With each new attack, the Al-Qaeda further defines the nature of its evil. The murder of Simon Cumbers and wounding of Frank Gardner on Sunday demonstrate clearly that these assassins are also dedicated enemies of the truth.
There is evidence that the brutal attack in the Suwaidi district of Riyadh was planned. The murderers may have known that the BBC crew was coming to film the home of Ibrahim Al-Rayyes, a wanted terrorist killed by security forces last year. Their ambush was directed against a distinguished journalist and his cameraman because Al-Qaeda has no interest in the factual reporting of its attacks and the deluded men who perpetrate them.
Our sympathies are with the family of Simon Cumbers, and we wish Frank Gardner a full and speedy recovery from his injuries. Though some may say that their decision to go to this part of the capital was tempting fate, they themselves would argue that it was necessary so they could report the story of terror in the Kingdom, fully and fairly. Gardner, an experienced Middle East reporter who has been coming to the Kingdom for 15 years and is a fluent Arabic speaker, and Cumbers knew the dangers and took a calculated risk. It went tragically wrong.
This assault must redouble our determination to utterly destroy this great disease in our society. If the Suwaidi district has really become a no-go area for Westerners, then there is where our work must begin. Scholars, imams and security forces must go to the doorstep of everyone there who harbors sympathies for Al-Qaeda, who harbors the terrorists themselves. For the sake of all peaceful, decent residents of the district, for all our sakes, extremism must not be allowed to maintain a stronghold in our midst. These killers are demonstrating that they present no alternative to the governments of the East or West, and that anyone who still supports them in the belief that they present some form of legitimate “opposition” is terribly misguided. Al-Qaeda and its henchmen are media-crazy when it suits them, forever publicizing their atrocities on their websites and on television stations and in newspapers that will give them space. But when the glare of impartial reporting is turned on them, they follow their true instinct, silencing argument the only way they know how: with the gun. One of the most potent barriers to their success is the truth. That it why they launched their ambush on these television journalists. Nonetheless we must not make the mistake British Prime Minister Tony Blair made yesterday, when he claimed Cumbers as a martyr for “our democracy” — a hollow rhetoric that merely entrenches false opposition between the West and its system on the one hand and Arabs and Muslims on the other. Such verbal incontinence does nothing to strengthen the position of those on both sides who set out to tell the truth.
