The carnage in Jakarta confirms what many believed, that despite the arrests since the Bali bombing outrage, the terrorists of Jemaah Islamiyah have not gone away. This beautiful country, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, still harbors people who, with the apparent help and backing of Al-Qaeda, believe that they can advance their cause by the butchery of innocents.
In the mind of any fanatic, the enemy does not have to be the policeman or soldier who is hunting him down. He is simply the person who represents a different belief and culture from his own. The Marriott hotel in Jakarta was a popular lunchtime meeting place for Westerners working in Indonesia, just as Bali was popular among Western tourists.
Both bombs were set for times of day when the maximum number of Western “enemies” would be present. That they would inevitably hit a fair number of their fellow Indonesian Muslims did not matter to the killers.
Terrorists prey upon the innocent who are by definition unprepared to defend themselves. The blind bigotry of terrorists has all too often also been exemplified by the seizure of doctors or aid workers who have chosen to come to the aid of the very communities whose interests the terrorists claim to be defending. The aircraft hijackings of the PLO in the 1970s ended an age of innocence for international travelers. Though left-wing groups chose to lionize those involved in them, there was nothing heroic about hijacking civilian planes. They seized planes with innocent people on board, sometimes killed passengers simply because they were Jewish or American and threatened to destroy everyone else on board unless their demands were met.
It was a heartless and cruel campaign. Though it put the Palestinian cause before a previously indifferent world, it built up a reservoir of anger and contempt from which the Israelis benefited immensely and from which the Palestinians still perhaps suffer today.
The horror of Sept. 11 raised terror to a new level, though it was eclipsed by the cold-blooded Serb savagery at the Srebrenica massacre when more than 5,000 were butchered. The New York target made perfect sense to the attackers. Here were two mighty office towers in the commercial heart of the world’s only superpower, which was seen as an oppressor. To destroy the towers and slay the thousands of innocents within, the terrorists thought, would be a triumph. Some triumph!
The only winner on Sept. 11, in Northern Ireland, in the Basque Country, in Kenya, in Riyadh, in Russia, in Indonesia, the only winner anywhere in the world where hateful bigots and their misguided dupes target the innocent, is evil.
