Another own-goal in Africa?

For a bunch of erstwhile holy warriors, those Al Queda guys sure seem to be murdering a lot of innocent Moslems.

Thursday's coordinated attacks on an Israeli-owned beach hotel in Mombasa and a nearly simultaneous failed missile attack on an Israeli chartered airline, look to be the work of our friends from the Arabian peninsula. Fortunately, the jamokes using what appear to be a pair of SA-7 missiles either fired from outside the missile's operational range or suffered some sort of malfunction. If they had succeeded in hitting the Boeing 757, they likely would have killed most of the 272 people on board.

In the event, the net results of the failed operation was the murder of 12 people, 9 of whom were Kenyan citizens and very likely Moslem, given the hotel's location along the heavily Moslem East African coast. Similarly, in the August 1998 Al Queda attacks on US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a total of 220 people were killed, of whom only 12 were American citizens. More than 4,000 other people were injured in the explosions. According to the CIA World Factbook, Moslems account for 10% and 35% of Kenya and Tanzania's populations, respectively.

I am not a Koranic scholar, but I believe that the Prophet does frown upon random murder of other believers in the one true faith.