Thursday, November 10, 2005
On prayer being the last resort of the wicked
Azahiri Bin Husin, now dead, is the murdering superbigot said to have "masterminded" the Bali atrocities. Today's papers described him as a former mathematician with two university degrees.
He is thus revealed as an educated fellow. His pedigree is not dissimilar to a number of the Aum Shin Rikyu cult lunatics who perpetrated the '90s sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway station.
Members of that milieu were famously revealed as university-educated computer geeks and technofiles. That prompted energetic discussion in the Japanese press at the time about the correlation, or otherwise, between powers of logical deduction and emotional stability.
When the saga of chess super grand master Bobby Fischer re-ignited some months back, with that American exile being forced to flee Japan to Iceland, such discussions were similarly re-ignited.
Fischer, you may recall, began vomiting (in the most unrestrained and obscene terms) anti-American and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories like they were going out of style. This stupefyingly brilliant former world champion is himself Jewish and American, and appeared at one level to be a few beads short of a full abacus.
We might rest easy with a similar take on Azahiri, though he clearly wasn't in the same academic league as the extraordinary Fischer.
Yet other explanations for Azari's behaviour are deductible from early reports following his capture by Indonesian police: resentment towards Australia and Australians after failing a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Adelaide; a warped sense of Islamic duty following deep inculcation into the faith after the death threatened his child, and even, perhaps: sadism, pure and simple - if it's true that he "enjoyed" watching innocent child and adult victims explode into gory, nail-ridden pieces.
Maybe the motivator(s) was(/were) something else altogether. Ultimately the whys and wherefores matter not. Azari's were acts of a hateful and warped mind, howsoever they were arrived at, and timely reminders of that old chestnut about prayer being the last resort of the wicked.
