They want to kill us
all
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
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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.
© 2002 The Spectator.co.uk |
