The New Governor of Luxor

“Ex-militant to run bloodied Luxor tourist region” NBC News, June 17, 2013

A member of the movement whose gunmen killed 58 foreigners at a temple in Luxor in 1997 was sworn in by Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi on Monday as governor of the vital tourist region. Adel Mohamed al-Khayat, who now represents the Building and Development Party, political wing of the once violent al-Gamaa al-Islamiya movement, was one of 17 new governors, several of them Islamists, who took their oaths with the president. 

Khayat, then in his mid-40s, was a leader of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya in another province when, on November 17, 1997, six young men from the group shot their way into the Temple of Hatshepsut near Luxor's Valley of the Queens. The attack was part of a broader campaign by the group, at that time
linked to al Qaeda, to cripple tourism revenues for the government of then-president Hosni Mubarak. Of the 62 people killed in the next hour, 58 were foreign tourists, more than half of them Swiss and the rest were Japanese, British, German and Colombian. The gunmen, reported to have trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, committed suicide. Al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, also implicated in the 1981 assassination of Mubarak's predecessor Anwar Sadat, renounced violence and condemned al Qaeda in ideological U-turns a decade ago. It moved into public life after the revolution in 2011 which ended Mubarak's military-backed rule.

In Egypt, we are now seeing some more of the tragic consequences of Obama's epic foreign policy failures. Adel Asaad al-Khayyat has been appointed the new governor of Luxor, in charge of the region's tourism. He belongs to a group, Gamaa al-Islamiyya which carried out terrorist attacks that killed dozens of tourists, soldiers and police officers in the same city that he has now been appointed to govern. Under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, a slaughterer is exalted, rewarded. This would never have happened under Mubarak. This is the beginning of a world where America is absent. A world where the leader of the free world is absent.

These salafists despise the monuments of places like of Luxor. Some Salafi leaders have expressed disregard, and even hostility, toward Egypt’s pre-Islamic relics and monuments, which they consider pagan. Salafi political leaders have not actively moved to eliminate the country’s ancient sites, but their contempt for the ways of non-Muslim tourists is well known, “because tourist villages have aspects that anger Allah, including alcohol, gambling and other forbidden things.” Adel Asaad al-Khayyat's group was blamed for splashing blue paint on a statue of a mermaid in Alexandria last month. And in 2011, they wrapped cloth around a fountain that depicted mermaids. They are sending a message with this appointment.  Luxor is a major attraction, and tourism has been vital to the Egyptian economy.

 The ancient treasures of the world are in danger. The new Egypt sounds positively seventh-century.

See: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/06/egypt-muslim-brotherhood-appoints-terrorist-to-new-governor-of-bloodied-luxor-tourist-region.html