Saturday, July 23, 2005
Sex and terrorism (3)
"This is about hatred of a way of life."
So said Australian PM Howard at a joint press conference with Tony Blair last week. He was responding to journalist queries from the usual suspects implying, as London Mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone did within days of his city being attacked, that western government foreign policy was 'responsible' for the terrorist attacks in London. Howard continued:
"Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq? ... that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq? ... that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor?
"Are people, by implication, suggesting that we shouldn't have done that?"
That theme - that 'root causes' for terrorist actions are about personal-cultural complex - is taken up by French academic Olivier Roy (author of "Globalized Islam") in a New York Times op-ed piece:
"The Americans went to Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, not before. ...(That) attack was plotted well before the second (Palestinian) intifada began in September 2000, at a time of relative optimism in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
"Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces.
" ... (T)here (are) virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists ... the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. ... (T)hey do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.
"(The jihadists) are rebels looking for a cause. They find it in the dream of a virtual, universal ummah, the same way the ultraleftists of the 1970's (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades) cast their terrorist actions in the name of the "world proletariat" and "Revolution" without really caring about what would happen after."
Australian journalist Miranda Devine's exploration of a number of culturally-charged gang rape cases in Sydney, which I previously discussed here and here, throws shocking light on the actual ideas and influences motivating a number of thugs who used their 'religion' as a shield.
Devine continued the theme in today's Sun-Herald. She says that according to the General Practitioner who is the father of 4 juveniles in Sydney's west who gang-raped a number of teenage girls between the ages of 13 and 18:
'(I)t is Australia that is unjust.' Last month he told Sydney Morning Herald journalist Natasha Wallace: "You are the enemy of the Muslim . . . they [his sons] are not rapists."
Dr K has maintained his sons' innocence ... even after viewing in court one of the videotapes police found ... (showing a) ... comatose 13-year-old girl, drunk or drugged, and the brothers performing degrading criminal acts on her body.
Dr K revealed his views about Australian girls to a reporter: "What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don't go out at night."
In court Dr K complained his sons, "did not know the culture of this country".
(In Pakistan, "honour rapes" have a long tradition. In one case that has become an international feminist cause, a woman was gang raped by 13 men on the order of a village council as a punishment because her brother had befriended a woman from another tribe)
He incubated his monsters in one of the most remote and primitive corners of Pakistan, in a small village near the Afghanistan border town of Peshawar where Osama bin Laden lived in the 1980s ...
Whether the crime is murder or mass-murder or rape or multiple gang-rape, western mores demand that perpetrators be held responsible for their own actions.
Otherwise, as the San Francisco Chronicle's Deb Saunders puts it:
"Imagine if anti-abortion terrorists killed 52 civilians and themselves, and Americans blamed feminism, or abortion rights, or the U.S. Supreme Court for Roe vs. Wade. Because the equivalent is happening at home and abroad."
