The images posted on Twitter yesterday of ISIS blowing up an Egyptian Navy frigate are frightening. 

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The SITE Intel Group says that the terrorists destroyed the naval ship with a guided missile. The images were widely broadcast. Time and Al Jazeera and many other newspapers and news stations published them. 

No travel or cruise magazine will publish them, for obvious reasons. 

Is it foreseeable that ISIS will attack a cruise ship?  Of course, but you would never know that if you rely on the cruise industry or your local travel agent for information and advice.

The cruise industry has a nonchalant view of terrorism. It reassures its customers that it’s allegedly safe to cruise in the Mediterranean. Costa and MSC (and five other cruise lines) scheduled calls in Tunis (La Goulette) even after the Bardo Museum massacre where 22 cruise passengers were slaughtered. The second attack in Tunisia was predictable and came in June when a single radicalized Muslim with a Kalashnikov gunned down 38 more tourists at the resorts in Sousse.  

Cruise ships sailing in Mediterranean waters are sitting ducks. I have been criticized before for explaining how the terrorists will attack cruise passengers as they sail off the Coasts of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.  

Terrorists have demonstrated that they can blown up a U.S. Navy vessel (USS Cole – 16 years ago). When the jihdists want to focus the cross-hairs of their weapons on a slow moving cruise ship, they can easily do so. The only question is whether the action will be in the form of an external attack (suicidal jihadists on a small boat with explosives ram the ship or the terrorists fire RPG’s into the hull), or whether the terrorists will try and board the ship and take the cruise passengers hostage and begin beheading them on video.   

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Photo Credit: SITE Intel Group via Al Jazeera