Terrorists & losers

The American Thinker ^ | November 25, 2010 | ANN MARLOWE

[Scanian]

ZABUL PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN -- Sitting on the dusty flightline at Forward Op erating Base Lagman in the Afghan hinterlands, what could make better leisure reading than the November issue of Inspire -- the English-language magazine of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula?

The lavishly illustrated, 23-page PDF, is a "special issue" devoted to the attempted toner-cartridge bombings via UPS deliveries from Yemen. Besides a page taunting Yemen's president, the issue focuses on how the explosives were prepared, how difficult they are to detect and how economically the plot was accomplished.

Of course, none of the bombs mailed to out-of-date addresses for Chicago synagogues actually made it anywhere near Chicago.

Inspire explains the elaborate allusions to Crusader history behind the fake names on the labels ("Reynald Krak" and "Diego Diaz"). The bombmakers even dropped a copy of Dickens' "Great Expectations" in one of the packages.

This self-congratulatory spiel gets at just what is wrong with the general jihadi enterprise, and even more broadly, with much of the Islamic world. There is a combination, odd to Western eyes, of a veneer of sophistication about how Western society works, along with profound misunderstandings that lead to dysfunction.

First, someone who had spent some time in the West and kept his eyes open would know that packages to synagogues are apt to get more attention than those sent to most offices or private addresses.

[saganite]

The bombs had their intended effect. We’ll now ratchet our security measures up another notch. The bombs probably cost a few thousand each to manufacture. It’s going to cost us billions in extra costs and lost productivity, not to mention the costs of the ever expanding “security” industry.