The Egyptian Atrocities -- The Blame Game Starts

The accounts are horrifying.

Khaled Sakran, a resident, said he saw one explosion from the Old Market. "I saw the fire in the sky," he told The Associated Press. "Right after, I saw a light in the sky and heard another explosion, coming from Naama Bay."

A London police officer, Charlie Ives, who was on vacation, told BBC Television that he was in a street cafe about 50 yards from the explosions.

"It was mass hysteria really. We tried to calm people down," he said. He said the blast was so strong, "we were virtually thrown from the cafe."

British tourist, Fabio Basone, was in Naama Bay's Hard Rock Cafe when he heard a small explosion, then a larger one that sparked "mass panic with people running and screaming in all directions."

"We went outside onto the street where we were met with hundreds of people running and screaming in all directions," he told BBC. "I saw the front of a hotel had been blown away ... There were two bodies on the floor, but I don't know if they were dead."

Read the whole thing here.

The target, as so often in Egypt, was the tourist industry, but most of those innocent men, women, and children massacred were Muslims. Once more radical Islamists, claiming to fight in the name of Islam, have slaughtered and terrorized Muslims.The bastards! The evil, evil bastards!

In all the hubbub over the bombing, once again voices are rising to blame it on Bush and Blair rather than the perpetrators themselves [here].

Before giving credence to that particular idiocy it will be useful to review the record of Egyptian Islamist terrorism. AP has a useful recapitulation here.

From Associated Press

Attacks in Egypt on sites frequented by foreigners:

2005:

-- April 30: Two veiled women open fire on a tour bus in Cairo, then fatally shoot themselves, and a suspect in an April 7 attack dies when the bomb he is carrying goes off during a police chase. Seven people, four of them foreigners, are wounded in the violence.

-- April 7: Suicide bomber detonates a homemade bomb near the Khan al-Khalili market, killing two French citizens and an American.

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2004:

-- Oct. 7: Islamic militants detonate bombs in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan, killing 34 people, including more than 10 Israelis, and wounding more than 100.

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1997:

-- Nov. 17: Islamic militants kill 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians in an attack at the Pharaonic Temple of Hatshepsut outside Luxor in southern Egypt. Police kill all six assailants. The massacre devastates the country's important tourist industry.

-- Sept. 18: Two gunmen kill nine German tourists and their driver in an attack on a tour bus outside the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo. Eighteen people are wounded.

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1996:

-- April 18: Four Islamic militants open fire on Greek tourists, killing 18, outside the Europa Hotel on the Pyramids Road in Cairo. Seventeen people are wounded.

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1994:

-- March 4: Islamic militants open fire on a Nile cruise ship at Sidfa in southern Egypt, killing a German woman.

-- Aug. 26: A 13-year-old Spanish boy is killed and three other people are wounded when militants fire at a tourist bus near Nag Hamadi in southern Egypt.

-- Sept. 27: Two German tourists and two Egyptians are killed when a militant opens fire in central Hurghada, a Red Sea resort.

-- Oct. 23: A British man is killed and three Britons and their driver wounded in an attack on their minibus near Naqada in southern Egypt.

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1993:

-- Feb. 26: A bomb explodes at popular coffee shop in Cairo's central Tahrir Square, killing a Swede, a Turk and an Egyptian. Eighteen others are injured, including two Americans.

-- Oct. 26: A gunman kills two Americans and a Frenchman and wounds three other foreigners at a Cairo hotel.

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1992:

-- Islamic insurrection begins in Egypt. An early casualty is a British woman tourist killed in an attack on a bus near Dairut in southern Egypt.

Those who would attribute the current atrocities to Bush and Blair are either themselves abysmally ignorant of history, or are cynically counting on such ignorance in their readers and listeners. As Tony Blair explained a few days ago -- "The people who are responsible for these terrible acts are the people who committed them."