Mark Steyn: They want to kill us all

The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 10/19/2002 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

Forget the ‘root causes’, says Mark Steyn. The massacre in Bali was part of the continuing Islamofascist war against the West, and those who ignore it are sleepwalking to national suicide

New Hampshire

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 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. Védrine, 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. If, as some of us maintain, the real ‘root cause’ of Islamofascism is Islam’s difficulty coexisting with modernity, we shouldn’t be surprised that an infidel-friendly, pluralist enclave in the world’s largest Muslim country would be an abomination to the Islamists, and the perfect target.

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 long-standing and mostly self-inflicted psychosis. In Europe, they’ve stood traditional immigration patterns on their head: the Continent’s young Muslims are less assimilated than their parents and grandparents; 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. They’ve had some success. Lee Kuan Yew has spoken of the change in Singapore’s Muslims in recent decades: once relatively integrated, they now keep themselves to themselves, are stricter in their observances than they’ve ever been, and dress their womenfolk more severely. They’ve embarked on the same process observers have spotted from the Balkans to Pakistan: the radicalisation of traditional Muslim communities. 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.

The easiest way to understand is, again, to take them at their word. Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Göttingen 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.

On the face of it, that sounds crazy. But look at the gains they’ve made in the last quarter-century, since they overthrew America’s closest ally in the Muslim world and established the first radical Islamic Republic in Iran. In the Middle East, Islamism has proved far more successful and exportable than Nasserite socialism ever was. It’s brilliantly opportunist, slyly spotting the openings in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Chechnya, and now Indonesia. In the West, it’s been able to rely on cultural squeamishness to advance its presence, ever since British police stood idly by while Muslim groups marched through the streets inciting their followers to murder Salman Rushdie. With the benefit of hindsight, Rushdie’s boneheaded buddies in the literary world made a huge mistake in opposing the ‘fatwa’ on the grounds of the primacy of artistic freedom rather than as a defence of Western pluralism. Everyone was more naive back then.

But we shouldn’t be now. As I said a few weeks ago, it’s not a clash between civilisations but within them — in the Muslim world, between what’s left of moderate traditional Islam and an extreme strain of that faith that even many of their co-religionists have difficulty living with; and in the West between those who think this culture is worth defending and those who’d rather sleepwalk to national suicide while mumbling bromides about whether Western hedonism is to blame for ‘lack of services for locals’ in Bali. To read Robert Fisk and Margo Kingston is like watching a panto cast on drugs: No matter how often the baddies say, ‘I’m behind you!’, Robert and Margo reply, ‘Oh, no, you’re not!’

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’re 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.

[Black Agnes]

For Muslims, the world is divided into two parts. Dar-el-Islam, the house of Islam, and Dar-el-Harb, the house of war. You are either Islamic and in the house of Islam, or you are not Islamic and therefore in the house of War. Any country not Islamic is thus defined as the 'House of War'. They believe this and so should we!

[ZeitgeistSurfer]

This should be the West's message to Islam: Clean your house or will not have a house to clean.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

Thanks-for-the-ping BTTT

[Steve0113]

I keep hoping, against hope, that the mantra of "Islam is a religion of peace" is the Bush Administration's way of saying "nice doggie" while we look for a big enough rock. . .

I've long suspected that's why they're doing it. They're too smart to believe it. People need to lighten up about that.

[jalisco555]

Reminds me of something Martin Scorsese once said about filmmaking: "Everybody steals from everybody".

[MeekOneGOP]

Mark Steyn: They want to kill us all

Excerpt:

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.

< snip >

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. If, as some of us maintain, the real ‘root cause’ of Islamofascism is Islam’s difficulty coexisting with modernity, we shouldn’t be surprised that an infidel-friendly, pluralist enclave in the world’s largest Muslim country would be an abomination to the Islamists, and the perfect target.

Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my General Interest ping list!. . .don't be shy.

[gcruse]

Undergirding the brilliant latticework of
Steyn's sparkling comedic accomplishment
is what is now tritely called an "out of the box"
perspective and analysis of world events shared
by no one else in the press, American or otherwise.
George Will, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kelly, Robert
Novak, Camile Paglia, and Kathleen Parker all have
their occasional insights. Steyn produces them
as the sun produces neutrinos, and displays them
every bit as brilliantly. The man is a treasure.

[TomSmedley]

But I am saying that the degeneration of Western culture is hurrying up the process of radicalizing Islam.

I suspect that supercilious, vacuous secular humanism is on the Almighty's shit list, behind Communism and Islam.

[Taliesan]

But I am saying that the degeneration of Western culture is hurrying up the process of radicalizing Islam.

Your honor, it was her short skirt that finally broke down my resistance to raping her.

[STD]

In reality our President knows all of this. That's precisely why he is giving lip service to the muslims. If he again uses the word "Crusade" we would suddenly be at war with all of islam. He is much smarter than that!

Our war on terror will be won with awesome measured military action followed by rebuilding and restoration of human rights and dignity. President Bush is a wise man, he will not give legitamacy to bin laden and radical islam. Speaking in clash of civilization terms would be political and military suicide. Empowering every radical whabbist.

If he can marginalize the muslim theoracies around the world for the price of a few words, so be it!

Never believe that he's buying the whole charade.

[steve-b]

As Western culture becomes more degenerate, more moderate Muslims look at it and choose to go back to stricter observance. The Muslim women who are taking on the veil again -- after their mothers threw it off -- are doing it deliberately.
I'm not defending the Islamists.

Yes, you are.

I see no difference whatsoever between your statement and the looney left's bleatings that the US is cynically fomenting a war for purposes of imperialist greed. In both cases, the pathology of Islamofascist terror is blamed on the victim rather than the perpetrator.

[STD]

ping me m&m

[Brian Allen]

<< Whether or not, as Margo would say, poverty breeds terrorism, in Indonesia last weekend’s [Islamanazi] terrorism will certainly breed poverty. >>

Good one Pokes.

[STD]

FC

You are correct Sir!

[steve-b]

But I am saying that the degeneration of Western culture is hurrying up the process of radicalizing Islam.

What nonsense. It is precisely the success of Western culture that enrages these medievalist goons... and convinces them that they have to lash out at us now before Western Civilization completely undercuts their power and relegates their way of life to a folkway practiced by a few isolated communities in the backdunes.

[XJarhead]

Please add me to the Steyn ping list.

[junta]

Mr. Steyn is certainly (with good cause) harsh on the Islamicists, but I have a prediction for him; After we occupy Iraq all the neo-Liberals at places like TNR will turn up the volume on people like Steyn, Coulter for their supposed intolerance for the "good muslims" while his allies the neo-Conservatives will have better things to do than defend him (her), themselves looking for "good muslims." Such are the vagaries of Middle Eastern politics and woe to the people of the United States that such hucksters control our levers of power.