Clear thinking needed to explain Bali (MUST READ!)

Disturbingly, the moral relativism that underpinned much left/liberal analysis of the September 11, 2001, attacks is creeping in. The blame everything but the perpetrators brigade is at it again.

The targets for blame are: the victims (ugly Western tourists); global poverty; the US; the war on terrorism, George Bush and/or John Howard; Israel; or all of the above. The terrorists and the Islamo-fascism that seems to have inspired their murderous actions are escaping culpability in quarters as seemingly far removed as Australian, British and Malaysian newspapers, the ranks of Jemaah Islamiah (the US planted the Bali bombs), and some who speak for Australia's Muslim community.

It would be unwise to dismiss the bickering as a debate confined to intellectuals, politicians and the media elite. Australia, and the rest of the world, will struggle to go forward with the campaign against terror until it comes to a clear understanding of the forces that seek to annihilate innocent civilians, crush Western democracy with its liberal approach to economic and social life, and impose a fascist theocratic state. As Mark Steyn writes in The Australian today, "until we're prepared to identify the enemy and confront him as such, there will be more terrorist attacks."

Steyn notes that terrorism breeds poverty, not the other way around. Certainly, the Bali terrorists have torpedoed any hope for Indonesia to rebuild its economy off the back of tourism. Conversely, there is no guarantee that poverty will produce terrorism. Bangladesh is one of the poorest nations in the world. It is also a sizeable Muslim nation. Yet it is not a breeding ground for terrorism. Still, one Australian newspaper pundit argued over the weekend that what was needed was not a war on terrorism, or regime change in Iraq, because "the regime that needs changing is the world economic order". Apparently a rethink of the international bankruptcy regime and a change of policy in Israel will satisfy the terrorists. The problem is that the soft-left apologists confuse their concerns with those of Islamo-fascism. Viewing the contemporary international reality of terrorism through the prism of a Marxist/socio-economic analysis is misguided. Islamo-fascism and its chief weapon, terrorism, does not proceed from anything so noble in principle as a desire to bring about economic equality. Osama bin Laden, al-Qa'ida and sympathetic groups such as Jemaah Islamiah are not interested in reaching agreement with the West based on a shopping list of economic issues. The aim is to kill Christian/Jewish "infidels" and impose a radical Islamist empire based on religious or Sharia law, extending from Spain, across the Middle East to Indonesia.

If it's not economic inequality, the moral relativists on the Left rail against US imperialism. Expatriate Australian author Clive James noted his discomfort with being classified as "right-wing" because he refused to buy the soft-left analysis that September 11 and Bali were the result of US hegemony, Western democracy and Israel's existence. We must tackle the real root causes of terrorism: the terrorist ideology and organisations linked to al-Qa'ida that have spread as far as Australia. This means it is also time to set aside mealy-mouthed apologies for those sections of Islam in Australia and abroad that accommodate, condone or celebrate hatred of the West, liberal democracy and the rights of women. This does not imply setting aside religious tolerance.

The spread of globalisation and economic prosperity is the best long-term hope for moderating Muslim extremism in nations such as Indonesia. But sending in an army of social workers is not going to crush the immediate threat posed by a terrorist ideology in which death is deified and the US cast as The Great Satan. The sooner the advocates of moral and cultural equivalence realise this the better.

THE slaughter of hundreds in the Bali bombing 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 Centre 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 Republican George W. Bush rather than Green candidate 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, Kingston can relax: it's not gonna be a problem anymore. Whether or not, as Kingston would say, poverty breeds terrorism, in Indonesia terrorism, on October 12, will certainly breed poverty.

While we're singing the old favourites, here's Bruce Haigh with a timeless classic. Haigh, a former Australian diplomat in Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, is in no doubt as to why hundreds of his compatriots were blown up in Bali. As he told the 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 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 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'ida 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 Bush. The French were supportive for about 10 minutes after September 11, but for most of the past year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine was deploring American simplisme on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam Hussein'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."

Unlike 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 Moussawi, 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 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.

As a way of making a point about Zionist occupation of the West Bank, the Bali bombing 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? 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 co-existing 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.

Until we're prepared to identify the enemy and confront him as such, there will be more terrorist acts like October 12.

Mark Steyn is a columnist for Canada's National Post and Britain's Daily Telegraph and The Spectator

This is what most of Australia is thinking.

Find 'em.

Kill 'em.

Drink beer and p*ss on 'em.

The aim is to kill Christian/Jewish "infidels" and impose a radical Islamist empire based on religious or Sharia law, extending from Spain, across the Middle East to Indonesia.

Their aim is nothing less than the spread of islam across the globe and any moslem who says differently is practicing the art of deception, or al taqiya, which is favored when dealing with the infidel (the rest of us).

We forget this at our peril!

And thanks for posting this article. The shameful media in the US are providing very few articles about your 911. If not for FR and Fox News I would have heard a blurb on the day it happened, and then almost nothing at all!

We stand with you!

Has anyone actually considered, that the people responsible for the Bali bombings, may infact be the little a group called the Maliciousa in Indonesia? Australian army forces went into East Timour in 2000 to stop this group from killing innocent people and drove the Maliciousa out. Since Australia's involvement, East Timour has become an independant country. The Maliciousa vowed to seek revenge on Australia. And it was reported that "rewards" would be offered to anyone who killed an Australian.

And why did it take 2 days for the President of the USA George W Bush to make a comment on Bali and to give his deepest sympathy?

Did anyone see Colin Powell's comments where he was more concerned that the Australian could pull out from joining the USA in it's wars that they are creating, rather than be concerned about the lose of human life?

You know this idea ran through my head while I was reading the article: The reason lefties always start pointing at what they perceive as the 'root causes' (poverty, environmental degradation, globalism) is because these are things over which they would resort to terrorism. They could well imagine killing thousands of individuals and ending society as we know it in order to impose their world view on the rest of us. The left cannot fathom religious extremism because they cannot fathom religion. But they can fathom the level of hate it takes to do something like this because, given the means they would do it themselves. The worst totalitarian regimes (as far as raw numbers killed) have been leftist governments. They have a proven track record in this respect.

The only way the leftists would ever want to hunt down and kill terrorists would be if Christians had been the ones committing the terror. You'd see some furor and righteous anger in their camp then- the only thing they hate worse than capitalism is Christianity.

I know this is the prevailing opinion but I take issue with it. Islam has been hijacked by those who seek power over the rest of us, including over moderate Muslims. The Taliban was a wonderful representation of that. Who were their victims? Other Muslims!!

The same is true in Indonesia. The moderates are asking the government to rein in the extremists, a small minority of Muslims whom the government had previously denied even existed.

Just as the left has coopted many minorities through the radical actions of a few, so is Islam trying to incorporate all Muslims to their cause. The left exploits grievences, real and imagined, while the Islamists exploit their own religion and explain it as a reaction to grievences.

The purpose behind it all is power for a few over the many. Then no disent will be tolerated.

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