Posted on 07/07/2005 12:31:49 PM PDT by Pokey78
"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will like the strong horse." So said Osama bin Laden in his final video appearance two-and-a-half years ago. But even the late Osama might have been surprised to see the Spanish people, invited to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding.
That's how I began my Telegraph column on March 16th last year - five days after the Madrid bomb, two days after the Spanish election. The choice for the British people today is whether to be the Spaniards post-Madrid or the Australians post-Bali. Anyone who knows Britain knows the citizenry don't incline naturally to appeasement, but anyone who knows their political elites knows the same cannot be said quite so clearly for their governing class.
With hindsight, the Spaniards were let off lightly for their contemptible behaviour. As I wrote back in that column:
To be sure, there are all kinds of John Kerry-esque footnoted nuances to Sunday's stark numbers. One sympathises with those electors reported to be angry at the government's pathetic insistence, in the face of the emerging evidence, that Thursday's attack was the work of Eta, when it was obviously the jihad boys. One's sympathy, however, disappears with their decision to vote for a party committed to disengaging from the war against the jihadi. As Margaret Thatcher would have said: "This is no time to go wobbly, Manuel." But they did. And no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications, the background - just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government. In Spain, the bombers hijacked the ballot, and very decisively. The Socialist Workers' Party wouldn't have won, except for the terrorism.
At the end of last week, American friends kept saying to me: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. They get it now." I expressed scepticism. And I very much doubt whether March 11 will be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity, in the way we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. All those umbrellas in the rain at Friday's marches proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made Sunday a victory for appeasement and dishonoured their own dead.
And, if it works in Spain, why not in Australia, Britain, Italy, Poland? In his 1996 "Declaration of War Against the Americans", Bin Laden cited Washington's feebleness in the face of the 1992 Aden hotel bombings and the Black Hawk Down business in Somalia in 1993: "You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew," he wrote. "The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear." To the jihadis' way of thinking, on Thursday, the Spaniards were disgraced by Allah; on Sunday, they withdrew. The extent of their impotence and weaknesses is very clear.
The Spaniards aren't alone in the extent of their impotence. Here's what I wrote in The Spectator on October 19th 2002 after the Bali bombing:
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 US, Britain and Canada 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. Hassan Wirayuda, the foreign minister, 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 websites 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 jewellery. 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-Qa'eda are operating inside the country.
The Australian people, fortunately, are made of sterner stuff, no thanks to their nancy-boy media:
The slaughter of hundreds is, relative to population, an Australian 9/11, with the same heart-rending details of people clawing desperately through the rubble in search of husbands, wives, children. 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 colonised 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 halfway around the globe to a place conspicuously lacking either Jews or Americans, then clearly it can apply to anyone or anything: my advice to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness is to put down the Omagh bombing as an understandable reaction to decades of frustration at Washington's indulgence of the Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people. As the likes of Mr Haigh demonstrate every day, 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, the Independent's Robert Fisk 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-Qa'eda 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 US 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.
I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added "initial" to that French "support for Mr Bush". The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, 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 US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels."
No problem. They are all infidels.
Unlike Mr Fisk, I don't have decades of expertise in the finer points of Islamic culture, so when people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." 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.
Back in February, Fisk wrote a column headlined "Please Release My Friend Daniel Pearl". It followed a familiar line: please release Daniel, then you'll be able to tell your story, get your message out. Taking him hostage is "an own goal of the worst kind", as it ensures he won't be able to get your message out, the message being—Fisky presumed—"the suffering of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees", "the plight of Pakistan's millions of poor", etc. Somehow the apologists keep missing the point: the story did get out; Pearl's severed head is the message. That's why they filmed the decapitation, released it on video, circulated it through the bazaars and madrasas and distributed it worldwide via the Internet. The message got out very effectively.
It's the same with Bali. As a way of making a point about Zionist occupation of the West Bank, it's 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? It's a mound of dead Australians and Scandinavians and the non-Islamic Indonesians of Bali: no problem, they're all infidels. A Bush-voting social conservative from Mississippi or a gay peacenik from Denmark, they're happy to kill both...
The easiest way to understand is, again, to take them at their word. Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Gšttingen University in Germany, gave an interesting speech a few months after 11 September: "Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them," he said. "The word 'peace', for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam—or 'House of Islam'— to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought." Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or "House of Peace". The objective isn't a self-governing Palestine but the death of the West...
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 had happened." That's what happened after 11 September: the brief glimpse of the reality of the Islamist scheme was too much, and so we dusted ourselves off and retreated back to all the illusions, like the Oslo "peace process". That can't save us, and it certainly can't save Indonesia. And until we'e prepared to identify the enemy and confront him as such, there will be more nights like last Saturday night, and more little girls like the Salvatoris', orphaned because their mum and her friends went dancing.
After the initial shock of stumbling over the truth, what will Britain do? Go back to the Bob Geldof agenda or avenge her dead?
And when people like the south end of a northbound horse, they will like Osama bin Laden.
"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
This quote, and its attribution, need to be the lead-in to every speech Bush gives.
After the initial shock of stumbling over the truth, what will Britain do? Go back to the Bob Geldof agenda or avenge her dead?
We can only hope for the later but it will not happen. How long does England continue to negotate with the IRA? Israel with the PLA and USA with Islam. It never works.
Germany and Japan were the examples, massive death and winning in the only end to a war.
We are too busy builing their schools, power and water systems and they still blow us up.
This is going to have to end soon.
Oh, and next time you attempt to visit, learn some punctuation and capitalization.
We'll just have to wait and see.
Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
Hmmm . . . good enough for THEM, good enough for US! This World War is off to a slow start, maybe we should pick things up a bit?? The events in London, might in a roundabout way, give us more reason to go into Iran later this year??
My only question is WHEN will this decent chap RUN for PRIME MINISTER OF CANADA?
We need this kind of thinking. We need this kind of backbone. We need leadership.
Thanks for the ping.
Spain does not have to be attacked again. It has surrendered. The islamo-fascists can take over any time.
Indeed.
Excellent read.
BTTT
He resides in New England.
He still has Canadian citizenship. You gotta let a girl dream!
Thank You.
Ping
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