Yemen Bombs and Smart Donkeys

May be the bombs were not the real issue behind this clumsy operation. But the mail bombs did carry explosives after all, they carried an explosive message.

By Dr. Ashraf Ezzat

 There is something peculiar about the so called global war on terrorism; I believe it is the first war in history to be waged against a phantom.

We can catch a man with an extreme and dangerous thinking and keep him locked up in a cell. But how could we imprison his ideas. We don’t have this technology yet. Besides, history has repeatedly shown us that hunting people in this aggressive and disproportionate way would only help to propagate their ideas- regardless of their value- and probably make heroes out of them.

 In WWII the world knew who the real enemy was that posed a clear and tangible threat to world peace. Hitler and the Nazis invasion of Europe was not a false flag. The mobilizing and deployment of allied forces all over Europe, Asia and Africa made sense to the people. But mobilizing the mightiest armies in the whole world just to hunt down a single man is something that fails to make any sense; rather it would make a good joke.

 I don’t mean to underestimate the dangers of terrorism, for I see that nothing could be more serious than intimidating and sacrificing the lives of innocent people for the sake of achieving any terrorist’s hideous goals, provided that we know for certain who the genuine and real terrorists are behind this whole piecemeal WWIII.

One of a kind terrorism 

One thing a real terrorist doesn’t have, is time. A terrorist job is to hit and run, so he can not have the luxury of a long time span for his operations. A terrorist is more like a vulture awaits and awaits again until the right moment comes for him to attack and grab the prey. It is a moment he cannot afford to mess up, for it’s all he got, he doesn’t get a second chance, he cannot make it linger even if he wanted to. Afterwards he is vanished, disappeared like a ghost.

But the vulturous terrorists behind 9/11 seem to be different kind of terrorists; the make-believe type or rather the made-up type.

They have all the time in the world, they are in no rush. They carry out a mega operation like 9/11 then they go on the most amusing play of hide and seek in the mountains of the middle and Far East.

Their leader relinquishes the discreetness of terrorists. He goes public and indulges his lust for publicity with broadcasting innumerable, successive and sometimes on demand video and audio tapes raging with non-stop threats to attack and wage a holy struggle against the west and America.

This war of propaganda has managed to stretch the moments and seconds during which the world trade center towers collapsed into a sustained war- almost ten years now- on terrorism during which the made-up al Qaeda managed to breed more make-believe Qaedas.

Can you locate Yemen on the map?

 But regardless of the futility of this global war with all the destruction and the chaos it brought about and the wasting of more than one million innocent lives but still we could see some good coming out of it.

This global war on terrorism has yet managed to refresh our knowledge and information of history and reduce the American geographic illiteracy.

 We still recall that shortly after 9/11 a survey conducted by National Geographic showed that most young Americans- aged 18 to 24- were not able to locate Iraq nor find Afghanistan on the map. With all the nearly constant news coverage of this war I believe that young Americans are doing much better now, geographically speaking that is.

Lately there has been an add-on stop on the touring war on terrorism by including yet another country that was virtually not located on anybody’s familiar map, namely Yemen.

I think that is a bit of an exaggeration, but anyway, let us review what has happened there.

On Thursday, October 28, intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia informed U.S. intelligence officials that UPS and packages carrying explosives had been mailed from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, to Chicago where the packages were addressed to Jewish synagogues via two airplanes.  The intelligence officials acted on a tip from a former Guantanamo detainee.

 The UPS cargo plane stopped in Qatar, then Dubai, where local officials quickly discovered the device inside a Hewett-Packard printer. The FedEx cargo plane stopped at East Midlands Airport in England, where the other bomb was found.

But the story is neither that simple nor straightforward. With more scrutiny you will find it full of contradictions; The British authorities declared that the bombs were designed to be detonated in flight. If that was true, why then the bombs were addressed to Chicago synagogues. Why stick a Jewish building as a final target when it was not meant to be this way.

John O’Brennan, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor, stated that investigators didn’t yet know how the explosives were supposed to be activated. While the experts said that the package found in England wasn’t actually a bomb.

Do you know who is “Reynald Krak”?

Something is missing here, but the strangest thing in this whole affair of the alleged affiliation of al Qaeda in yemen happened On Tuesday November 2. when Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane of the NYT reported that the packages had been addressed to “Diego Deza” and “Reynald Krak.” The former was a notorious Grand Inquisitor during the Spanish Inquisition of the sixteenth century, who tortured people accused of being secret Muslims. The latter name is a rare variant of  Raynald of Chatillon, a French knight who slaughtered Muslims en route to Mecca as pilgrims during the Second Crusade in the twelfth century.

Let us stop here for a moment; we now know that the mail bombs were supposed to blow up while the planes were in flight. Then wouldn’t it be safer to have it addressed to random mail addresses instead. Any professional terrorist would have done it this way, the safer way. Then why take the risk? Why attract the attention to the packages with those notoriously suspicious names?

May be the bombs were not the real issue behind this clumsy operation. But the mail bombs did carry explosives after all, they carried an explosive message that said; there are MUSLIMS behind this terrorist act who held a grudge against the west as old as the crusades and the fall of the Muslim empire in Spain.

History of Yemeni Bedouins

I agree that the objective of this Yemeni fabricated act of terrorism is to tarnish- already blemished by 9/11- Islam and Muslims and forever connect them with terrorism. But first, let me tell you something about the Yemeni mountains and desert dwellers known as Bedouins.

 They are a group of herders with strict and hard to change conservative traditions. Most of them are illiterate and their young girls are not encouraged to go to school. They gain money by smuggling weapons and narcotics – mainly Qat– through the border of north Yemen with Saudi Arabia.

The political unrest that has been going in Yemen during the last two decades -that has been misinterpreted and propagated by the media as a conflict between the Yemeni government and groups of Islamic militants allegedly affiliated to al Qaeda– is nothing more than the government military trying to root out the insurgency of separatist groups– living along the Saudi- Yemen border- of a Shiite Bedouin tribes called the“Houthis” living amongst a majority of Sunni Yemenis.

The Saudis had to build a barrier along the border with Yemen to gain more control and minimize the rate of smuggling weapons and qat into the kingdom territories. Despite that, the flow of contraband from the Yemeni side did not stop. When the Yemeni officials were asked for an explanation they replied that they did their best but smugglers were using “smart donkeys” which can not only find their way across unaccompanied but can also recognize the uniform of Saudi border guards and avoid them.

…Now don’t tell me that a group of people with this kind of mindset and with their modest stock of education and general knowledge could be- all of a sudden – experts on medieval history.

Bedouins who spend their day chewing Qat and herding sheep might have never heard of the crusades in the first place, let alone “Reynald Krak”, a historical character that could only be familiar to an oxford historian specialized in the crusades history but not to a Bedouin who only excels at training smart donkeys to transport illegal weapons and drugs.

Some will argue that this might be the influence of new generation of educated clerics and English speaking imams like Anwar Awalki– a dual citizen of U.S and Yemen- who is a lecturer and an inspiration to a lot of mujahedeen in Yemen.

 But I listened to most of his lectures in English and I assure you that he is as misinformed and misguided as any other religious fanatic.

He reiterates the same old rhetoric of jihad against the west with no political insight or any historical awareness whatsoever. Nonetheless, and to please the Americans, the Yemeni authorities declared Awalki wanted dead or alive.

Why donkeys are smarter in Yemen?

I think the donkeys in Yemen are smarter than some Bedouins who enjoyed the more exposure by the media and who didn’t mind being referred to as al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula instead being called by their real tribal name.

They thought with more media exposure they could gain international sympathy for their cause. They were not aware that the Yemeni authorities were playing the card of “we got a group of another Qaeda in the country, come and get them”

And since the Bedouins were not trained nor qualified to play the international terrorists. So they got all the help needed to launch their first international operation.

They were only assigned the small and easy parts of the plot like the tip they gave to the Saudis which they thought it would clear up the turbulent past between them and Saudi Arabia.

But the rest were left to the real professionals in the terrorist business. They were the ones to make the bombs look sophisticated. They are the ones who addressed the mail package to Chicago synagogues under the notoriously risky names.

As for whom they might be, we only have to figure out who would benefit from including JEWS on the list of targeted victims of this global war on terrorism?

.. Well, even a donkey can figure that out, and not necessarily the smart type.

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat

Ashraf Ezzat is an Egyptian born in Cairo and based in Alexandria. He graduated from the faculty of Medicine at Alexandria University.

Keen not to be entirely consumed by the medical profession, Dr. Ezzat invests a lot of his time in research and writing. History of the ancient Near East and of Ancient Egypt has long been an area of special interest to him.

In his writings, he approaches ancient history not as some tales from the remote times but as a causative factor in our existing life; and to him, it’s as relevant and vibrant as the current moment.

In his research and writings, Dr. Ezzat is always on a quest trying to find out why the ancient wisdom had been obstructed and ancient spirituality diminished whereas the Judeo-Christian teachings and faith took hold and prospered.

Dr. Ezzat has written extensively in Arabic tackling many issues and topics in the field of Egyptology and comparative religion. He is the author of Egypt knew no Pharaohs nor Israelites.

He writes regularly at many well-known online websites such as Dissident Voice and What Really Happened.

Dr. Ezzat is also an independent filmmaker. His debut film was back in 2011 The Annals of Egypt Revolution and in 2012 he made Tale of Osiris a short animation for children.

In 2013 his short The Pyramids: story of creation was screened at many international film festivals in Europe. And he is working now on his first documentary “Egypt knew no Pharaohs nor Israelites”.