they thought this was all fine when it was only happening to Jews and Americans but now I wonder if this is finally their wake up call to become more active participants in the war on terror.
Captains Quarters
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005028.php
July 23, 2005
AQ Kills Muslims In Egypt, Belies Iraq As Cause
Al-Qaeda took responsibility for the horrendous coordinated series of bombings in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday, killing 83 and wounding hundreds. The suicide car-bomb attacks targeted Egypt's tourist business, which hoped to recover from the Luxor bombings in 1997 and a series of attacks last year:
The attacks dealt a fresh blow to the tourism industry so crucial to Egypt's economy, which was still recovering from the fallout of last year's bombings.
There have also been several attacks in tourist areas in Cairo in recent months, as Egypt prepares for its first multi-candidate presidential election in September.
The Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Levant and Egypt said it carried out the multiple bombings as a "response against the global evil powers which are spilling the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya."
Where has Egypt stationed its soldiers in any of these areas? Nowhere. Why does AQ want to attack Muslims in Egypt if the country doesn't have any soldiers deployed to Iraq? Because Iraq has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda's overall war. This attack should make that obvious, finally.
Egypt has no patience with radical Islam; Hosni Mubarak sees it as a threat, and rightly so. Radicals killed his predecessor for signing a peace treaty with Israel and Mubarak has maintained that diplomatic contact. He has managed thus far to checkmate the radicals in Egypt, mostly through political oppression that has the deadly side effect of oppressing everybody, creating more radicalism. For example, Osama's number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, hails from Egypt and used to head the leading radical terrorist group there before it folded itself into AQ.
AQ antagonism towards Egypt has nothing to do with Iraq, Palestine, and Chechnya and everything to do with assuming control of the ummah in its entirety. It attacks the US and Britain because we oppose the radical takeover of Southwest Asia by the lunatic Islamofascists. Does that involve Iraq? Certainly; right now it's the hot front in the war on terror, along with Afghanistan. But to claim that these attacks spring from our presence in Iraq exclusively, or even our presence in Arab lands, flies in the face of all evidence. Where are the American troops in Egypt?
The media, especially the British media who keep haranguing Tony Blair about causing the London bombings as a price for liberating Iraq, need to start adding two plus two and quit getting three for an answer. AQ operations point to a long-term strategy of isolating and crippling Middle East governments that (a) oppose radical Wahhabism and (b) operate in a secular manner that maintains ties to the West, especially Israel. That is the scope of the war Islamists have fought for twenty years under different banners -- Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and now al-Qaeda. They want to seize power by force, cast a Taliban-style tyranny over the entirety of Southwest Asia and North Africa (to start), and bring the infidel world to its knees through the control of petroleum.
Why, four years after 9/11, does the media and the Left still fail to grasp this? Could it be because acknowledging this fact requires a stark choice to either fight or surrender, and they would prefer to create a fantasy through sophistry to allow them to simply go AWOL instead?
Posted by Captain Ed at July 23, 2005 09:35 AM
God have Mercy...
How could anyone do such a thing?
They have no soul...
Ms.B
Thanks for posting this since the 24-hour cable news networks have been less than forthcoming with coverage last night and this morning. I haven't checked recently.
Who the hell goes to "vacation" in a Islamic country?
Dear Ted, Hillary, Harry, Barbara, Nancy and all the other libs that would like to politely express how "supportive" they are of the troops...... but not the war (what a line of bullshit!!) Maybe you should start picturing these photos as bodies of your constituents from your own home states, not that you'd give a crap anyway... Because this is going to start happening on our city streets, in our neighborhoods, at our hotels, on our subways and buses until you grow some friggin' balls and put away your tamborines, daisies and "Kumbaya" songsheets!!! We are at war, ACT LIKE IT!!!!