It was only a matter of time before the next terrorist attack in the Red Sea resorts of Egypt killed and maimed tourists and fun-loving Egyptians who shun the all-enveloping, Afghan-burka-style veil for their women, preferring to see them in bikinis.

Sadly, it happened yesterday.

They are still counting the dead and the wounded while Egypt’s vital tourist industry is pursuing its trip to oblivion.

Like hyenas shrieking in the wilderness, Islamic fundamentalist Web sites were quick to declare yet another victory against “infidels,” “adulterers,” “Christians and Jewish pigs and monkeys” – in other words, tourists.

Of course President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, our friend and ally, has issued his usual “assurances” that culprits will be “severely punished.” Never mind that his security forces have yet to catch all those who did the exact same thing twice before in two years, targeting Egypt’s golden resorts of the Red Sea coast. (In July, terrorists killed 64 and wounded more than 200 in Sharm el-Sheikh. In 2004, they killed 34 in Taba, less than 300 yards from the border between Egypt and Israel).

For its part, the American press will be replete this morning with “security experts” speculating that this attack so closely follows Osama bin Laden’s latest video vowing to unleash Islamic wrath. It has to be the work of jihadists. Duh!

Please folks, let us push the envelope.

It goes without saying that, as sure as the sun has risen this morning, the authors of this terror are related in one way or another to Muslim Jihadists who were on the rampage way before September 11, 2001, including inside Egypt, where they have killed and maimed hundreds, starting with President Anwar Al Sadat, for whom Mr. Mubarak served as vice president in 1981. The question is, why has Egypt only pursued those who carry guns, but left the political and thought commissars alone?

Back then, as now, Mr. Mubarak knew not only the authors of the crimes, who were arrested and tried, but the source of the jihadist poison. It is now, as it was then, the Egyptian government-sponsored 1,000-year-old Al Azhar Theology School and its hundreds of tributaries, or madrassas, which has been graduating terror-mongers and their teachers for more than 30 years.

Al Azhar University ranks without equal as the font of Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world, a foundation rock for the Islamic Brotherhood Movement, which is itself the mother of all jihadist organizations, including Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

To this day, thousands of young Muslims – from Egypt, the Arab world, Asia and Africa – flock every year to Al Azhar, where four or six years later they graduate to spread the message.

Guess who pays the bill? Saudi Arabia. Guess where Sheik Omar Abdurrahman, who has been jailed for life in America for bombing the World Trade Center the first time round, graduated from? Guess where those who supervised the religious indoctrination of Ayman Al Zawahri originated from? Guess where the hallucinational preachers breathing fire in Pakistan every Friday were trained? And guess where the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheik Ali Gomaa, who advocated only a month ago that the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and the great Pharaonic temples of Egypt were heathen statues that Muslims should not only shun but be rid of, graduated from?

Al Azhar is the answer over and over again.

You reap what you sow. Or, as Americans say, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Yesterday’s Washington Post had a delightful story by its Cairo Correspondent, Dan Williams, a serious journalist and expert on the Middle East, quoting the Arab world’s greatest living comedian, actor, director, and producer, Adel Imam, as saying how he, at age 65, no longer recognizes the once secular Egypt he grew up in as it has been so deeply plunged into the darkness of Islamic fundamentalism.

Mr. Imam has been so threatened because of his irreverent movies bashing fundamentalism that he has had permanent police protection, in addition to his own bodyguards, for the better part of his 40-year-long career.

Why, then, is the same regime that protects the Arab world’s most popular actor also enabling his potential killers?

Mr. Mubarak, our friend and ally, and his crackerjack policy and intelligence services are very quick to arrest any liberal, secularist, or ordinary citizen suggesting he is a dictator, or that his son Gamal has no constitutional right to inherit the presidency, or, God forbid, that the 77-year-old president has been in his job illegitimately for 25 years. But when it comes to the firebreathing doyens of Al Azhar, it is hands off.

Go figure.