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.
It may be objectively true that the sun will rise tomorrow, but can you conclusively prove it will, in advance? I rather doubt it, and yet we all believe it to be true. Such are the limits of logic - the best we can do to "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow is to point to all the yesterdays where it rose. Of course, that's a logical fallacy at it's core, so we're sort of stuck with no way to objectively prove that the sun will rise tomorrow.
And that's the sort of problem we run into when we try to logically "prove" the existence of God - God may very well objectively exist, but like the objective (we assume) truth that the sun will rise tomorrow, there's just no way to conclusively prove that it must be so...
(is it just me, or is FR slow suddenly?)
We were given the gift of reason to use it. It seems unreasonable to me, however, to use reason to argue against faith; for faith is indispensable, essential to what it means to be fully human, to human living and thinking.
Prometheus' "revolt" can be understood as a revolt against the "intramundane gods" -- i.e., the Olympians. Yet as far back as Homer, and from thence through Hesoid, Parmenides, and Plato human beings have understood that the Olympians were themselves creatures, albeit immortal ones. Which means there had to be a god "Beyond" them, for "creature" presupposes "creator."
I like to think that Prometheus was not asserting his "rights" against this Unknown God of the Beyond (the tetragrammatical G-d of the Jews, the "I Am That Am"), just against another order in nature, albeit one of "superior" status relative to man -- which order happened to be jealous of their own prerogatives. And which order, Plato thought, was in his time perishing out of human consciousness; although the Unknown God of the Beyond everlastingly IS....
Yet it seems to me the scriptures themselves suggest that man can be "assertive" vis-a-vis the God "beyond" creation; for they tell us that if we knock, it shall be opened unto us; if we seek, we shall find; if we ask, it shall be given unto us.
But this is the heart of faith -- that we can speak to God and have Him hear us, and help us. I know that He can and does. And I am certainly not alone in this belief which, if anything, is supported by experience, and mediated by reason.
Your essay is so lovely, general_re. Thank you for writing it!
You must have gotten a new keyboard!
P.S. On reason. Dan 5:25 And this [is] the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
If I can prove the existance of God to myself, that's good enough for me.
The opposite of Reason is "I believe in God because my parents did". That's not reasonable.
Does this mean you think you have only yourself to credit and thank for your ability to reason? If it's not a "gift," then how did you come by it? By means of theft -- as with Prometheus, who "stole the fire of the gods?" Or by that never-ending piling up of accidents breeding ever more accidents that is known as "natural selection?" How can reason -- which is structured and orderly -- be the product of sheer randomness?
Have you ever really given this issue any serious thought at all?
You assert that animals "use" reason. Alternatively, one might say that they use "instinct" -- "progammed" into animals by the same Source that "programmed" man for reason.
That animals learn language is a completely unfounded canard. After all this time, I think we could expect to have some poetry out of the higher apes if that were the case.
Tool using behavior by animals appears to be of a rather low-level kind. There may be a crude type of learning involved; I don't know. But for the most part it seems to be the sort of thing that a parent animal transmits to its young by example, not by reasoning. As far as I know, there is no animal species which has yet managed to construct, say, an Eiffel Tower.
Pack hunting for certain species can be quite easily explained as an instinctive, and not a learned behavior.
I wonder which of us is spinning the more egregious "myth" here.
BTW, you seem to be using that term with a certain amount of disdain or contempt. Am I right about that?
"The reason the theory of evolution is so controversial is that it is the... main scientific prop---for scientific naturalism. Students first learn that "evolution is a fact," and then they gradually learn more and more about what that "fact" means. It means that all living things are the product of mindless material forces such as chemical laws, natural selection, and random variation. So God is totally out of the picture, and humans (like everything else) are the accidental product of a purposeless universe. Do you wonder why a lot of people suspect that these claims go far beyond the available evidence?"
Orthogonal means metrical or space relationships that are attributes of the domain of discourse that can be varied irrespective of each other's current values. I first heard the word when I was being taught chess: the bishops move diagonally, and the rooks move orthogonally. So they're compatible in that they represent mutually independent variables.
Very amusing. A proof you claim you once had is not a proof by any sensible measure; by it's nature, a proof is something anyone can verify. Mystery proofs have not been published to the public do not make it into the game. If I get to count proofs no one can see, then, obviously, everything has been proved, but the dog ate the homework.
Originally the word liberal meant social conservatives(no govt religion--none) who advocated growth and progress---mostly technological(knowledge being absolute/unchanging)based on law--reality... UNDER GOD---the nature of GOD/man/govt. does not change. These were the Classical liberals...founding fathers-PRINCIPLES---stable/SANE scientific reality/society---industrial progress...moral/social character-values(private/personal) GROWTH(limited NON-intrusive PC Govt/religion---schools)!
Evolution...Atheism-dehumanism---TYRANNY(pc-religion/rhetoric)...
Then came the SPLIT SCHIZOPHRENIA/ZOMBIE/BRAVE-NWO1984 LIBERAL NEO-Soviet Darwin America---the post-modern age
Well, it's a bit of a fuzzy concept in ordinary use, but in math, it refers to the indepedence of parameters of an equation.
Let's make up a chesslike game with a more indicative example. Suppose the rook can only move a number of squares related to, say, how many squares he last moved a bishop.
In the original chess rules, the number of squares the rook can move is orthogonal to the behavior of the bishop, in our new game, it is not. The idea of the word extends beyond merely physically perpindicular, and is, by my lights, a pretty useful and compact word.
So if you say you fell down the steps as a child but you can't prove it, it never happened? Brilliant.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.