1997 Luxor Attack

The 1997 Luxor Attack appears in Noam Chomsky’s account as a mass killing with both immediate and wider consequences: sixty tourists were killed, and Egypt’s tourism industry suffered a devastating blow. He uses the attack to illustrate how extremist violence and retaliatory policies can feed a cycle of grievance and recruitment rather than resolve the conditions sustaining it.

The Attack and Its Immediate Consequences

Chomsky identifies the perpetrators as members of groups associated with Osama bin Laden’s network. In 1997, they killed sixty tourists in Egypt. The attack was not presented only as violence against its direct victims: by striking tourists, it also inflicted a severe loss on the country’s tourism industry, extending the consequences into Egypt’s economic life.

A Wider History of Violence

The attack belongs to a longer sequence in Chomsky’s account. He describes the networks associated with Osama bin Laden as products of the wars of the late 1980s, tracing their background to the forces mobilized for the war in Afghanistan. Those forces, he says, had also been linked to violence in other settings, including the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and a 1983 suicide attack that helped prompt the withdrawal of American forces from Lebanon. The 1997 killing therefore appears not as an isolated episode but as one action within a transnational history of armed groups and political violence.

Chomsky describes the groups’ activities as extending across North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, western China, Southeast Asia, and the United States. He connects their continued activity to the aftermath of earlier wars and to recruitment among people experiencing anger, despair, and frustration, across differences of wealth and religious or secular outlook. His account presents these conditions as part of the context in which violence can persist, not as an excuse for the attack or a diminishment of its victims.

Retaliation and the Cycle of Violence

The attack also informs Chomsky’s warning about responses to terrorism. He contrasts gathering evidence and pursuing those responsible through legal procedures with answering atrocities through extreme violence. The latter, he argues, risks producing new crimes and reproducing the very conditions that give rise to vengeance. In this analysis, the Luxor killing is one example of violence whose significance reaches beyond the event itself: it stands within a cycle in which attacks and reprisals may intensify rather than contain conflict.

The Event in Chomsky’s Broader Argument

Chomsky’s discussion treats terrorism as a category that should be applied consistently, rather than reserved for violence committed by adversaries. He cites the official American definition, which encompasses calculated violence or its threat for political, religious, or ideological aims, and identifies the attacks on the United States in September 2001 as terrorist crimes under that definition. Against this background, the Luxor Attack serves as a concrete example of the brutality of non-state violence while the surrounding argument questions how states define terrorism and how their own uses of force are described.

The book does not give a detailed account of how the Luxor Attack unfolded or identify individual perpetrators. Its emphasis is instead on the attack’s toll, its damage to Egypt’s tourism industry, and its place in a wider pattern of violence, political grievance, and possible escalation.