October 04, 2005
IT'S not just the environmentalists who think globally and act locally. The
jihadi who murdered Newcastle woman Jennifer Williamson, Perth teenager Brendan
Fitzgerald and a couple of dozen more Australians, Indonesians, Japanese and
others had certain things in common with the July 7 London Tube killers. For
example, Azahari bin Husin, who police believe may be the bomb-maker behind this
weekend's atrocity, completed a doctorate at England's Reading University. The
contribution of the British education system to the jihad is really quite
remarkable.

But, on the other hand, despite Clive Williams's game attempt to connect the two
on this page yesterday, nobody seriously thinks what happened in Bali has
anything to do with Iraq. There are, in the end, no root causes, or anyway not
ones that can be negotiated by troop withdrawals or a Palestinian state. There
is only a metastasising cancer that preys on whatever local conditions are to
hand. Five days before the slaughter in Bali, nine Islamists were arrested in
Paris for reportedly plotting to attack the Metro. Must be all those French
troops in Iraq, right? So much for the sterling efforts of President Jacques
Chirac and his Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, as the two chief
obstructionists of Bush-Blair-Howard neo-con-Zionist warmongering these past
three years.
When the suicide bombers self-detonated on Saturday, the travel section of
Britain's The Sunday Telegraph had already gone to press, its lead story a
feature on how Bali's economy had bounced back from the carnage of 2002. We all
want to believe that: one terrorist attack is like a tsunami or hurricane, just
one of those things, blows in out of the blue, then the familiar contours of the
landscape return. But two attacks are a permanent feature, the way things are
and will be for some years, as one by one the bars and hotels and clubs and
restaurants shut up shop. Many of the Australians injured this weekend had
waited to return to Bali, just to make sure it was "safe". But it isn't, and it
won't be for a long time, and by the time it is it won't be the Bali that
Westerners flocked to before 2002.
I found myself behind a car in Vermont, in the US, the other day; it had a
one-word bumper sticker with the injunction "COEXIST". It's one of those
sentiments beloved of Western progressives, one designed principally to flatter
their sense of moral superiority. The C was the Islamic crescent, the O was the
hippie peace sign, the X was the Star of David and the T was the Christian
cross. Very nice, hard to argue with. But the reality is, it's the first of
those symbols that has a problem with coexistence. Take the crescent out of the
equation and you wouldn't need a bumper sticker at all. Indeed, coexistence is
what the Islamists are at war with; or, if you prefer, pluralism, the idea that
different groups can rub along together within the same general neighbourhood.
There are many trouble spots across the world but, as a general rule, even if
one gives no more than a cursory glance at the foreign pages, it's easy to guess
at least one of the sides: Muslims v Jews in Palestine,
Muslims v Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims v Christians in Nigeria, Muslims v
Buddhists in southern Thailand, Muslims v (your team here). Whatever one's views
of the merits on a case by case basis, the ubiquitousness of one team is a fact.
"Men of intemperate mind never can be free; their passions forge their fetters,"
wrote Edmund Burke. And, in that sense, Bali is more symbolic of the
Islamofascist strategy than London or Madrid, Beslan or Istanbul. The jihad has
held out against some tough enemies: the Israelis in the West Bank, the Russians
in Chechnya; these are primal conflicts. But what's the beef in Bali? Oh, to be
sure, to the more fastidious Islamist some of those decadent hedonist
fornicating Westerners whooping it up are a little offensive. But they'd be
offensive whoever they were and whatever they did. It's the reality of a
pluralist enclave within the world's largest Muslim nation that offends. It's
the coexistence, stupid.


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So even Muslims v (your team here) doesn't quite cover it. You don't have to
have a team or even be aware that you belong to any side. You can be a
hippie-dippy hey-man-I-love-everybody-whatever-your-bag-is-cool backpacking
Dutch stoner, and they'll blow you up with as much enthusiasm as if you were
Dick Cheney. As a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden put it in 2002,
explaining why they bombed a French oil tanker: "We would have preferred to hit
a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels."
No problem. In our time, even the most fascistic ideologies have been savvy
enough to cover their darker impulses in sappy labels. The Soviet bloc was
comprised of wall-to-wall "people's republics", which is the precise opposite of
what they were: a stylistic audacity Orwell caught perfectly in 1984, with its
Ministry of Truth (that is, official lies). But the Islamists don't even bother
going through the traditional rhetorical feints. They say what they mean and
they mean what they say. "We are here as on a darkling plain ..." wrote Matthew
Arnold in the famous concluding lines to Dover Beach, "where ignorant armies
clash by night".
But we choose in large part to stay in ignorance. Blow up the London Underground
during a G8 summit and the world's leaders twitter about how tragic and ironic
it is that this should have happened just as they're taking steps to deal with
the issues, as though the terrorists are upset about poverty in Africa and
global warming.
So, even in a great blinding flash of clarity, we can't wait to switch the
lights off and go back to fumbling around on the darkling plain. Bali three
years ago and Bali three days ago light up the sky: they make unavoidable the
truth that Islamism is a classic "armed doctrine"; it exists to destroy. The
reality of Bali's contribution to Indonesia's economic health is irrelevant. The
jihadists would rather that the country be poorer and purer than prosperous and
pluralist. For one thing, it's richer soil for them. If the Islamofascists gain
formal control of Indonesia, it won't be a parochial, self-absorbed dictatorship
such as Suharto's but a launching pad for an Islamic superstate across Southeast
Asia and the Pacific.
Can they pull it off? The reality is that there are more Muslim states than a
half-century ago, many more Muslims within non-Muslim states, and many more of
those Muslims are radicalised and fundamentalist. It's not hard to understand.
All you have to do is take them at their word. As Bassam Tibi, a Muslim
professor at Gottingen University in Germany, said in an interesting speech a
few months after September 11, "Both sides should acknowledge candidly that
although they might use identical terms, these mean different things to each of
them. 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."
That's why they blew up Bali in 2002, and last weekend, and why they'll keep
blowing it up. It's not about Bush or Blair or Iraq or Palestine. It's about a
world where everything other than Islamism lies inruins.



http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16801982^7583,00.h\
tml



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Islamic Separtists in Australia: That's why we don't believe in democracy



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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/718
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/803
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/713
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Roche pleads guilty in al-Qaeda plot to bomb Israeli embassy



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