| Perish the thought! |
| I imagine that's the monastery the Egyptian army has been attacking, after knocking down the front gate. They like to shout, "Allahu akhbar!" |
Qaeda denies bombing
In the latest video, al-Zawahri devoted much of the time to the Mohammedan-Christian divide. But he denied that his group was behind the Alexandria bombing, according to a transcript by the SITE Intel group, a U.S. group that monitors cut-thoat messages.
Ahead of the bombing, thug Islamic websites affiliated with al-Qaeda circulated lists of Coptic churches in Egypt and Europe - including one that was hit on New Year's - along with instructions on how to attack them.
"To start, I want to explain that al-Qaeda has no connection with the kaboom that happened in the church in Alexandria," he said.
"The first among those who are responsible for setting the situation ablaze is the leadership of the Coptic Orthodox Church under the leadership of the one called Pope Shenouda
III," he said.| Of course. Had the Copts not been there, allowing themselves to be led by that man, the church need not have been attacked. Thus it is that they are at fault. |
| As if the Copts would dare so much as think such a thing! |
| Does anyone actually believe such arrant nonsense? |
About 3,000 protesters scuffled with Mohammedan shop owners Tuesday night and smashed the windows of a police car in the city of Assiut.
The next day, around 2,000 Copts gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square to protest reports that an Egyptian army unit had attacked a desert monastery earlier on Wednesday. The protesters said that a military unit using armored vehicles had demolished newly-built fences surrounding the old monastery. They claimed that the soldiers fired live bullets at monks.
Egypt's military council, which has been ruling the country since the Feb. 11 ouster of Mubarak, said the soldiers were removing "some walls that had been illegally built on the road and on land owned by the state."
Calls for more attacks
"If we are not able to produce weapons equal to the weapons of the Crusader West, we can sabotage their complex economic and industrial systems and drain their powers, which fight without a cause, until they run away fleeing," Zawahiri said in the audio message, according to the US-based SITE monitoring service.
He complained that the Mohammedan world trails behind the West in technological know-how and military weaponry.
| That's not all the Mohammedan world trails behind. |
| Good luck with that. Except for the American airplanes (once) and the London trains (once), the rest seem to have been painful or embarrassing fizzles. It doesn't seem as though your Allah likes you very much. |
According to AP, Zawahiri's first message, delivered Feb. 18, made no mention of the protests or Hosni Mubarak's fall from power. Al-Qaeda had advocated for the destruction of Mubarak's regime - and al-Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor, was part of a failed cut-throat uprising against the former president in the 1990s.
Meanwhile,
...back at the ranch...
according to AFP, Zawahiri's first message last week addressed the popular uprising that led Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to step down after three decades in power. Al-Qaeda has long advocated that violence is the only way to overthrow regimes.
But a handful of countries across the Middle East and North Africa are now roiled by popular revolts against longtime autocratic rulers.