Still “Root Causes”?

Two days ago I suggested that after the mass murder and maiming of several hundred mostly Australian tourists on the Indonesian island of Bali no one could still seriously maintain the “root causes” explanations for Muslim terror—ranging from America’s friendship with Israel to the West’s lack of sufficient concern over Third-World poverty. I was wrong. The following excerpts from Mark Steyn’s must-read article, “They Want to Kill Us All,” at Front Page Magazine, shows that some Australian and British media types are responding to the atrocity in absolutely typical fashion:

… 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?’ …

… 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.’

… 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.

… 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.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 18, 2002 09:18 PM | Send