Terror Warnings in Sinai, Israelis Asked Not to Travel

Amidst very concrete warnings of likely terrorist attacks in Egypt's Sinai Desert, Israelis have been asked to stay away. The Egyptian security forces are reported to be searching for an armed group of terrorists traveling in a convoy of four pick-up trucks. Just last week, the Egyptian security forces found a car bomb bound for a tourist site in the Sinai, according to the Egyptian-government controlled Al Ahram newspaper. Another apparent car-bomb escaped, however.

Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.

This claim, quickly accepted by the Arab media as incontrovertible fact, was the most salient "evidence" that the Jews were involved in the attacks. Syrian ambassador to Tehran Turky Muhammad Saqr said at a conference held at the Iranian Foreign Ministry: "Syria has documented proof of the Zionist regime's involvement in the September 11 terror attacks on the U.S.," and that "4,000 Jews employed at the WTC did not show up for work before the attack clearly attests to Zionist involvement in these attacks." [21] The conservative Iranian daily Kayhan also referred to this "fact": "It is known that 4,000 Jews worked at the WTC in New York and that these people did not come to work that day." [22]

Raed Salah wrote in Saut Al-Haqq Wa-Al-Hurriyya, "A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims." [23]The same numbers were also cited in an article by Syrian columnist Mu'taz Al-Khattib, who wrote in Al-Hayat that 4,000 Jews had been absent from the WTC building at the time of the incident.