There has been no independent confirmation of yesterday’s claim by a previously unknown group, the Tawhid and Jihad Brigades, that it executed BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped five weeks ago today in Gaza and whose abduction I followed for a while, until I reached the regrettable conclusion that there is no story, there is only the abyss.
Nothing that has happened since has made me feel any more hopeful. Indeed quite the opposite.
I note that the bigger issue—the fact that there’s big, big trouble in Gaza being stirred up by extremist Islamist troublemakers (that is: even more extremist than Hamas, which lately has had to answer attacks from al Qaeda that it has gone soft, because it signed on to the Mecca agreement)—is finally getting some play.
Even the IHT reported on this today, however obliquely (Debka reported it first, as I noted here on March 17):
The group claiming to have killed Johnston said it would soon release video proving his death, but hours after the declaration was made, no such proof had been produced.
Palestinian moderates in Gaza have voiced concern recently over what they call the growth of “Al Qaeda-type thinking” in the Gaza Strip. Over the weekend, a Christian bookstore and an Internet café were damaged by bombs that were presumably the work of Islamic militants.
Tawhid and Jihad was the original name of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s first group in Iraq, before he changed it to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. It is unclear whether there is any relation, in intent or in reality, between the new Palestinian group and the Iraqi insurgent group.
This development should not come as news to anyone who has been following events in the Palestinian territories. The “moderate” Palestinian Hanan Ashrawi was recently caught complaining about Hamas’s religious clampdowns, as I mentioned here. Austin Bay noted here that there have been 48 attacks on internet cafes in Gaza in the last 5 months (and that there have been attacks on internet cafes in Morocco as well).
Trying to clamp down on the free flow of information is, of course, the oldest totalitarian trick in the book. Bombing internet cafes is “al Qaeda-type thinking,” as is burning books and CDs. That happened in Pakistan, but the thinking spreads like wildfire.
Garance Franke-Ruta underscores how deeply this newest development of extremist Islamist violence can hurt the Palestinians:
I can think of few actions more likely to decrease support for Palestinians among American political actors than for militant Palestinian Islamists to begin attacking Palestinian (or foreign) Christians, given the amount of high-level American support for Palestinian rights that’s based on the sufferings of Palestinian Christians at the hands of Israelis, as illustrated by this Robert Novak column following his annual trip to Bethlehem. The specter of the transformation of the territorial dispute between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs into a religious war of Palestinian Muslims against Palestinian Christians and Israeli Jews sounds like a textbook example of the maxim that in the Middle East, no matter how bad things look, they can always get worse.
They can and they will. And “everyone” will be surprised.
