Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
The Recent Nightclub Bombings in Bali Illustrate Just What the "War on Terror" Is Really About
On the night of Saturday, October 12--the second anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, a year, month, and day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and mere days after terrorist attacks in Yemen, Kuwait, and the Philippines--two car bombs detonated outside neighboring nightclubs on the island of Bali, triggering a third explosive planted inside, and killing nearly 200 people (the majority of whom were Australian tourists), injuring several others, and redirecting the focus of the war against terror to Indonesia.
Also on the night of Saturday, October 12, the following bands and DJs were playing and spinning at several of Seattle's rock and dance clubs from Re-bar to Rock Bottom: FCS North, Sing-Sing, DJ Greasy, Michiko, Super Furry Animals, Bill Frisell Quintet, the Vells, the Capillaries, the Swains, DJ Che, Redneck Girlfriend, Grunge, Violent Femmes, the Bangs, Better Than Ezra, the Briefs, Tami Hart, the Spitfires, Tullycraft, B-Mello, Cobra High, Randy Schlager, Bobby O, Venus Hum, MC Queen Lucky, Evan Blackstone, and the RC5, among many, many others.
This short list, taken semi-randomly from the pages of The Stranger's music calendar, is designed to illustrate a point that is both facile and essential to reckoning the effects of the Bali bombings. Many of you were at these shows, dancing, smoking, drinking, talking, flirting, kissing, groping, and presumably enjoying yourselves, much like the 180-plus tourists and revelers killed at the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Pub in Bali. Though no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombings, they were almost certainly the work of Muslim radicals launching the latest volley in the war against apostasy.
Whether the attacks turn out to have been the work of al Qaeda or one of the like-purposed, loosely connected, multicellular organizations that function in the region--groups like the Jemaah Islamiyah (an umbrella network that seeks a single Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore), the Indonesian Mujahedeen Council (led by the nefarious Abu Bakar Bashir), Laskar Jihad (which waged holy war on Christians in the Spice Islands before mysteriously disbanding two weeks ago), or the Islam Defenders Front (which makes frequent "sweeps" of bars and nightclubs, attacking non-Muslims, and violently guarding against "prostitution and other bad things")--will ultimately prove to be of little consequence. What matters is that the forces of Islamic fascism have struck again, in a characteristically cowardly, murderous, and yes, blasphemous fashion that must register as an affront to every living human with even a passing interest in freedom.
The facile part: It could have happened here, at any club in Seattle. It's a ludicrous thought, of course--at least as ludicrous as the thought of shutting the Space Needle down on New Year's Eve because some crazy terrorist was arrested at the Canadian border--but that doesn't make it any less true. That doesn't mean we should be looking over our shoulders and under our chairs every time we go to a show. It simply means that it could happen anywhere, because anywhere is exactly where rabid Islamists can find evidence of blasphemy against their precious, imaginary god.
Which brings us to the essential part: The Bali bombings were not an attack against Bali; they were an attack against humankind. In all the jawflap about the whys and wherefores of the multiple conflicts currently dotting our collective radar screen--the war against terror, the war on Iraq, the coming holy war, et al.--it seems worth restating (at the risk of sounding pious) that the war against basic human liberty, waged not by us but on us, is at the heart of the matter. Discourse has justifiably, necessarily turned to complexities of strategy, diplomacy, and consequences. The moral truth, however, remains agonizingly basic. We are still dealing with a small but indefatigable contingent of radicalized, militant absolutists who believe that every living being is accountable to the stricture of Shari'a, under penalty of death. As Salman Rushdie wrote, in an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, the fundamentalist faction is against, "to offer a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." If these were fictional villains, you'd call them hyperbolic, not believable. But they aren't fictional. Their code would be laughable if it weren't so aggressively despicable.
As headlines about Bali cross-fade into news of North Korean nukes, and there are further debates about the finer points of Iraqi de- and restabilization, it's crucial to remember that there is, in fact, a very real enemy, with a very real will, and the very real power of delusional self-righteousness. How to remember? Consider the scene of the attacks (as reported by various Australian and European news sources):
It's a typical hot, sweaty, drunken, lascivious Saturday night. People, primarily young Aussie tourists from Melbourne, Geelong, Perth, and Adelaide, are crammed into the clubs, mixing it up, spilling out into the street. Rock band noises mix with techno music and innumerable voices as latecomers clamor to squeeze inside. Just after 11:00 p.m., a car bomb explodes outside of Paddy's, followed a few seconds later by a second blast that smashes the façade of the Sari Club and leaves a hole in the street a meter deep and 10 meters across. The second bomb is strong enough to damage buildings miles away. All at once, everything's on fire. People are incinerated. Cars go up in flames. Televisions explode. Ceilings collapse, trapping those still inside. Screams. Blistered, charred flesh. Disembodied limbs. Mangled bodies. Victims covered in blood. Inferno.
Now transpose this horrible, fiery mass murder from the seedy, alien lushness of Bali to, say, Pioneer Square, where clubs and bars are lined up in the same teeming proximity as the Sari and Paddy's in the "raunchy" Jalan Legian district, the busiest strip of nightlife in Kuta Beach. Imagine a car blowing up outside the Central Saloon and another, across the street at the New Orleans. Again, it seems too simple an equation, but the fact remains that the victims were not targeted at random, or for merely political purposes. They were doing exactly what any of us might be doing on any night of the week: exercising a liberty so deeply offensive to religious believers as to constitute blasphemy. And the punishment for blasphemy is death.
There is an ongoing lie in the official governmental position on the war against terror, which bends over backwards to assure us that, in the words of our president, "we don't view this as a war of religion in any way, shape, or form." Clearly, in every sense, this is a war of religion, whether it's declared as such or not. And if it isn't, then it certainly should be. Not a war of one religion against another, but of reason against religion--against any belief system that takes its mandate from an invisible spiritual entity and endows its followers with the right to murder or subjugate anyone who fails to come to the same conclusion. This is the war our enemies are fighting. To pretend we're fighting any other--or worse, that this war is somehow not worth fighting, on all fronts--is to dishonor the innocent dead.
No. I am holding solidity with the jews, the witches, and the anabaptists, whom it would be best not to subject to another 1600 years of repression followed by mass murder because too many christians are too willfully, self-righteously smug to think about or address the principal targeting of the last 1600 years of repression, sitting in the bible like a poison-gas bomb waiting to be tripped by another Torquemada.
When did that happen? My argument has nothing to do with Europeans, anti-semitism, the holocaust, or even the Bible for that matter. You give reading-between-the-lines a whole new meaning.
Once again, I simply dispute your assertion that Pharisee=Jew. (So do you, by way of your contradictory statement that Pharisees were a Jewish tribe, or merely types of Jews).
I think you're confusing me with someone else you were arguing with.
Is this then your final arguement to support the assertion that 'Parisee=Jew' and simultaneously 'Pharisee=type of Jew'?
‘Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants’ (Matthew 18:23)
"In the parable introduced by the above verse, both servants bear the same relation to the king as each other. They are called "fellow servants" (28+29).
"The indulgence shown by the king to the destitute and desperate first servant, had ethical implications for him. He should have incorporated forgiveness into his lifestyle. There is an important organic relationship between the King, the servant, and his fellowservant. When the first servant, having had his entire debt canceled, threw his fellow servant in prison, his action bore jarringly on his relation to the fellow, as well as against his own relation to the king who had been so compassionate."
"The first servant's debt was enormous compared to that of the second servant. I am always the first servant. It is always better for me to think of my own debt to God, as having been greater than anyone else's. By keeping this perspective, mercy will loom large to me, and I will be more likely to forgive my fellow servants."
"In... humility---consider others better than yourselves" (Philippians 2:3).
Why not answer "answers to Him, and to his human peers?"
The confusion of a mundane justice with divine justice is a very dangerous civilizational mistake. The confusion is likely to substitute one for the other, or on the other hand, to set them in opposition to each other. The Christian teaching endorses neither of these extremes, although we don't need to be so intelligent to recognize the abuse of extremes throughout history. A certain poster here is exceptionally perspicacious in the deparment of abuse, hounding those who adopt a mundane law and tout it as divine justice--and I hope it has not thoroughly blinded him to other aspects in the understanding of law. I would hound them too, if they were still alive. For those who are still alive, the first order of business is to distinguish kinds of law. If we don't make that distinction, we will run the same mistake as the Enlightenment optimists.
The argument that our Constitution is grounded on this distinction between mundane and divine surfaces in the writings of Leo Strauss, especially in his critique of Carl Schmidt, a catholic who defended the inordinate presumption of mundane law.
LOL! I suppose I should wish him a Happy Thanksgiving for his contribution!
Are you kidding? A contradiction is nonsense. It is useful in code or arguement or whatever because it tells you that something wrong. A contradiction cannot make sense. That's why it is called contradiction.
Your statements are contradictory without appealing to any outside source by the way I outlined it. You are using the term in contradictory ways. Once again, 'A' cannot be both equivalent to 'B' and not equivalent to 'B'. "Pharisees" cannot be both equivelent to Jews and to just some subset, or tribe, of Jews (i.e. NOT equivalent to Jews).
You could save me a lot of typing by reading my posts the first time round.
Words of civility.
It doesn't mean I have to enjoy beating my head against a wall, however.
While I imagine there must be somebody out there who "tinks" this joke is funny, all I'm thinking is: There must have been something seriously wrong with your DI. To propose such a thing in active, on-the-line warfare. You don't get survivors -- let alone heroes -- by "emasculating" them immediately before putting them in harm's way.
Jokes are funny -- but only in proper context.
If America has ever done this before, I hope we've figured out by now that we need to STOP doing that....
Still, I think we can (and ought) to list this "joke" on our "Descartes Joke List du Jour"....
Thanks for writing, dude.
I'll say this one more time. Pharasee is a synonym for orthodox jew, and has been since the bible was written. I brought up a quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia to demonstrate that to you. It was the intention of the writers of the gospels to paint the orthodox jews in a bad light in order to win converts from orthodox jewery to the catholic church. The catholic church officially admits to this. Defaming Pharasees served that purpose admirably, just as it served admirably to defame all jews throughout christendom for 1600 years. If I defame a non-evangelical, ethnic tribe of jews who have laws against intermarriage, and all of their children for all time, who am I condemning? All of the jews--you do the math.
Your insistence that the separation of the Pharasees from the rest of the jews matter of any gravity reminds me of the great battle between the hoomoosians and the hoomoeosians, over the question of whether Jesus was of the "substance", or of the "essence" of God. 23 priests were slaughtered in the debates over this question, which is why we now live with the doctrine of consubstantiation: jesus is of the substance of god. Which is why an orthodox jew regards being "saved" by accepting christ as a violation of the 1st commandment, and when you take the communion biscuit, of the 2nd commandment.
Sitting down to pee is pretty universal in basic training in the later half of the 2th century. It is a barricks rule, and it exists because we have to clean the latrine spotlessly, continuously. There is usually also a one-showerhead rule. It does not apply to battlefield conditions, and if I were to pick through the things that made me feel emasculated in basic training, this would be a far cry from heading the list.
20th century, sorry.
I suppose my take on this would best be described by a more libertarian (aaaagh! wash my mouth out with soap!) philosopy, viz., if one's actions don't adversely and maliciously affect others, then others have no right to sit in judgment of them. To employ a somewhat facetious example, if I'm not standing upwind of someone or ashing in his mocha latte, why can't I enjoy a cigarette or two? (I'm duking it out on one of the puff threads right now, can't ya tell... ;) I appreciate your comments about mundane versus divine... I suppose I have less regard for the former...
You have a surface familiarity with this issue you are entirely too sure of. There are many, many applications in the real world that are not wrong or mistaken, that nonetheless, cannot resolve because, stated as formal math instead of programs (which is doable if their grammars are chomsky-normal), they are contradictions, in that an attempt to return their truth values to the operating program result in endless loop hangups. A contradiction does not return a consistent truth value--that is why it is a contradiction. Whether it makes sense or not depends on what you are doing, and what your domain of discourse is. Contradictions occur when a domain of discourse which can be rendered as a venn diagram whose sets contain all the elements under discussion contains elements whose truth value is different for different, supposedly valid operators in the domain. Nothing forces you to be confined to said domain. If you are outside the domain, contradictions can have useful meaning, like "this domain is invalid" for example.
I have no trouble reading your irrelevant point over and over.
Your attempt at justifying contradictions is like performing neurosurgery to remove a hangnail--it's both overly complex, and misapplied.
We are talking about simple truth values. We need no more than a simple predicate calculus. A contradiction always has a truth value of false. It occurs with a conjunction of statements that cannot both be true. It is a fundamental of all rational logic. "A and not A" is false in all rational set theory, grammars, automatons--even Chomsky's (despite his political absurdities he apparently does not deny the law of noncontradiction, at least in his linguistic theories). That you have construed ways in which you think a contradiction is at times NOT false shows your misapplication of the fundamentals upon which the theories you think you understand are founded.
Besides. I don't fall for diversions.
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