bali

Either way, why Al Qeada would choose to strike Bali, if they indeed did it -- very baffling.

As for the reasoning, well: add western tourists to the fact that discos have traditionally been a target for Islamic terrorists -- as symbols of frivolous irreligious western decadence they're really not so shabby -- I'm not sure it should be massively surprising.

*If* the latest attacks are al Qaida then unfortunately it underlines the right's suggestion that the organisation targets everyday Western culture - of which hedonism is as much a part as democracy (and also IMO worth defending). It also underlines the fact that not every modern terrorist action is going to be a 'spectacular' - old school car bombings remain a horribly cheap and bloody way to go about things. (Actually this point applies whoever did it).

of course terrorism isn't new, and has been perpetrated on ghastly levels since classic times, but i argue that this style of it is new, and terryfying, and difficult to get your head around as to where it'll strike next - simply because, as an australian, i feel pretty insecure that i'm a young white capitalist christian sitting duck target.

I think it is significant that it happened in Bali, which as others have pointed out is predominantly Hindu, within a larger country which is predominantly Muslim. Although it is an attack on foreigners, it may be intended as a rebuke to Bali as well.

something that i'd like to add: i was travelling the muslim indonesian island of lombok this time last year (some may say foolishly) - shortly after sept. 11... my female companion and i were accosted by a group of young guys who demanded to know if we "loved george bush" - there were around 10-15 of them, with young kids running behind them... the harrassment went on, all kinds of accustations and high blown statements like "we kill you" etc. we shut up, pretty frightening stuff, and later learned they beat up a couple of scandanavian guys quite badly.

my point is - as was said by tom - a lot of these young guys obviously saw us as walking dollar signs, none of them were wearing shoes and one young kid ripped my drink from my hand and skolled it down. they have nothing much to lose and are constantly exposed to these shining images of westerners on tv, they sympathise with the al quaeda cause, whether or not they are members or whatever - it doesn't take all that much for a group of them to put together a car bomb and feel they've done the 'right thing' for their cause. i don't know, but recalling this experience just makes me shudder, because it may well have been a group of disgruntled young guys like these ones who orchestrated the most recent bombings in bali.

Any kind of terrorism is shocking.

To suggest that when terrorism, violence, despair, become commonplace in any society that we should say: "oh well, that's normal there" and simply shrug our shoulders? I don't know which would be worse.

Much to the disgust of my best friend (whom herself was a victim of crime and terrorism perpetrated by a Muslim Arab), I have decided that I will try to learn to speak Arabic. I would like to think that this will help me understand our differences better (between Muslim and Western cultures).

Can anyone tell me how much violence exists in Muslim society that they inflict on their like? Forgive my obvious ignorance, but Muslims seem united against the rest of the world, but are are they truly united amongst themselves?

I wouldn't say that Muslims are united against the rest of the world, certainly not the ones I speak to. The Turkish and Iranian ones are refugees, who've fled from persecution in their own countries - I guess you can call that 'violence inflicted on their like'. The others (Pakistani, Bangladeshi) see both sides of the argument (if that's what you call it - I mean, they look for the reason why somebody would fly a plane into a building or leave a car bomb outside a nightclub) but still don't think it's right.

Ouch.

Appallingly bad taste front page headline in the Evening Times coverage yesterday "RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"

so many people here know someone who is either missing or was there or is treating someone who was/is there or played football with the guy who's wife is dead or something - it's hard to talk about it now without coming across like a memeber of the media, so i now bow out.

australia and new zealand have not before been involved so directly in any terrorist attacks as intended victims. yes we all grow up seeing this happening around the world, yes we travel and experience what it might be like to live under constant threat of terrorism, and yes the french bombed our greenpeace ship 'the rainbow warrior' some years ago killing some of us, but until now we have been spared the horror of such things happening on this scale in our own backyards.

surprise and shock are natural reactions to any occurrence of this kind, regardless of how world-weary someone may be and to expect us to simply be blase about it is pretty 'out-there'.

it is a tad insensitive to question peoples reactions to something that is a very emotive issue, especially when it is our first encounter with terrorism directed our way.
we are mourning our loss of innocence i guess, as even though our security methods were 'stepped up' following sept 11th, so-called experts continued to state that we were very unlikely targets ( with the exception of a few ).

again, i do not wish to get into an unwinnable argument over 'our right to be shocked'. it is not a competition over who should be upset or who is more 'worldy-wise'.
we all know the way the world is, we all know many people die in violent ways around the planet due to differences of religion and opinion, but i also hope we are able to express our dismay at it happening to us without being told we should expect it.

I wholly agree, and I share your sadness.

There's something that makes me very uneasy about the immediate rationalization of unexpected violent mass death as serving a political end.

I'll go further and that say that discomfort is more like anger when it is used as "evidence" for an unfalsifiable theory that doesn't even coincide with the stated aims of the causal agents (cf., the WTC having something to do with capitalism, Bali being punishment for John Howard's support of Bush). I suspect that the methods and circumstances of these attacks are designed to be plastic-- to allow any set of aggrieved individuals to project (for lack of a better word) their grievances as the reason for the given attack. (I gave leftish justifications, but it applies to the right as well.)

Anyhow, I recognize that I'm constructing some set of reasons post facto to support positions of my own, but that doesn't get past the fact that there's just naked, raw horror that is essentially undigestible. I guess this gets to the core of why I try to seek out what Nabisco (the gentleman, not the corporation) has to say about this "sort" of thing-- because he immediately, and without a set of polemic inversions, tries to identify the "otherness" that allows me to be more revolted by, say, Bali, than by, say, Jenin or what have you.

Likewise, as every knows there is a history of terrorist attacks on London, and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if another one was to happen, but if Piccadilly Circus was to blow up tomorrow, taking hundreds of people with it, I'd still think "fuck, I walk past that every day, how could this happen?"

</provocateur>

(Dammit, there's already letters to the Herald bemoaning Helen Clark & the Skyhawks & our defence budget. ARGH.)

new message alert : sterling, that reminds me - how are thee Aussies reacting to this? (specifically with regard to their concentration camps)

& yeah, internal pressure/factors seem to be the important thing here.

Admittedly, I learned last September that I have never understood and may never be able to understand by what mechanism people are more emotionally affected by the deaths of their countrymen than by those of the people of other nations. Apparently a great many people find that perfectly natural.

what's that old saying - something like "1000 deaths in china get's a minute of your thoughts, 100 deaths in a distant state of your country shocks you for a day, 5 deaths in your city makes you think for a while and grieve, 2 deaths in your street will shock and upset and penetrate your psyche for some time" you get my drift anyway -

everyone who is bombarded with today's media images have to be desensitized or go insane - it's not human nature to feel such intense emotion for distant atrocities. what IS human nature though is to identify your own place and potential demise amidst a disaster... so, nabisco, i'm sure if narrowly escaped a blast on a london tube station and afterwards were forced to see images of limbless casualites who just happened to be 5 minutes behind you, you'd be affected just a tad - but to me, they'd just be distant unfortunate victims of what is everyday crime and atrocity.

for example, if something like this had happend in bali, but westerners were not the victims, do you think as big of a deal would have been made of it, and would people have been putting front page sympathy spreads up? i doubt it somehow.

if this isn't what you meant nabisco, then sorry...but i suppose it's kind of my take on things as well.

And Donna, I said above that there's a general reason why I don't have the reaction you and Miss Jayne are talking about, which I guess I'll try to explain. My parents immigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia, and the bulk of my extended family is still back there -- so while I've lived in the U.S. all my life and consider myself entirely American, I've never really thought of Americans, Ethiopians, or anyone else as "my own." In plenty of cases both of those nations have returned the favor. So these days I find it really hard to understand why people need to conceive of themselves as part of a "nation" or a "people" for whom they're going to be concerned any more than they're concerned for anyone else: in fact, this distinction strikes me as causing more and more problems as time goes on.

I also grew up with the general idea that really bad things could happen to my family members in Ethiopia at any time. This strikes me as the simple reality for most of the world, that people are killed or harmed or displaced quite often because of revolutions and terrorist actions and ethnic clashes and a thousand other things that they have very little to do with. So I'm often bothered by the fact that those of us in the west -- and I completely include myself in this group -- tend to think of our comparative safety not as a privilege but as some sort of God-given right, something that should allow us to walk through areas of violence and conflict and politely be left out of them.

So when you said "I'm a bit shocked that it happened so close to home" it just got me, because there's a whole lot of meaning wrapped up in that. Certainly you don't mean "close" in the geographic sense -- worse things than this have happened even closer to you (East Timor). What it seems to say, to me, is "I'm a bit shocked that it happened to westerners / white people / people like me / people someplace where I would actually go." And the "they were just tourists" part compounds this, for me: they non-western people who are usually violently victimized are "just" whatever-they-are, too, aren't they?

So I don't understand the expectation that this violence should automatically restrict itself to native people and not affect westerns who happen to wander through: the fact that it usually doesn't is just the result of having more money to spend on better security, and sometimes that security will fail. The shock, then, isn't that it happened -- it happens all the time -- but that the magic web of insulation westerns usually have draped around them isn't in fact magical, that being Australian and having economic power doesn't inherently make you more innocent than someone who lives every day in an unstable nation.

So I don't have any political aim when I say this, and I don't pretend to speak for anyone other than myself: that's just the best I can do to explain why I'm sometimes bothered by certain comments, and why I sometimes knee-jerk against comments that may not even have been meant that way. And apologies again for having injected that into a thread you probably didn't mean to be about that.

i do see your point, now that you have clarified it, but i dont think i belong in a group that believes security to be a 'god given right' simply by living in a westernised country.
in fact, i am thankful every day that i am raising my son in a country that is not affected by this kind of violence on a regular basis.

the attack on a nightclub in bali was ( to me anyway ) pretty obviously separate to the violence that is inherent in indonesia, in that it was aimed at a place known to be crowded with westerners, mainly australians, on an island that is a popular holiday resort. this is not a case of me expecting westerners to be able to 'walk through areas of violence and conflict and politely be left out of them'.

How many Balinese were killed in the blast?

This is just the sort of projection of aims of the traditional left onto a group of people who AVOWEDLY had different political goals that is so disturbing. It's one thing to shake your head sadly that one's aims are being achieved in such an immoral way, it's another entirely to stake claim to a murderous act as being for an entirely different set of principles.

Ramzi Yousef and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who picked the World Trade Center as a target in the first place, when they bombed it in 1993, selected it for its visibility from Jersey City, where they lived and worked, and because of the perception that it was chock full of Jews. Now there's a leap of logic in saying that the airplane attack was connected to the bombing, but the two groups evidently were directly linked, personally and financially, to the same people, and some feel that the choice of the first target inspired the second.

The clubs, by the way, were said to have had a policy of turning away Indonesians at the door.

I'm going to try not to involve myself in this discussion, though, because I'm sorry I touched it off and I don't think anyone understands what I'm saying: it seems like everyone think I'm saying they're wrong or bad people for feeling concerned about this, which is not what I mean at all.

http://theage.com.au/news/world/blasts-in-bali-tourist-area/2005/10/01/1127804698173.html

Blasts in Bali tourist area
October 1, 2005 - 10:32PM

Explosions rocked a hotel and department store on the Indonesian tourist island of Bali today, leaving dozens wounded and at least two dead, witnesses and local media reports said.

There was no immediate confirmation of what caused the blasts.

Witnesses said they saw body parts, including a severed head and a leg.

Reports said two explosions happened around 1850 local time near the Four Seasons Hotel in Jimbaran on Bali's south coast, and 10 minutes later near the Matahari department store in the centre of the popular tourist area of Kuta, the site of deadly bombings in 2002, witnesses told local Metro television.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warned in late August that terrorists were likely to launch an attack in Indonesia in the next two months during what has become known in the country as "bomb season" owing to a series of attacks that has occurred around this time over the past three years.

The attack in Bali in October 2002 left some 202 people dead, mostly foreign tourists. Bomb attacks on the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August 2003 left 12 dead, and an attack outside the Australian embassy in September 2004 killed 11 and injured some 180.
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Police have continued to search for two Malaysian fugitives accused of being behind the attacks, Azahari and Noordin, who are also believed to be senior members of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) regional terror group.

JI has been linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network.

Although JI members have been involved in several deadly bombings in Indonesia, authorities have not officially outlawed the organisation which many Muslim leaders claim does not exist.

As an aside, reading the original thread I'm a bit suprised by donna's comments. Bali was in no way the first kind attack Aussies were involved in - I mean Darwin was bombed in WWII, there was the Hilton bombing in Sydney in the 70s, the Police HQ bombing in Melbourne... anyhoo.

and here i was hoping this was a tourism thread. uh....