The morning after last week's terrorist attack in Taba, Egypt, an op-ed submission from the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress popped up in my e-mail in-basket. Dr. Mohamed Elmasry's article opened with a perfunctory expression of regret for the atrocity--and a rather more heartfelt expression of concern for the Egyptian tourist industry. The doctor then proceeded to his real message: Canadian newspaper readers must understand that the Israeli vacationers in Taba had brought slaughter and death upon themselves:
"It is greed that motivates the Zionists to follow an aggressive violent policy towards the Palestinians. They want it all--the land and they want the peace. They want to be the masters enslaving the Palestinians. . . . But violence begets violence."
Dr. Elmasry is right in one way: Violence does indeed beget violence. Since 1979, thousands of Jews and Christians have been murdered in the name of militant Islam in Israel, the United States, Europe, the Philippines, West Africa and beyond. But for every nonbeliever killed by Muslim extremists, those same extremists have killed dozens of their own: up to as many as 100,000 during the civil war in Algeria and hundreds more each month in Iraq, Indonesia, and Afghanistan today.
Those Muslim leaders who condone or accept Islamic terror may delude themselves that they are somehow speaking up in defence of their religion and culture. The truth is that they are bringing disaster upon their families, their homelands and Islam itself.
By a very horrible coincidence, the bombing in Taba happened to coincide with a pair of Islamist terrorist strikes in Pakistan: a suicide attack by Sunni terrorists on a Shiite mosque in the city of Sialkot that killed at least 30; then a few days later, a retaliatory car bombing against Sunnis in the city of Multan.
The Sialkot attack follows months of anti-Shiite violence throughout the Middle East, in Pakistan and especially in Iraq, including the March 2 attack on Shiite Islam's holiest place (the Imam Hussein tomb in Karbala) on Shiite Islam's holiest day (Ashura, the anniversary of Hussein's martyrdom in 632). More than 150 people were killed and hundreds wounded in an outrage that has been compared to bombing the Vatican on Easter Sunday.
In an important article that appeared in Foreign Affairs, two months before the Ashura attacks, Princeton University's Michael Scott Doran explained the motive for anti-Shiite terrorism:
"Radical Sunni Islamists hate Shiites more than any other group, including Jews and Christians. Al-Qaeda's basic credo minces no words on the subject: 'We believe that the Shiite heretics are a sect of idolatry and apostasy, and that they are the most evil creatures under the heavens.' "
These anti-Shiite radicals are not acting on their own. They are, Doran argues, putting into effect the teachings of some of the most revered leaders of mainstream Islam.
He gives this example: "A recent fatwa by Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, a respected professor at the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University (which trains official clerics), is a case in point. Asked whether it was permissible for Sunnis to launch a jihad against Shiites, al-Barrak answered that if the Shiites in a Sunni-dominated country insisted on practising their religion openly, then yes, the Sunni state had no choice but to wage war on them."
Nor are Shiites the only targets of religious warfare. Kashmiri women who will not wear the veil, anti-Taliban Afghans, Algerians who refused to join the Islamic insurrection of the mid-1990s, Iranians who defied the authority of the ruling mullahs--over the past 25 years, perhaps as many as a million Muslims have been massacred in the name of Allah.
It's often observed that the Arab and Islamic world has responded to the war on terror with a broad "Yes--but." In the end, the "but" invalidates the "yes"--and Muslims who want to condone only some terrorism end up giving aid and comfort to all of it. Anti-Jewish terrorism legitimates anti-Shiite terror, which in turn legitimates terror against insufficiently orthodox Sunnis--until in the end all restraint is thrown away and the greater Middle East becomes a vast killing zone.
After the Taba bombing, the director-general of the Al-Arabiya TV channel, a journalist named Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, published an article in a London Arabic-language newspaper that bravely challenged Arabs and Muslims to repudiate all terror, whatever its putative justification, whatever its target.
"[The terror attacks] are interconnected ideologically, if not by the affiliation of their perpetrators. A solution solely concerned with security can never succeed in bringing terrorism to a halt. This sheds light once again on [the position of] the Arab intellectuals, who not only are silent but even justify terror, for they in reality supply terrorism with what it most needs--propaganda and legitimacy. Therefore they are embarrassed when [such an] incident takes place on their own land and they hasten to make distinctions and clarifications."
Exactly so. By abrogating all moral standards in their war against Israel, Arab and Muslim leaders initiated a process of moral collapse that has ended by soaking their own societies in blood. The terror they intended to inflict only upon others has rebounded with a hundred times greater horror upon their own lands.
Israelis and Jews are grieving for the losses at Taba. But it could truly be said that it is those who condone and applaud such atrocities who have lost the most.
David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.
