https://www.barrons.com/news/french...-unstable-man-authorities-01670892607?tesla=y
The killer of the elderly French female tourist in Morocco may simply have been, as the Moroccan authorities of course want everyone to believe, an “unstable person,” but I suggest that he may also have deliberately chosen a French target – rather than, say, an American tourist, or a fellow Moroccan – as a representative of the “colonial” power, France, that held sway in Morocco from 1912 to 1956.
The Moroccan government will not suggest any such thing, for an obvious reason: that news could scare off French tourists, whose custom is so important to the Moroccan economy. Better to attribute the murder to someone who is mentally unbalanced than to a Muslim Moroccan full of hatred for the Infidels, someone who has been whipped up even more by all the talk of the Morocco-France soccer rivalry.
A not inconsiderable number of Western tourists have been set upon and murdered in Muslim lands over the past few decades. These attacks are almost always described as having been committed by “unstable” people, as in this case. Only when the crime is uncontrovertibly linked to Islam, as when an attacker yells “Allahu akbar” while committing his crime, do the authorities admit that foreigners were targeted because they were Infidels. And in some cases, the Muslim attackers set upon the foreign tourists not just out of a deep animus, but also to discourage tourism, as a way to deprive a hated regime of a vital source of revenue – a regime with which the Islamists are at war.
The leading example of this is the attack by Muslims on foreign tourists visiting Luxor in1997. Sixty-nine tourists were murdered; thirty-six of them were Swiss. After killing two Egyptian security guards, the terrorists had the tourists trapped inside the temple of Hatshepsut. The killing went on systematically for 45 minutes, during which many bodies, especially of women, were mutilated with machetes. The body of an elderly Japanese man was found mutilated. A leaflet was discovered stuffed into his body that read “no to tourists in Egypt” and was signed “Omar Abdul Rahman’s [the blind cleric being held in a U.S. prison] Squadron of Havoc and Destruction – the Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group.”
By attacking non-Muslim tourists, you can wreak your revenge for some act “against Islam” by those tourists’ home countries. Thus the Frenchman Hervé Gourdel, who merely wanted to walk in the mountains of the Kabyle, was kidnapped and decapitated in Algeria because France refused to halt its bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq. The killing of the 68 foreign tourists – the majority of them Swiss – at Luxor in 1997 raid, was an act by Egyptian Muslims intent on damaging tourism and thereby harming the Mubarak regime.
Is there a moral to this tale? A lesson to be learned? There certainly is. For god’s sake, do not visit Muslim lands. Do not take the quite unnecessary risk. The world is wide, there is so much else to see — safely. Who knows when some individual, who has all his life been told, in the Qur’an, that Infidels are “the most vile of created beings,” may have been listening to his own imam denouncing Infidels in recent sermons, or been whipped up by broadcasts from such Muslim preachers as the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, or Zakir Naik, will decide to take out his fury on some innocent foreign tourist passing by? Now that Morocco has lost its soccer match to France, or to Argentina, who would be surprised if a disappointed Moroccan, or other Arab, took out his rage on an Infidel tourist passing by?
Besides, why would you want to give a boost to Muslim economies with your tourist dollars?
Instead of visiting the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings, simply visit the collections of Egyptian antiquities at the museums in Turin, Berlin, Paris, London, Boston, New York, where you can see mummies, canopic jars, and sarcophaguses to your hearts’ content. And if you have the urge to see pyramidal structures, skip the Valley of the Kings In Egypt, and instead go safely to Teotihuacan, just 30 miles outside Mexico City, to see the even more fabulous structures built by the Aztecs, including the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, and the Temple of the Jaguar. Why visit dangerous Pakistan when you can visit India to see Hindu temples and statues that were built long before the Muslim invasion? Visit South America, the Pacific islands, Sweden, Lapland, Greenland. Take the Trans-Canadian railway or the Trans-Siberian Express. Or stick to the inexhaustible civilizational riches on offer to you in just three European countries – Italy, France, and England. You will never be tired, never bored. And you will not have the uneasy feeling that any Infidel tourist visiting a Muslim country is fully justified in feeling.
Right now, Moroccans are fixated on their own soccer team’s victories in Qatar, having defeated what they describe as the “two colonial powers Portugal and Spain” — though it was the Arabs who for 700 years colonized the Iberian Peninsula — and on their December 14 defeat in their semifinals match with France. A victory against France would have represented, for Moroccans and all Arabs, a kind of civilizational victory over the Infidel French, and by extension over the Infidels everywhere In the West. The match was endowed with a significance, by the Arabs, that we in the West have not understood. The defeat has resulted in the expected reaction, but even before then, tensions were high.
The killer of the elderly French female tourist in Morocco may simply have been, as the Moroccan authorities of course want everyone to believe, an “unstable person,” but I suggest that he may also have deliberately chosen a French target – rather than, say, an American tourist, or a fellow Moroccan – as a representative of the “colonial” power, France, that held sway in Morocco from 1912 to 1956.
The Moroccan government will not suggest any such thing, for an obvious reason: that news could scare off French tourists, whose custom is so important to the Moroccan economy. Better to attribute the murder to someone who is mentally unbalanced than to a Muslim Moroccan full of hatred for the Infidels, someone who has been whipped up even more by all the talk of the Morocco-France soccer rivalry.
A not inconsiderable number of Western tourists have been set upon and murdered in Muslim lands over the past few decades. These attacks are almost always described as having been committed by “unstable” people, as in this case. Only when the crime is uncontrovertibly linked to Islam, as when an attacker yells “Allahu akbar” while committing his crime, do the authorities admit that foreigners were targeted because they were Infidels. And in some cases, the Muslim attackers set upon the foreign tourists not just out of a deep animus, but also to discourage tourism, as a way to deprive a hated regime of a vital source of revenue – a regime with which the Islamists are at war.
The leading example of this is the attack by Muslims on foreign tourists visiting Luxor in1997. Sixty-nine tourists were murdered; thirty-six of them were Swiss. After killing two Egyptian security guards, the terrorists had the tourists trapped inside the temple of Hatshepsut. The killing went on systematically for 45 minutes, during which many bodies, especially of women, were mutilated with machetes. The body of an elderly Japanese man was found mutilated. A leaflet was discovered stuffed into his body that read “no to tourists in Egypt” and was signed “Omar Abdul Rahman’s [the blind cleric being held in a U.S. prison] Squadron of Havoc and Destruction – the Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group.”
There have been other mass killings of tourists in Arab countries since 1997, as well as many attacks on individual tourists, like the one on this Frenchwoman in Morocco. There was the French mountain guide, Hervé Gourdel, who was seized by Muslims as he was walking in the Kabyle region of Algeria. His kidnappers decapitated him, as “revenge” for the French bombing of targets in Iraq. Islamist gunmen killed 22 tourists at the Bardo Museum in Tunisia on March 2015, and three months later other Muslim gunmen killed 38 foreign tourists on a beach at Port El Kantaoui, near Sousse. The Islamic State (ISIS) said it had carried out the attacks. Infidels, in ISIS’ view, should not be visiting Muslim lands and, by their example — their women half-naked, their men drinking alcohol — corrupting Muslim youth.
By attacking non-Muslim tourists, you can wreak your revenge for some act “against Islam” by those tourists’ home countries. Thus the Frenchman Hervé Gourdel, who merely wanted to walk in the mountains of the Kabyle, was kidnapped and decapitated in Algeria because France refused to halt its bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq. The killing of the 68 foreign tourists – the majority of them Swiss – at Luxor in 1997 raid, was an act by Egyptian Muslims intent on damaging tourism and thereby harming the Mubarak regime.
Is there a moral to this tale? A lesson to be learned? There certainly is. For god’s sake, do not visit Muslim lands. Do not take the quite unnecessary risk. The world is wide, there is so much else to see — safely. Who knows when some individual, who has all his life been told, in the Qur’an, that Infidels are “the most vile of created beings,” may have been listening to his own imam denouncing Infidels in recent sermons, or been whipped up by broadcasts from such Muslim preachers as the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, or Zakir Naik, will decide to take out his fury on some innocent foreign tourist passing by? Now that Morocco has lost its soccer match to France, or to Argentina, who would be surprised if a disappointed Moroccan, or other Arab, took out his rage on an Infidel tourist passing by?
Besides, why would you want to give a boost to Muslim economies with your tourist dollars?
Instead of visiting the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings, simply visit the collections of Egyptian antiquities at the museums in Turin, Berlin, Paris, London, Boston, New York, where you can see mummies, canopic jars, and sarcophaguses to your hearts’ content. And if you have the urge to see pyramidal structures, skip the Valley of the Kings In Egypt, and instead go safely to Teotihuacan, just 30 miles outside Mexico City, to see the even more fabulous structures built by the Aztecs, including the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, and the Temple of the Jaguar. Why visit dangerous Pakistan when you can visit India to see Hindu temples and statues that were built long before the Muslim invasion? Visit South America, the Pacific islands, Sweden, Lapland, Greenland. Take the Trans-Canadian railway or the Trans-Siberian Express. Or stick to the inexhaustible civilizational riches on offer to you in just three European countries – Italy, France, and England. You will never be tired, never bored. And you will not have the uneasy feeling that any Infidel tourist visiting a Muslim country is fully justified in feeling.
