Dateline: Alexandria, Egypt. The news this morning was about a bomb blast in Cairo that killed one French teenage tourist and injured maybe 20 more European kids and Egyptians, some quite seriously. The bomb went off yesterday by the Hussein mosque by the Khan el-Khalili where tourists visit the bazaar and drink tea in sidewalk cafes.
The bomb was hidden in one of these cafes, possibly the very one that the other DrC and I sat in two months ago, drinking soda and watching the passing parade. Timing, they say, is everything….
If I’m not mistaken, this is the first terrorist-caused fatality in the Nile valley since 2005. The Egyptian government works very hard to prevent, deter, and stop this kind of ugliness. They have literally thousands of “Tourism and Antiquities Police” whose only job is to protect tourists.
Every tour bus has a discreet armed guard aboard. Every popular tourist site has these special police standing guard, some with submachine guns or behind bullet-proof steel shields. The problem is that Egypt has literally millions of tourists from all over the world; you cannot protect them all without effectively imprisoning them.
Egyptians we’ve met are friendly people, not at all anti-Western. I believe the terrorists who do violence against tourists in Egypt do so primarily to harm the Egyptian government which is not susceptible to normal political pressure.
Such less-than-democratic governments can be relatively popular if they create good economic conditions, Singapore is an example of this. Every serious anti-tourist incident costs Egypt tens of millions of dollars in tourism revenue as cautious people decide to visit somewhere perceived as less dangerous.
