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.
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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.
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