Any comment on Friday’s failed terror attack on the huge Abqaiq oil processing facility in the Eastern Province must begin with our gratitude for the vigilance and courage of the security staff who prevented it. It must also include our deepest sympathy to the friends and family of the two brave men who perished doing their duty. We also wish all the injured a full and speedy recovery. As police forensic experts sift evidence gathered from the site, there are other lessons to be learned from this attempted crime. The first is that Al-Qaeda has clearly changed tactics within the Kingdom, perhaps because of its success in Iraq where attacks against pipe lines, installations and workers have crippled Iraqi oil production.

Thanks to the efforts of police and security forces as well as the vigilance of members of the public, Al-Qaeda’s operations have clearly been rendered much more difficult to carry out. The clemency shown to terrorists who surrendered has also probably undermined attempts to recruit new deviants needed to replace those killed or captured. The last major attack in the Kingdom before Friday’s failure was in December 2004. Having regrouped its shrinking resources, Al-Qaeda has shifted its targets to oil installations, no doubt hoping that a single spectacular attack against Abqaiq would have scored for it a stunning “victory.” They measure victory, let us not forget, by the number of the innocent lives they take. On Friday, they discovered just how tough a nut the Kingdom’s oil infrastructure is. They will also have learned lessons from their latest failure. Therefore everyone must remain alert for their next wicked attempt to injure a society from which they have separated themselves by their bigotry and hatred.

The government is clearly more determined than ever to root out the deadly cancer they represent. There is now a general recognition in Saudi Arabia that the minds of these butchers are fatally diseased with evil. Their sheer barbarity and relentless inhumanity demonstrate the sort of world they would create if they could ever overthrow the ordered society that opposes them.

They have long squandered whatever sympathy they managed to accumulate by claiming to act on behalf of the oppressed Palestinians and against foreign interference in the region. Stripped of their pretense of decent values, they have been shown for what they are — men made totally blind and deaf by searing hatred and driven by insatiable blood lust. With the exceptions of those who have abandoned their depravities and surrendered, Al-Qaeda’s terrorists are entirely lost to the principles that sustain a just and civilized world.

Indeed perhaps the greatest crime of these thugs is their stupidity. Those who are persuaded to throw away their lives in cars loaded with explosives seem incapable of appreciating the misery their crimes cause to innocent people. Worse, they are obviously unable to understand the contempt and loathing felt for them by every decent Saudi. It is bad enough that they are cold-blooded killers. It is worse that are ignorant and stupid as well.