An incredibly telling slide show On Al Qaeda’s butchery can be viewed at that great site for foreign issues, The Winds Of Change.
Bill Roggio and Marvin Hutchens put together a flash presentation that shows you (complete with suitable music) a quick history of Al Qaeda attacks on the innocent. Roggio writes:
The facts presented speak for themselves. There have been 30 major mass casualty attacks directed against the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Tunisia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and North Osetia. 14 of the 30 attacks were conducted prior to the invasion of Iraq, making claims of the occupation of Iraq as a casus belli for al Qaeda’s terrorism to be disingenuous at best. 4,895 people have been killed in these attacks, and 12,345 plus have been wounded. The majority of the countries attacked are Muslim countries. And although not stated, the vast majority of the victims of al Qaeda’s violence are Muslims.
The ideologues, leaders and foot soldiers of al Qaeda have no reservations about slaughtering the innocent. The majority of their attacks have been directed against civilian infrastructure such as embassies, consulates, shipping, transportation, hotels, resorts, nightclubs, bars, synagogues, churches, temples, mosques, markets, housing complexes, office buildings and schools. Each of al Qaeda’s targets were purposefully selected and carefully timed to inflict mass casualties as well as to provide the maximum media exposure. The radical Islamists embrace Muslim casualties, as many are considered infidel for embracing Western culture and rejecting the “pureâ€? Islam espoused by al Qaeda. This is an enemy that deserves no quarter.
When you read his Roggio’s post, you also realize: in doing the slide show they also left out a lot of Al Qaeda’s acts of sheer inhuman barbarity as the beheadings of bound, screaming victims in what were in effect 21st century “snuff films” by groups of their “brave” militants.
This flash presentation not only should be viewed but SHARED with as many friends and relatives as you can. In a few minutes, it puts into perspective what the world faces and what is at stake.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.