UPDATE 4:30 PM Eastern:

Looks like the death toll is rising in the Egypt bombings.

At least 83 people were killed and 200 injured when car bombs ripped through shopping and hotel areas in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday in the worst attack in Egypt since 1981.

Shaken European tourists spoke of mass panic and hysteria as people fled the carnage in the early hours, with bodies strewn across the roads, people screaming and sirens wailing.

The regional governor said two car bombs and possibly a suitcase bomb had rocked the resort, popular with divers and European holidaymakers, as well as diplomats who have convened world summits. Egypt has called it “the city of peace.”

One blast tore the front off the Ghazala Gardens Hotel in Naama Bay, the site of most of the resort’s luxury hotels. People were feared trapped in the rubble of the lobby.

A car broke into the hotel compound and exploded in front of the building, South Sinai Governor Mustafa Afifi said.

I have not been keeping track of this on TV or on the net (at a family reunion in West Virginia), but the level of carnage these sick terrorists are willing to inflict on innocent people is going to turn more and more people against them. Do the terrorists really believe the middle class Muslims who make a living off of tourism are going to be enamored with losing their jobs and connections to the West? I don’t think so. Just like the London bombings had the opposite effect the bombers anticipated, so will this attack, as well as the ones in Turkey.

END UPDATE

The terrorists are executing an all out push to try and rattle the Western and Non-Islamic countries. The bombings have been from Turkey to London, always in Iraq and now in Egypt.

As many as seven explosions in quick succession shook the city, beginning at 1:15 a.m. and rattling windows miles away. Smoke and fire rose from Naama Bay, a main strip of beach hotels in the desert city at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, also popular with Israeli tourists, witnesses said.

Dazed tourists milled about the darkened streets as Egyptian rescuers searched for dead and injured. Ambulances sped away with victims.

“There seemed to be a lot of bodies strewn across the road” near one cafe, British policeman Chris Reynolds, visiting from Birmingham, England, told the BBC by telephone. “It was horrendous.”

At least four car bombs were used in the attack, said a security official in the operations control room in Cairo monitoring the crisis in the city 230 miles to the southeast. One went off in the driveway of the Ghazala Gardens hotel, a 176-room four-star resort on the main strip of hotels in Naama Bay, said the governor of South Sinai province, Mustafa Afifi.

The Ghazala was “completely burned down, destroyed,” Amal Mustafa, 28, an Egyptian who was visiting Sharm with her family, told The Associated Press after driving by the site. Television video of the hotel, a three-story complex, showed parts of the building burned out with walls collapsed.

Another car bomb exploded in the Old Market, an area a few miles away, killing 17 people — believed to be Egyptians — sitting at a outdoor coffee shop, the control room official said. Three minibuses were set ablaze. It was not clear if they were carrying passengers, the official said.

Another blast went off near the Movenpick Hotel, said a receptionist there who declined to identify himself.

Although many tourists could have been asleep when the explosions struck, the resort’s sidewalk cafes, seafront restaurants and bazaars are usually packed with locals and tourists well into the late summer nights.

The attacks came nine months after a series of explosions hit several hotels in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan, about 100 miles northwest on the Israel border

We have no choice. We must weather this storm. And we do not need the ‘surrender now’ crowd to say a word. No one is asking them to fight this war. Just stay home if that is what it takes.