The root cause? We're all infidels
Mark Steyn National Post
An appeaser, said Churchill, feeds the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last. But sometimes the croc eats him first anyway. For months, the U.S., Britain and even Canada apparently had warned the Indonesian government about terrorists operating within its borders. So had Singapore and Malaysia. President Megawati's administration responded by calling Washington anti-Muslim. The American Ambassador was publicly denounced by her Vice-President. The Foreign Minister, Hassan Wirayuda, said in February that the outside world's fears of Islamic terrorism in Indonesia were overblown and that in Jakarta "we laugh at it." Ha-ha. From government contacts to police indifference, the administration's strategy was to deny the crocodile existed and then quietly slip him the à la carte menu.
Now, Indonesian stocks are down, the rupiah's in the toilet, the national carrier's flying empty, and the official tourism Web sites have switched to continuously updated info on dead tourists, safe in the knowledge that they're unlikely to be getting any new bookings from live ones. "We're finished," says the chairman of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce. The members of the Maroubra Lions Rugby League Club, who visited Bali at this time every year, won't be back. On Saturday night after dinner, the blokes agreed to babysit while the wives went out dancing. They didn't return. On Monday, Craig Salvatori put his two young daughters back on the plane to Sydney and told reporters he had to stay to "look for mummy." He found her in the morgue a couple of hours later, so badly burned she was identifiable only by her jewelry. But not to worry, Mr. Wirayuda: If the western partygoers are fleeing, the high-rolling Islamofascists are here to stay. On Monday, for the first time, Mrs. Megawati's government conceded that al-Qaeda are operating inside the country.
When Osama's boys hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the "root cause" crowd, after some pro forma regret about the loss of life, could barely conceal their admiration for the exquisite symbolism of the targets, the glittering monuments to American militarism and capitalism. The New Statesman dismissed the victims as Wall Street types who made the mistake of voting for Bush rather than Ralph Nader.
If you had to pick anywhere on the planet where Bush voters are thin on the ground, Bali's hard to beat. Lots of Aussie beach bums, Scandinavian backpackers, German stoners, braying English public-school types taking a year off to find themselves, but not many registered Republicans. This mass murder was clearly going to be harder to excuse, but the root-causers gamely rose to the occasion. The Sydney Morning Herald's Margo Kingston fretted over "whether we've respected and nurtured the place we love to visit or colonized it with our wants ... Maybe part of it is the lack of services for locals. A completely inadequate hospital, for instance, so graphically exposed in the aftermath of the horror. Some people -- foreigners like us, elite big-city Indonesians -- make their fortunes. Have residents lost their place, their power to define it? Did the big money fail to give enough back to the people who belong there, whose home it is?", etc., etc. Well, if the insensitivity of Western tourism is the root cause, Margo can relax: It's not gonna be a problem any more. Whether or not, as Margo would say, poverty breeds terrorism, in Indonesia last weekend's terrorism will certainly breed poverty.
While we're singing the old favourites, here's Bruce Haigh with a timeless classic. Mr. Haigh was an Australian diplomat in Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and he's in no doubt as to why hundreds of his compatriots were blown up in Bali. As he told Australia's Nine Network, "The root cause of this issue has been America's backing of Israel on Palestine." You don't say. It may well be true that, for certain Muslims "frustrated" by Washington's support for Israeli "intransigence," blowing up Australians in Bali makes perfect sense. But, if even this most elastic of root causes can be stretched half way around the globe to a place conspicuously lacking either Jews or Americans, then clearly it can apply to anyone or anything: Why, the FLQ would still be in business if only they'd thought to murder Pierre Laporte because of frustration at Washington's indulgence of the Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people. As has been noted here on previous occasions, the more you insist the Islamist psychosis is a rational phenomenon to be accommodated the more you risk sounding just as nutty as the terrorists.
On which subject, Robert Fisk of The Independent in London thinks the Aussies were targeted for a more specific reason -- blowback for being too cosy with the Great Satan: "The French have already paid a price for their initial support for Mr. Bush. The killing of 11 French submarine technicians in Karachi has been followed by the suicide attack on the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen. Now, it seems, it is the turn of Australia ..." And don't worry, there are plenty of others who'll be getting theirs any day now. Just in case al-Qaeda had missed one or two, Fisk helpfully provides a useful list of legitimate targets: "Belgium, which hosts NATO HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows U.S. military aircraft to refuel at Shannon ..." Blessings be upon you, Mister Robert, we had entirely forgot to add "Kill the Irish" to our "To Do" list, praise be to Allah.
I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added "initial" to that French "support for Mr. Bush." The French were supportive for about 10 minutes after September 11th, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: Throughout the spring, their Foreign Minister M. Vedrine was deploring American "simplisme" on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam's best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.
But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said: "We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate but no problem because they are all infidels."
No problem. They are all infidels.
When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew -- like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they're happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. We are all infidels.
Messrs. Haigh and Fisk persist in believing that they kill infidels in pursuit of a negotiable goal, when the evidence suggests that killing infidels is the goal. As a way of making a point about Zionist occupation of the West Bank, blowing up Bali is a little convoluted, to say the least. If it's intended to warn America's allies off supporting Bush, it seems perverse and self-defeating to kill and maim large numbers of citizens from countries who haven't supported him. So, instead of trying to fit square pegs into Islamic crescents, why not take the event at face value? An infidel-friendly enclave in the world's largest Muslim country has been transformed into a mound of dead Australians and Scandinavians and the non-Islamic Indonesians of Bali: No problem, they're all infidels.
In many ways, the sanest Muslims in the world today are those of South Asia. In the Middle East, they're mired in their own mostly self-inflicted psychosis. In Europe, they've stood traditional immigration patterns on their head: Instead of becoming more European, they're becoming more Islamist. So the challenge now is for the Wahhabists to co-opt the Asian Muslims as they have the Arab and European. If Islamofascists were to gain control of Indonesia, it wouldn't be a parochial self-absorbed dictatorship like Suharto's but a launch pad for an Islamic superstate in the region.
Perhaps it would also improve health care in Bali, ending the "lack of services for locals" that Margo Kingston worries over. But I doubt it. Exposing the parlous state of Balinese morgue facilities by dramatically increasing their clientele isn't necessarily a sign of concern for public services. I began with a Churchill quote so let me end with one: "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." That's what happened after September 11th: The brief glimpse of the reality of the Islamist scheme was too much, and so Margo and Co. dusted themselves off and retreated back to all the illusions. Now she's stumbled again. Oh, well. We'll see 'em all again on the next trip -- which is more than the Indonesian Tourist Board can say.
© Copyright 2002 National Post
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Sorry, I won't be so accommodating. 