Monday, October 14, 2002

The War Arrives in Paradise

Australia is bracing for an appalling toll of death and suffering in the aftermath of the terrorist bombing in Bali. No one knows for sure how many people died in the blast but surely the smug indifference to the War on Terrorism is a collateral casualty.

Do I have inside information that the Bali blast was the work of Islamofascists? Yes I do. Having seen their handy work first hand a little more than a year ago in lower Manhattan, the descriptions of the scene, such as this one from The Independent, sound remarkably similar:

"It was surreal," Mr. Norton said. "You can't believe you're really there. It's something you see on the telly, but it never happens to you."


Other descriptions go far beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Read this one from the Sydney Morning Herald:

“I saw all the television screens around the bar explode. I saw heaps of people burning and dying around me. It was an inferno. I saw one guy whose leg had been blown open - he couldn't walk - he was just lying there screaming. I saw another man with severe facial burns - it was hard to tell if he was dead or alive. There was so much screaming."


Or this one from Australian television:

"It was like a bloody war movie. One bloke ... looked like a bit of wood, that's how burnt he was. A few of us helped this German lady out. She had no clothes on ... maybe it was burning and she ripped them off. You just think about it and you break into tears."


I’m very sorry to say that the war has now come to another doorstep and another peaceful and complacent population in the tolerant West has finally awoken to the danger.

Why would Islamofascists make such a provocative move now, when they could simply lay low and let their main protagonist, the United States, flail about at seemingly unseen threats? Because, they don’t want to avoid confrontation. Radical Islam’s intention is to spark a worldwide confrontation against the West on every front.

Watch now as the secular government of Indonesia, the world’s largest Islamic country, is criticized by Australia for not doing enough to thwart terrorism and by it’s own Islamofascists minority for siding with the infidels.

This is just the sort of destabilization the Islamofascist movement wants unlike a toppled Taliban dictatorship or an overthrown Iraqi dictatorship which is the sort of destabilization that impedes their cause.

We are entering a transformational period in history. Instability is unavoidable. The status quo is indefensible. The best response is to manage change before the change manages you.

Very fortunately, this is the expressed policy of the United States and in time it will be the conventional wisdom of all those nations that value peace, tolerance and freedom.

Just a guess.

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