DEATH THROES:

The Bali bombs may deal a fatal blow to the Islamists: After Luxor, Egyptian rule improved. Indonesia may do the same (Martin Woollacott, October 18, 2002, The Guardian)

After the massacre of foreign tourists at Luxor in 1997, the shock and grief felt by Egyptians was tangible. The journalist and academic Geneive Abdo describes leaving the relatively quiet campus of the American University in Cairo to find that "all around me, Egyptians were cursing the violence. They stood in crowds in the middle of downtown, waving their hands in the air and looking past one another as they shouted in anger and frustration."

The spectacular violation of Egyptian ideas of decency and hospitality by the Luxor terrorists turned the population decisively against a violent Islamism about which they already had grave doubts. The main radical Islamist movements in that country condemned the attack, went on to the defensive, and began a reconsideration of strategy.

In retrospect Luxor can be seen as the last desperate throw of the terrorist brand of Islamism in Egypt. A slow Islamisation of Egyptian society continued, which many westerners and secular Egyptians deplore, but it has nevertheless been pursued by non-violent means. Most of those who could not reconcile themselves to this course left the country, some of them to become founders and associates of what came to be known as al-Qaida.

Five years after Luxor, it looks as if al-Qaida and its local allies in Indonesia have repeated the same mistake in Bali. Just as Luxor alienated Egyptians from the path of violence, so it is likely that Bali will have the same effect on Muslim Indonesians. Extreme Islamists are far less a force in Indonesia than they once were in Egypt, and their chances of increasing their influence must be narrowed by what has happened. The operation that al-Qaida and its helpers have chosen to conduct illustrates the almost unavoidable contradiction between national political objectives and the kind of transnational war on the west and its friends which al-Qaida's leadership, whatever remains of it, wishes to conduct.

In much the same way, it might be said that December 7th, 1941, marked the beginning of the end of WWII. Once America entered the fighting the outcome was inevitable. So too with the war on radical Islam, a lot of blood remains to be spilt and some awful days await us, but the outcome is not really in doubt. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2002 11:03 AM