Mark Steyn on "root causes":
Robert Fisk of The Independent in London 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-Qaeda 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 U.S. 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, praise be to Allah.
I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added "initial" to that French "support for Mr. Bush." The French were supportive for about 10 minutes after September 11th, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: Throughout the spring, their Foreign Minister M. Vedrine 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 U.S. frigate but no problem because they are all infidels."
No problem. They are all infidels.
When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. 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.
Messrs. Haigh and Fisk persist in believing that they kill infidels in pursuit of a negotiable goal, when the evidence suggests that killing infidels is the goal. As a way of making a point about Zionist occupation of the West Bank, blowing up Bali is 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? An infidel-friendly enclave in the world's largest Muslim country has been transformed into a mound of dead Australians and Scandinavians and the non-Islamic Indonesians of Bali: No problem, they're all infidels.
nationalpost.com |
