Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publication: Slat
Date: October 3, 2005
URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127343/?nav=ais
Terrorist attacks aren't caused by any policy
except that of the bombers themselves.
The return of murderous nihilism to Bali is
highly instructive. It shows, first, that the fanatics of Islamism don't know
how to stop. And it also shows that they never learn. How can Jemaah Islamiyah,
which almost ruined Indonesia's economy by its filthy attack three years ago,
possibly have tried to repeat the same crime in the same place? If we look
for answers to this question, we shall find answers that completely discredit
the current half-baked apologies for terrorism.
I remember going to Bali from Jakarta in the
summer of 2003. I had already toured the wreckage of the Marriott Hotel in
the capital city, which was blown up by a suicide team just as I arrived,
slaying several Muslim cab drivers who were waiting in line outside. The rage
of the local population was something to be seen: The widows of the dead men
were calling for the perpetrators to be tortured before they were executed.
In Bali, which is a more mild and temperate place, a huge candlelit march
had followed the bombings that had devastated the tourist hangouts in Kuta.
I made a point of going to Legian Street, which had been the "ground
zero" of this fiery atrocity, and of attending the opening of Paddy's
Bar Reloaded, where so many genial Australians had been foully incinerated.
The prevailing view was that JI had isolated itself and that the trial of
the perpetrators would expose them to popular contempt-which indeed it did.
But if JI were rational, it wouldn't have
attacked the bars and clubs and beaches of Kuta and Jimbaran in the first
place. Indonesia is a mainly Muslim society, whose government takes a stern
line against the war in Iraq and even Afghanistan. Its people, who are astonishingly
hospitable to all foreigners, depend in millions of cases on tourism to make
the difference between indigence and the minimum wage. Its elections feature
Muslim political parties, many of them quite austere in their propaganda.
Why on earth, then, would a fundamentalist group wish to bring discredit upon
itself and ruin upon its neighbors by resorting to random slaughter?
Never make the mistake of asking for rationality
here. And never underestimate the power of theocratic propaganda. The fanatics
look at the population of Bali and its foreign visitors and they see a load
of Hindus selling drinks-often involving the presence of unchaperoned girls-to
a load of Christians. That in itself is excuse enough for mayhem. They also
see local Muslims following syncretic and tolerant forms of Islam, and they
yearn to redeem them from this heresy and persuade them of the pure, desert-based
truths of Salafism and Wahhabism. (One of the men on trial in Bali had been
in trouble before, in his home village, for desecrating local Muslim shrines
that he regarded as idolatrous.) And then, of course, Australians must die.
Why would that be? Well, is it not the case that Australia sent troops to
help safeguard the independence of East Timor and the elections that followed
it? A neighboring country that assists the self-determination of an Indonesian
Christian minority must expect to have the lives of its holidaymakers taken.
Do not forget that on Aug. 19, 2003, a gigantic
explosion leveled the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, which then served as the Iraq
headquarters of the United Nations. The materials used to do this were of
a high military grade not available to any random "insurgent" and
certainly came from the arsenals of the fallen regime. The main target-and
principal victim-was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the dashing Brazilian who had
been sent by Kofi Annan to reanimate the U.N. presence in Iraq. De Mello had
been the most devoted and humane of the world body's civil servants and had
won himself golden opinions in Cambodia, Lebanon, Sudan, and the Balkans.
But it was his role as U.N. supervisor of the transition in East Timor that
marked him for death. A communiqué from al-Qaida gloated over the end
of "the personal representative of America's criminal slave, Kofi Annan,
the diseased Sergio de Mello, criminal Bush's friend." It went on to
ask, "Why cry over a heretic? Sergio Vieira de Mello is the one who tried
to embellish the image of America, the crusaders and the Jews in Lebanon and
Kosovo, and now in Iraq. He is America's first man where he was nominated
by Bush to be in charge of the UN after Kofi Annan, the criminal and slave
of America, and he is the crusader that extracted a part of the Islamic land
[East Timor]."
Consider this, look again at the awful carnage
in Bali, and shudder if you ever said, or thought, that the bombs in London
in July, or the bombs in Baghdad every day, or the bombs in Bali last Friday,
are caused by any "policy" but that of the bombers themselves. Note
the following:
1) East Timor was for many years, and quite
rightly, a signature cause of the Noam Chomsky "left." The near-genocide
of its people is an eternal stain on Indonesia and on the Western states that
were complicit or silent. Yet Bin Ladenism wants not less of this killing
and repression but more. Its demand to re-establish the caliphate is a pro-imperialist
demand, not an anti-imperialist one.
2) Random bombings are not a protest against
poverty and unemployment. They are a cause of poverty and unemployment and
of wider economic dislocation.
3) Hinduism is considered by Bin Ladenists
to be a worse heresy even than Christianity or Judaism or Shiism, and its
adherents, whether in Bali or Kashmir, are fit only for the edge of the sword.
So, it is absurd to think of jihadism-which murders the poor and the brown
without compunction-as a movement against the rich and the "white."
So, what did Indonesia do to deserve this,
or bring it on itself? How will the slaughter in Bali improve the lot of the
Palestinians? Those who look for the connection will be doomed to ask increasingly
stupid questions and to be content with increasingly wicked answers.