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.
Howdy all!
LR, in your next post to uncbuck you state that the "standard" is Reason. The above excerpt seems to indicate that Reason (implicitly the reasonable individual) is the foundation of moral life. Reason does this by discriminating what is "higher." While this is clearly true, you say nothing about what standard is being used to discriminate what is higher from what is lower.
IMHO, your take above is hopelessly idealistic: You will not find in any human community of a certain size any consensual ground, if the standard of the "ideal ground" is wholly left to competing human preferences and interests. Certainly it's clear people have been known to disagree about what HIGHER value most "contributes to civilization." Socialists have one take on this; libertarians another; Islamacists yet another; etc., etc.
Arguably, Reason does not itself supply a standard of this kind. Yet without such a standard, there is nothing but doxa, opinion.
JMHO FWIW.
It is not, Don. It would be like saying Tory is just another word for Englishman.
Even if you could maintain this point in the face of just subsequent history--what have you gained? The Pharisees weren't all of the jews. Fine, they were merely the jews who had charge of the sacred temple, the synagoges, and the interpretation of the law. Merely the jews that maintained an exclusive ethnic line of rabbi's in charge of the religeous courts of the sanhedrin in Judea, merely the jews who we now would call orthodox.
What a lame, pedagogical excuse for partaking of what paved the road to the holocaust without a glimmer of apology or attempt at remedy.
Then why don't you quote the part of the "official catholic encyclopedia" that says that (please don't just repost your previous quotes which, of course, do not say that "Pharisee" was synonymous with "Jew")?
And if you're interested in making your point, why not quoting "the official" Jewish encyclopedia, if there is such a thing.
Why don't you give up? Your own points are inconsistent with each other. You say that Pharisee=Jew, and you say that Pharisee=one of the Jewish tribes. In other words, you are saying that all of the Jews are but one of the Jewish tribes.
To you, Pharisees are simultaneously all Jews and not all Jews. Argumentum ad absurdum.
Uh no. Is that how you define "tribe"? I didn't know members of different tribes, whether Jewish, Indian, or elsewhere, are prohibited from marrying outside their tribe.
ahem...and for the third time it 10 minutes:
After the conflicts with Rome (A.D. 66-135) Pharisaism became practically synonymous with Judaism. ... from the second century onward, in the bosom of a tenacious race, the type of Judaism known to the western world.
So...your argument hangs on the word "practically"? Let me offer the words "niggling", and "pedagog" in response.
You said Pharasee's weren't ethnic--obviously they were, and obviously they are the very same ethnic orthodox jews that were reciting before the Wall in jerusalem this morning.
Whatever "tribe" means exactly is irrelevant.
For the very obvious reason that the Jews did not persecute the Jews for 1600 years. If you want to convict someone of a crime, the best witness you can have is the defendant.
Yes, exactly. This the real meaning of the joke I've already posted elsewhere of Descarte before dehorse. I've been all through the demon box and it has more errors based upon the implications of the scenario than I can count. I've also seen it put, preface of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine if I remember corrrectly, that he got it backwards, "I am, therefore I think."
Because it seems important to me.
Your own points are inconsistent with each other. You say that Pharisee=Jew, and you say that Pharisee=one of the Jewish tribes. In other words, you are saying that all of the Jews are but one of the Jewish tribes.
Matthew indicts all the tribes, so does Acts. And even if they didn't, Pharasees equals orthodox equals law-ridden jews equals exactly the target of 1600 years of ghetto laws and pogroms, and exactly the guilty unsaved of the doctrine of salvation only through christ, who know of Jesus, and reject him. Even the heathen can be saved, but the Jew who, like his fathers, believes accepting salvation through christ sins against he 1st and 2nd commandments is lost.
And who am I describing? Exactly the Pharasee. The orthodox jew. The jew who was hounded almost to oblivion by the Christians because of these Pharaseeian beliefs.
To you, Pharisees are simultaneously all Jews and not all Jews. Argumentum ad absurdum.
To you, a trivial distinction seems like a mighty argument. A common trait in the indefatigably blameless.
To you, a trivial distinction seems like a mighty argument.
To you a contradiction is "trivial". Kind of makes argument pointless, doesn't it?
No I didn't. What is the matter with you? You keep seeing things that aren't there.
In “my perfect world” I love everyone, and thus have no desire to judge Lord Nelson or anyone else for anything. And if Lord Nelson is living in “my perfect world” - only God would be in a position to judge. Interestingly, the appointment of judges was an accommodation – it wasn’t part of the original plan (Exodus 18, Deuteronomy 1).
Me: [in my perfect world] “Acts or omissions which would be a violation of the law would include murder, theft, envy, neglect, abuse, meanness, libel, hate.”
You: and how do I get that these are against the law from Acts 15-20?
You don’t in "my perfect world" – because they are but curious details that manifest from the two laws: love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength and understanding and love your neighbor as yourself.
I once again quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which I would pick over the Anglican's take on this subject over at Oxford. Horse's mouth, and all that.
What the Pharisees had to say about themselves contemporary with Jesus’ and John the Baptist’s comments - are the only points that matter in my view (#1167.)
But here is a good, modern source: Gabrielle Boccaccini, Roots of Rabbinic Judaism: An Intellectual History, from Ezekiel to Daniel
In the quote you have repeated, there is a phrase which I believe ought to be emphasized as follows:
After the conflicts with Rome (A.D. 66-135) Pharisaism became practically synonymous with Judaism
Josephus is a good source for what happened in the period of the destruction of the temple. The rabbinical traditions at Yavneh survived, that is where the Sanhedrin was established after the destruction and hence the domination of Pharisiasm after 70 A.D. But, previously, in the time of Christ – the Pharisees were regarded by Him, by John the Baptist, by Paul – as only one sect of Judaism, never as a synonym for Judaism.
Answer: Whatever donh says it is.
How may orthodox jews have I ordered torn limb from limb in the marketplace? How many orthodox jews have I condemned to eternal damnation because they wanted to practice the faith of their fathers?
I don't believe christians can be considered qualified to judge on this subject, until we make some effort at moral remedy for the poisoneous effects of our central doctrine of salvation.
Yeah, but only because it makes a world of difference in the meaning. Why don't you ask yourself why that word was put in there? Maybe next time I see someone who is practically dead, I'll just call him dead.
Tell you what. If you want to restate your whole argument in some way that makes sense, I'm willing to wipe the slate clean and start from there.
It is not the contradiction that is trivial, it is the constrained domain of discourse you chose to confine yourself to, in order to see a contradiction.
Pharasee is just a word. You can hang on it a vast array of more or less inclusive, more or less abstract groupings of peoples. I am not forced to accept the highly literalist interpretation you would suggest is exclusive, in order to make your argument. And neither was the Inquistion.
For most western readers of the bible, between 414ad and 1943ad, Pharasee was close enough to orthodox jew to justify the appelation christ-killer.
Kind of makes argument pointless, doesn't it?
No. Only your artificially constrained take on it.
I like my brother's take best (he's a high school history teacher):
Rene Descartes
Was a crusty old fart
Who drank,
And therefore he was.
:^)
It's a real canard; but I think it's funny.
So, if I grant you and the others here arguing this point that Pharasees aren't all jews...does this satisfy you on this question? The cristian doctrine bears no responsibility for the pogroms and the holocaust, because only the fraction of the jews charged to defend jewish law were "a brood of vipers" forever denied salvation? You think there was therefore no connection whatsoever between the Holocaust, the pogroms, and the doctrine that Jews who hold fast to jewish laws (like Pharasees) are denied salvation because they knowingly reject salvation through christ?
Pardon my skepticism.
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