Friday, October 12, 2012

Self loathing and the Islamists


The Bali bombings revealed that Islamist thinking isn't that different from modern-day liberal miserabilism


Today is the 10th anniversary of the Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, including 28 Britons and 88 Australians. Many of the victims were young or youngish holidaymakers, drawn to Bali for its famously fun nightlife. The bombs, detonated inside a bar called Paddy’s Pub and directly outside a thumping nightclub called the Sari Club, were clearly an expression of disgust against such nightlife, an attack on those who have the temerity to be hedonistic.
Although the bombings tend to get overshadowed in most people’s minds by the earlier and more deadly 9/11, and by Britain’s own terror nightmare, 7/7, they provided a searing insight into Islamist violence. They revealed two important things. First, that modern Islamist violence is not, as some of the West’s borderline apologists for al-Qaeda have claimed, driven by political grievances over Palestine or Afghanistan or whatever; rather, it is underpinned by a virulent anti-modernism, by a kind of super violent Victorianism and strait-laced hatred of anyone who dares to drink, dance or fornicate. And second, the bombings revealed, pretty shockingly, that some liberal miserablists over here share the joy-killing, priggish outlook of hotheaded haters over there, even if they don’t go so far as to plant a bomb in a bar.
The most striking thing about the Bali attack was its naked loathing of what the terrorists no doubt considered to be “Western decadence” but which most of us would think of as “having a good time”. After a year in which radical observers had desperately tried to convince us that the attacks on America in September 2001 were driven by political anger (summed up in the Observer's later description of bin Laden as “a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician”), here was an attack which laid bare the anti-sex, anti-youth, anti-booze fury of the finger-waggers of the modern Islamist set.
Such Islamist killyjoyism dolled up as radical politics has reared its ugly head again and again over the past 10 years, including in attempted attacks in Britain. Who can forget the British-born plotters who wanted to blow up the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London and its “slags, dancing around”? The same plotters also drew up plans to poison that other community that is much loathed for its raucous behaviour: football fans. They discussed selling cans of beer laced with poison outside football stadiums. In 2007, Islamists parked two cars packed with 60 litres of petrol and loads of nails outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in central London on Ladies’ Night – another attempted mass murder of “slags”. Thankfully, some tipsy youths outside the club spotted that the car was smoking and informed the police; yes, that’s right, Britain was saved from a potential Bali-style massacre by the binge-drinking yoof we so often frown upon. From Bali to Tiger Tiger, Islamism has revealed itself to be a movement, not of political principle, but of haughty disgust.
The Bali bombings also revealed, in black and white, that some Western observers share Islamists’ fear and loathing of the “slags” who make up modern society. In a New Statesman article at the end of 2002, population-control campaigner David Nicholson Lord fumed over Bali – not so much over the behaviour of the bombers as the behaviour of the victims. He said the kind of Western tourism that takes place in Bali “smells” – it smells “of moral casuistry, of self-indulgence, even of that much-debated commodity, decadence”. He described youthful tourists who go looking for hedonistic larks in the East as “the shock troops of development and post-colonialism”, which means “it’s not really surprising… that they find themselves targeted by anti-Western militants”. In short, they had it coming, these scantily-clad, beer-swilling “troops” from the decadent West. In green magazine The Ecologist, the Guardian writer Ros Coward described Bali as a “clubbers’ colony” and labelled youthful Western tourism as “a form of casual imperialism”. So if you blow up tourists, is that anti-imperialism? A far-Left magazine said out loud what others had only hinted at – that the “drunken, obnoxious, young(ish)” tourists were “a hated symbol of Western imperialism for many [Balinese]”.
How striking that some observers looked at the horrors in Bali and found themselves more repulsed by the antics of Western youth than by the extreme violence of Islamist activists. This revealed today’s very uncomfortable, mostly unspoken crossover between Islamists’ hatred of “slags”, football fans and debauched revellers and prim Western liberals’ disdain for the very same constituencies. Ten years on from the terrible attacks in Bali, it should be pretty clear that modern Islamism isn’t seriously political or “anti-imperialist” – it’s just a far more violent version of the loathing of mass society and its inhabitants that is pretty commonplace these days.

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