CAIRO: Jailed leaders of an Egyptian extremist group urged Muslim youth not to participate in al-Qaeda terror attacks, saying such acts were religious mistakes, a pan-Arab paper reported Monday. Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya's leaders, serving life sentences for their role in Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's 1981 assassination, said in a statement that terror attacks like those in Saudi Arabia and Morocco "put the whole (Islamic) community in a state of enmity with the rest of the world." Al-Gamaa was once Egypt's largest Islamic militant group and tried to overthrow the country's government during the 1990s in bloody campaign that killed more than 1,000 people. The group renounced violence in 1997.
| Al-Gamaa presents a little lesson on how to control terror organizations. The Egyptians bumped off a lot of cannon fodder, but they also grabbed the head cheeses and put them in jug. Under the usual conditions in the Arab world, the next step would be for their supporters to kidnap somebody and demand an exchange. I believe the deal in this case is that when that happens, Grandmaw, Uncle Abdul, and little Mahmoud get it. For all its faults, Egypt learned the lesson that to defeat terrorism you've got to be more vicious than the bastards you're fighting. |
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