Not many people in the world boast of killing Australians. Noordin Mohammed Top is one of them. In an Internet posting on a new Islamist website in Indonesia, someone claiming to be Top has taken responsibility for the hotel bombings in Jakarta on July 17, which killed three Australians.
It is not clear that the posting is authentic. But often these sorts of postings have proven reliable. Top, if it is him, says he targeted the American Chamber of commerce at the Marriott Hotel. Top is presumably referring to the regular business breakfast hosted by the well-respected US business consultant James Castle. It was in the bombing of this meeting that three Australians and one New Zealander died. The other target was the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which had been scheduled to host the Manchester United football team. The alleged Top posting said of the Manchester team: ``Its players include Christians and it is not appropriate for us to show respect to these enemies of Allah.''
The hatred of the web posting is typical of Top and his disciples in terror. Top has been for years the master bomb-maker of the Jemaah Islamiah terrorists. He is on the run from Indonesian police. A lot of analysts believe that JI has split, with only a minority of its former members committed to continuing bombing Westerners.
However, the split is purely tactical. JI's former spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Bashir, has never renounced anti-Western violence in the cause of jihad.
He continues to preach hatred and intolerance based on his twisted interpretation of religious values. Moreover, it is almost impossible that Top could have stayed at large for so many years without the support of the extensive social network around JI. The JI fanatics are a very small minority in Indonesia, but in a country of 240 million, a tiny percentage of extremists can cause a lot of trouble. What was also interesting about Top's apparent appearance on the Internet was the use of the term ``al-Qaeda in Indonesia'' to describe his group.
Top's group had previously called itself ``al-Qaeda for the Malay Peninsula''.
Many Western analysts deny the global nature of Islamist terrorism. They do this to try to diminish the religious and ideological roots of the conflict. They want to explain conflicts by local and, if possible, by non-religious local factors: poverty, unresolved territorial disputes, personalities, repressive governments -- anything other than Islamist ideology But the terrorists themselves keep telling us what they believe in and who they admire.
Al-Qaeda provides inspiration and a blueprint for action for them. It's not just al-Qaeda, of course. Much of this type of thinking comes from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and there are countless sources for it all over the Middle East and Pakistan.
The ideology behind the terrorism in Indonesia, and the intolerance in Nigeria and Sudan, is the same ideology. It is the ideology of Islamist extremism. It is coherent, strong, and evil.
As David Irvine, the new head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, pointed out in his first public speech, Australians are still very much at threat from terrorist attack.
If we ever forget that, the terrorists will make sure to remind us.
Greg Sheridan
Sunday Telegraph (Australia)
The polititians and terrorists cause the problems and the innocent people have a miserable life of hard labour, unimplyoment hunger suffer or get brainwashed by half truths get killed in terorist attack and military conflicts which serve someone elses interests.
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