The New York Times this morning explores something I noted below: that Al-Qaeda has lost support in Saudi Arabia by killing Muslims.
No one seems concerned about non-Muslim deaths.
“‘They can no longer say they are more or less raising the banner of jihad,’ said Saad A. Sowayan, a professor specializing in Bedouin poetry at King Saud University, sipping orange juice in a hotel coffee shop. ‘Jihad is not against your own people.'”
Evidently then, earlier attacks by Al-Qaeda enjoyed wide support because they were not against Muslims, and were understood as jihad operations. But not this time: “The fact that the targets were fellow Muslims lent the sense that the attackers might just be pursuing pure chaos. ‘If they were really seeking change they would resort to actions that would win them the support of the people,’ the professor said. ‘Before, people could find excuses. It is getting so irrational that you cannot explain it, you cannot defend it, you cannot understand it.'”
What kind of actions would “win them the support of the people”? Bombings in the U.S. instead of Saudi Arabia?
No word in this article about the evidence that non-Muslims, including a large number of Lebanese Christians, were actually the targets. Some radical Muslims themselves are claiming this, as quoted below: “the mojahideen had struck the heart of a compound housing arab non-muslims working for the CIA!”