A year on, the question remains: why?

By Scott Burchill
October 11, 2003

Twelve months on, two very different responses to the Bali atrocity are evident within Australian political circles.

The first argues that cultural hatred is the only legitimate explanation for the present wave of Islamic militancy. John Howard has repeatedly stressed that Australians are targeted by extremists "because of who we are, not because of what we have done. We are a Western country and what these terrorists hate is Western civilisation."

According to this argument, no rational account of the behaviour of terrorists can be found and no dialogue with individuals willing to commit such heinous acts is possible.

Nor is any examination of our own role in world politics required. Awkward questions about US support for al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah operatives when they were resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s need not be posed. The same applies to Washington's support for Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine and a range of repressive regimes across the Arab world.


http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/10/1065676158547.html

"Brian Deegan wonders if his son Joshua was singled out, or whether the bombers "viewed the group of tourists at the Sari Club on that October night as representative of a Western collective of terror whose leaders had bombed Islamic states such as Afghanistan and Iraq, so killing, albeit inadvertently, equally innocent children".

no Brian....theyre just fascist cold-blooded murderers.

But he was talking about the REASONS for the attack, not what the people who carried them out are....

Violet...