Barry Rubin: Terrorism Returns to Egypt, Will Sanity about Islamism Arrive in the West

Terrorism Returns to Egypt, Will Sanity about Islamism Arrive in the West

by Barry Rubin

As I’ve predicted since February, a major consequence of the Egyptian revolution and the rise of radical Islamism there will be a return to the terrorism of the 1990s which destroyed the tourism industry; targeted Christians; murdered moderates and secularists; and killed government officials and bystanders.

Now a group has attacked two police stations in el-Arish. And of course CNN misses the point. Those responsible, it reports, are, “Takfir-wal Higra, a group sympathetic to al Qaeda’s goal of establishing an Islamic Caliphate.” Actually, the group originated in Egypt long before Usama bin-Ladin began his political activity. And in Egypt, terrorist Islamists come out of the Muslim Brotherhood, demanding faster and more extreme tactics. We will be seeing a lot of such people in the coming months and years.


Once again, this recalls to me the 1981 book of Muhammad Abd al-Salaam Faraj, The Forgotten Commandment.

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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

Technorati Tag: Egypt and Muslim Brotherhood and Arab Spring.