From Reuters:
BAGHDAD - Egypt's top envoy to Iraq, expected to become the first Arab ambassador in Baghdad since the fall of Saddam Hussein, was kidnapped late on Saturday, an Egyptian diplomat said on Sunday."He was buying a newspaper on Saturday evening when two BMWs full of gunmen blocked his way and kidnapped him," the diplomat told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Iraq said just last week that Ihab el-Sharif would take up full ambassadorial rank to become the first diplomat of an Arab state with that status in Baghdad since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Egypt had yet to confirm that announcement, which was seen as an important sign of legitimacy for Iraq's new government. Many Arab states have envoys in Baghdad, but none have had a full-fledged ambassador since Saddam was toppled in 2003...
Department of Optical Illusion:
An Egyptian diplomat is kidnapped in Baghdad. It could be by common criminals, for the ransom money. It could be for political motives, on the assumption that any Arab diplomat who comes to Baghdad is an implicit seal of approval on the current Iraqi government.
But whatever the reason, it is the effect on American perceptions that is so dangerous. For if the kidnapping of an Egyptian official in Baghdad is endowed with a false significance -- and the Egyptians will try mightily in their own meetings with American officials to give it precisely that significance -- Egypt is "on our side" and Egypt is "an ally" and so on and so terribly misleadingly forth.
And if an important measure to be undertaken is to stop paying the diguised jizya to Egypt (and then to other Arab and Muslim recipients of American aid, not to mention that of other Infidel states), one that should ideally begin now (and just as a casus belli is easy to arrange, far easier to find is a reason for ending foreign aid -- possibly Egypt's refusal to comply completely and promptly with American demands not only for elections but for an end to harassment of Mubarak's opponents, and not only for an end to harassment of such opponents but giving them (such as Ayman Nour) full access to Egyptian media, and making a series of other demands that the Egyptian government cannot possibly meet, and then cutting off not part of the aid -- not the measly $30 million that was threatened had the Egyptians not finally given Saad Eddin Ibrahim a new trial -- but all of it. And it can be sweetly and plausibly (but always leaving open the "real reason" to be teased out by journalists, as the new hard policy on Muslim states becomes apparent, so that the correct gloss on American leave-taking in Iraq -- a machiavellian gloss -- will be clear in all minds) that the aid has been cut because Egypt has terribly disappointed "the American government, and the taxpayers" who had assumed, when the aid was first given, that Egypt would scrupulously fulfill its commitments under the "Peace Treaty" with Israel not to engage in hostile propaganda but to encourage friendly relations, that it was expected that so much American aid would, furthermore, lead to warmer feeligs on the part of its recipients but that anti-Americnaism has been whipped up, in the Egyptian media, for the last two decades at least, and "the American government believes that its own interests, and that of the American taxpayers, and that of the Egyptians themselves, would be better served by ending such aid, which in fact simply reinforces the view that we are supporting corruption among Egyptian government officials, and delaying the day of their having to reckon with the people."
But this diplomat's kidnapping is just the kind of thing, trivial as it is, explicable as it is, to give Americans the idea that "Egypt is right in there with us, right beside us, our staunch ally with its diplomats risking their necks to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us. Nonsense, of course, absolute and complete -- but the optical illusion is there.
Illusions, optical and other, are a real problem. They must be swooped down on at once, identified, analyzed, and corrective lenses -- the lenses of seeing Islam plain, and seeing Egypt plain -- must be promptly affixed to all Infidel temples, and don't bother, please, to waste time trying to select just the right fashionable frames. Concentrate on the lenses. Worry about the frames much later.
Kidnapped, eh?
Can we now expect a beheading video on al-jazeera, please? But first, Oh, can we have the whining, the writhing, the grovelling and pleading and calling for egypt to withdraw and leave Iraq etc, first?
*sick.*
The jackals are now biting each other.
What a pity.
I'm sure there's a good sura in the Koran to excuse it.
Good luck, ambassador.
Next time, try having some effective security, schmuck.
It's a terrorist war zone.
(Or hadn't they advised him of that little detail?)
BigSleep,
He probably thought that he was safe because he was a fellow Sunni Muslim brother.
The motive of the kidnappers does not really matter. They did it because they could. It show that we cannot protect diplomats.
I can't remember or find the site, but someone recently posted on a blog a statistical analysis comparing the instances of increases of attacks to payments made by various stupid people to the Jihadists for ransoms. The correlation, with the single exception of the events right around the time of the Iraqi elections, are 100% identical. Every time they got more money from a kidnapping, they get more violent and kill more people. You want my prediction? I think you can guess what it is...