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COMMENTARY
October 16, 2002
Bali
The Islamist terrorists executed another "sucker punch" against defenceless civilians over the weekend in Bali; the largest since 9/11. It was almost certainly a response to the higher levels of security they are encountering in U.S. embassies and military installations in the region. The bad news is that most civilian targets are indeed indefensible the terror organizations are truly international and there will be more like that until they and their support networks including sponsoring regimes have been smashed. There is no reason to doubt the hand of Al Qaeda in the attacks; and therefore every reason to suspect it is part of an international campaign to derail the Bush administration's plans in Iraq. And sure enough the operation coincided with a new publicity drive in the name of Osama bin Laden after ten months of silence promising just such attacks as part of the organization's "hands off Saddam" campaign. The Sari and Kuta nightclubs were full of Australians and Australia's prime minister John Howard has been after Britain's Tony Blair the most stalwart ally of the U.S. in the war against terrorism. These places were full of young people dancing drinking and having fun which are against the tenets of Islam. Bali is a Hindu island in the middle of an Islamic archipelago -- and again the Indonesian affiliates of Al Qaeda principally Jemaah Islamiyah but also Jashkar Jundullah have publicly affirmed their desire to "cleanse" the traditionally tolerant nation of its Hindu Christian and Buddhist minorities. The intention to ruin Bali's flourishing tourist industry was reminiscent of the Egyptian Jihadists' attack on tourists at Luxor in November 1997. The attack happened on the anniversary of the holing of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden. There was a simultaneous though abortive hit on the U.S. consulate in Denpassar. To understand the mindset of the enemy we must try to grasp the "poetry" inside his psychopathology. Al Qaeda likes to strike multiple targets as a way of communicating its message. The symbolic "parallel" drawn on 9/11 between the capitalist World Trade Centre and the military Pentagon was quite intentional. In Bali a point was being made by associating the American diplomatic presence with the "corruption of morals" in the island's nightclubs. Another signature Al Qaeda touch is the twin blast. It is a device they have used repeatedly in Israel/Palestine Afghanistan Pakistan Kashmir: a smaller bomb to help attract the crowd that will be slaughtered by the bigger blast to follow. In the "poetry" of Islamism this is something like rhyme; it makes clear that the large number of "infidel" casualties is an intended part of the effect. The use of C-4 explosive in the big blast is yet another signature. Al Qaeda has been instrumental in distributing this powerful substance to affiliates from Morocco to the Philippines. It is the explosive that has made the suicide bombers of Palestine much more effective -- the powerful explosive combined with improved techniques for packing shrapnel (C-4 can be handled safely as an elastic and the nuts bolts glass shards etc. are worked into the "dough") . By packing large quantities of it Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been able to blow up even a couple of Israeli tanks previously impregnable to the Intifada. For all practical purposes Jemaah Islamiyah the Indonesian terror organization is indistinguishable from Al Qaeda; its history is co-terminous with the parent organization its "militants" were trained in Afghanistan its leadership co-ordinates with terrorists abroad. It is in effect the leader of four regional terror constellations devoted to the creation of an Islamic caliphate in east Asia -- to contain southern Thailand Malaysia Singapore Brunei the Philippines East Timor as well as Indonesia and "eventually" the rest of South-east Asia New Guinea and Australia. The Islamists openly publicize this goal and uphold the principle that a country with any Muslim residents at all must become part of an Islamic caliphate with all non-Muslims to either convert or be slaughtered. The Indonesian government has notoriously taken no steps against the political wing of this movement which is actually represented as a minor party in the governing coalition. Abu Bakar Ba'asyir the "spiritual leader" of the Jemaah Islamiyah operates freely speaks through Saudi-financed Wahabi imams in many Indonesian mosques and publicly boasts of his ambitions. Even the military leader Riduan Isamuddin alias Hambali was free to travel until recently and openly attend meetings of the terror organization's "shura" or consultative council. When the U.S. demanded his arrest after 9/11 the Indonesian government said they couldn't find him; when the Americans told them where he was he finally went into hiding. Nothing was done last December when the U.S. showed extensive Jemaah Islamiyah complicity in an attempt to blow up several embassies in Singapore. Indeed CIA warnings of a possible major hit on Bali were issued to the Indonesian government two weeks before last weekend's blast; and nothing was done about them either. I wrote last January about the frustration of both U.S. representatives and international Christian groups at being unable to get the Indonesian government or military to take a serious interest in the routine village by village massacres and forced conversions of Christians in Sulawesi and the Maluku islands. It can only be hoped that the carnage in Bali will help wake the world to the rest of what's going on in Indonesia. The Indonesian government under President Megawati Sukarnoputra is suddenly under extraordinary pressure not only from Western foreign ministers but domestically from the entire Hindu population of Bali and what's left of the country's Christian population to finally do something about the terrorists. She and the corrupt Indonesian political establishment that supports her have previously worked on the theory that if you don't bother them maybe they'll go away. The fatuity of this thinking has now been exposed. It is the same theory that the Chretien government has in Canada. Our national policy seems to be that Islamist terror cells present no danger to Canada; that a serious effort to hunt them down would be an affront to "multiculturalism"; and that it might backfire by antagonizing the terrorists themselves. But the lesson of Bali also applies here: for as soon as the Islamists realize that their "hard targets" are likely to be well-protected they will look for soft targets. And Canada is the softest target in the West. The debate about whether or not to hunt down Islamist fanatics ended on the weekend in sister Australia which has lost (at the time of writing) 30 dead 113 seriously injured and 180 still missing and probably among the unidentified corpses in makeshift morgues. (To Australia proportionately as 9/11 was to the U.S.) Like every other Western country Australia has its share of "liberals" who argue that the U.S. and the West are only getting what we deserve from our "history of imperialism" and should answer terrorism with tolerance understanding and appeasement. But a headline in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald one of the country's more distinguished broadsheets delivered the breaking news: "Bleeding hearts left exposed as fools." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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