Author: Mark Steyn
Publication: The Spectator
Date: October 19, 2002
Introduction: 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
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.
