Yesterday’s suicide bomb explosion at an Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan seaside resort of Mombasa and the double missile attack on an Israeli charter airliner taking off from the city’s airport were not wholly unexpected. A month ago, Al-Qaeda said in one of its taped messages that it would go after Jewish targets worldwide; despite the claims of responsibility from a hitherto unknown Palestinian group, Al-Qaeda remains the likely perpetrator. Expectation, however, does not make what happened any less evil — or stupid.
It is bad enough when innocent bystanders are killed in military action, but civilians, Israeli or otherwise, must never be targeted. The fact that the Palestinians are at war with Israel does not alter that fundamental fact. In any event, what was the military objective here? Was the hotel a secret Israeli army base? Where the two children killed in the blast Israeli soldiers? Were the six Kenyans killed closet Israelis? The fact that the Israeli Army kills innocent Palestinians, even Palestinian children, is no justification. It is not for Israel’s enemies to mimic its evil deeds.
To target and kill civilians is the worst of crimes against humanity. Killing Israeli holiday-makers, or those waiting for buses in Israel, is no different to Serbs slaughtering the innocents of Srebrenica, other than in scale. Those who organized the Mombasa attacks are on a par with the Milosevics and Karadzics of this world — just as cruel, vile and culpable.
Nor will such evil advance the Palestinian cause. It will set it back — which is why this coordinated attack, for all its apparent sophistication, was so insane. All that the Palestinians have is the moral high ground, based on the justice of their cause. That high ground is the only hope of a free Palestine being one day created. It is reinforced when the world sees pictures of Palestinian homes bulldozed and innocent Palestinian children killed. But it works the other way too. Every time a suicide bomb goes off in Israel, every time Israeli civilians are killed, at a club, at a bus stop, that moral high ground is eroded. Whether or not Palestinians were involved in the Mombassa action, they will, sadly, be tainted by it.
There is another reason why this attack sets their cause back. It and the bus attack in northern Israel are precisely the sort of action that frightens the Israelis into Ariel Sharon’s bloodstained arms. He — and Netanyahu — alone gain.
There will be other victims too — Muslim victims — as a result of this insane action. Tanzanian and Kenyan Muslims still feel the weight of discrimination and suspicion as a result of Al-Qaeda’s 1998 US Embassy attacks in the two countries. In Tanzania there has been outrage among Muslims at a new terrorism law which they believe discriminates specifically against them. This bombing will make matters immeasurably worse. It will be used by Tanzania to justify the new law and could be used by both states to clamp down even tighter. Not that Al-Qaeda will care.
But this attack is also a warning to President Bush who has allowed himself to be deflected by Iraq. Last month there was the bomb attack in Bali. Yesterday, it was Mombasa. Tomorrow where? Goa? Benidorm? Bodrum? Marrakesh? Al-Qaeda is not going to stop. Like a ravenous, stalking beast, it has tasted human flesh and will crave for more until it is destroyed. Its destruction has to be the crux of the war on terrorism, not Iraq.
