There are not one, but two, opinion pieces on Tuesday’s suicide bombings in today’s Australian, which are refreshingly accurate and honest.
The following excerpts are taken from the editorial:
Significantly, the two attacks come just as major milestones were being passed on both the road map to peace and Iraq’s road to recovery. Israel was about to hand over two West Bank towns to the Palestinians. In Iraq, coalition troops were basking in the capture of Saddam Hussein’s former vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan. The timing is no coincidence, of course. Driven by their insane millenarian fantasies in which Americans and Jews shall be wiped from the earth, the last thing the terrorists can abide is a measured progress towards peace and understanding.
The bomb in Jerusalem was just as devastating, driving what may be the final nail into the coffin of the seven-week-old ceasefire. Several extremist groups have stepped forward to claim responsibility. Their argument that the bombing is a justified retaliation for Israel’s ongoing attacks on their own commanders is totally without force. Attacks on Israelis have slowed, not stopped, since the ceasefire. If the Israeli Government has a bead on terrorist ringleaders plotting mayhem, how can it be expected to do nothing? There is no equivalence between that and randomly blowing up a bus whose passengers include women, children and babies.
Humoured by his fans worldwide, including among the membership of the EU, Yasser Arafat clearly has no intention of going quietly, and letting Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas pursue the road map to peace. If Arafat told the militants to disarm, they would. But as long as there is an armed militia for every Palestinian faction, rather than a single force under the authority of the Palestinian Authority government, the road map will be one step forward – and then a bomb, blowing everything back into ruins.
Greg Sheridan then has this to say:
THE bombs in Baghdad and Jerusalem show us one thing – the terrorists and extremists hate not only George W. Bush and the US, they hate every semblance of government that is not in the style of the extremist Taliban.
They hate peace and democracy. They hate economic growth. They hate the empowerment of women. They hate compromise and settlement.
They hate, apparently, the UN and innocent diplomats trying to deliver services to the Iraqi people.
While they come from many backgrounds, they will make a common cause of their common hatred.
Above all, they hate any civic authority that does not conform to their nihilist ideology, whether it be the UN or a moderate Muslim government, in any Islamic country in the world.
The bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem, the resurgent Taliban attacks in southern Afghanistan, and the MarriottHotel bombing in Jakarta are all faces of the same phenomenon.
This is a global campaign in which Osama bin Laden’s al Qa’ida terrorist group has established ideological and organisational leadership.
But it is supported, clandestinely, by several semi-rogue states.
These bombings may well be a sign of things to come.
There are far more willing suicide bombers around the world than there are packages of explosives to strap to their stomachs or load into the backs of their trucks. Now that truck bombs are increasingly popular we can expect to see bigger and bigger bombs.
Terrorists follow a simple, old methodology: worse is better. This is true from the terrorists’ point of view equally in Jerusalem, in Jakarta, in Baghdad, and in Kabul.
The ideological alternatives to al-Qa’ida have fallen away in the Middle East, and in extremist Islamic circles. Secular nationalism has led only to dictatorship and poverty in the Middle East. Its most aggressive variant, communism, died with the end of the Cold War.
Moderate Islamic democracy cannot be found anywhere in the Middle East. Its nearest equivalent is Turkey, a secular state with a majority Islamic population.
In Pakistan, democracy has failed and extremist movements are kept from power only by the military. The Indonesian Government is profoundly hated by al-Qa’ida because it embodies democracy, moderation and religious tolerance.
The bombing in Jerusalem is more gruesome even than usual but it is all of a piece. The Palestinian Authority never takes effective action against terrorist bombers, no matter what it occasionally says to placate Western opinion. It is either not interested or incapable of creating a monopoly on force in its own area.
The ideology of extremism has permeated the Palestinian leadership. No one wants to be the leader who compromised and acknowledged the legitimacy of Israel. Otherwise Yasser Arafat would have accepted the Camp David offer of 2000 and a Palestinian state would be established by now.
In Baghdad the story is the same. Terrorism is supremely what analysts call “asymmetrical” warfare.
The object is not to defeat your enemy in military battle, but simply to raise the human cost of his actions to a point that is unbearable.
And if your own people suffer along the way, so be it.
The ideology of contemporary terrorism does not grow out of poverty, injustice, dislike of George W. Bush, veneration of the UN or any other of the fashionable pieties.
It grows out of a systematically inculcated view of the world based on hatred and the endless recrudescence of grievance.
Ideologically, it is powerful now in narrow but teeming corners of the world.
The demands of the terrorists are absolute and non-negotiable, so there is no compromise.
The war against terror will be with us for a very long time, until one side or the other is exhausted and defeated.
Is that the sweet sound of truth that I hear?
