With all the activity in Doha these days, I guess all we really lacked was a good terrorist act to make it all complete. I mean, how would we know we were living in the Middle East if we didn't have an occasional suicide bomber? In all seriousness, though, many of our friends and family have expressed varying levels of concern for our safety and well-being, and I want to address those concerns as best I can.
Basically, my employer is going to follow the lead of the U.S. Embassy here in Doha; if they issue travel warnings, recommend that dependents or employees evacuate, then we'll do the same. We have several good communications tools with which we can inform our entire faculty, staff, & student body within minutes of an event or an alert, and my boss is in charge of our emergency procedures, so I can say with good confidence that we are reasonably well-prepared for almost any contingency, including terrorist acts.
The bombing that took place was on a very soft target, probably one of the softest in town, and it was very poorly executed (from a terrorist's point of view). It was fairly obvious that it was a desperate attempt to do something, anything, to mark the 2nd anniversary of the Iraq war. The day after the bombing, over 2,000 locals converged on the site to protest terrorism in general, and that bombing in particular. I was very moved by this, as I have sometimes thought that perhaps the Arab world took a different view of terrorism than us Americans. Turns out that they don't like it any more than we do, though we might differ on the best methods of eliminating it.
After the hot-air threats from the "Army of the Levant" hit the news--notice that they said to strike churches and avoid civilians...I'm not sure how that's supposed to work--Qatar's Ministry of the Interior sent crews around town to surround all potential targets (western churches, schools, etc.) with concrete barricades. They all have concrete walls already, unlike the theater that was bombed, so the barricades just give one more level of protection from vehicular attack. On Friday, imams in every mosque in town denounced terrorist acts and reminded their listeners that suicide bombing is not an acceptable practice in Islam, regardless of what al Qaeda (or certain parts of the Quran) might suggest.
Our church met in an alternate & more physically secure location, primarily for the benefit of anyone who might not have come to church in our usual spot out of fear of terrorists. Our speaker wisely pointed out that we weren't really any more or less secure than we were before the bombing; that unhappy event simply forced us to discard any illusions we might have harbored. The only true and lasting security to be found anywhere is in a relationship with Christ Jesus.
Bottom line, things are carrying on here pretty much as usual, with a few increased security measures thrown in to remind us all to remain alert, aware, and vigilant. On the whole, I think we're safer here than, say, in a Minnesota public school or in a Florida hospice. With the rampages of kids raised in godless homes and educated in godless schools, and a rampant judiciary bent on making law (bad law at that) instead of interpreting it as proscribed by the Constitution--killing people in the process--the United States is becoming a very dangerous place to live, especially for anyone unable to fend for themselves.
Posted by jon at March 27, 2005 12:42 AM