Tim Blair

gosh, i mean, just because of bali, wtc, madrid...er, who could sense a pattern?

You know... I didn't want to say anything but, I think I read somewhere that some terrorists are Islamic radicals.

I don't believe that though, otherwise you'd see a lot of moderate Islamic leaders speaking out against terrorism in the name of Islam.

good point, dash

Here are some other inextricable links Greg Barns and Jane Rankin-Reid can explore:

Why is Hitler always linked to death camps? How come people don’t talk about Hitler’s historically rich literature?

Why is Stalin linked to the gulag? How come people don’t write about Stalin’s visual culture and musical performance?

As many people like to point out, not all Muslims are terrorists. But a hell of a lot of terrorists seem to be Muslim.

October 2002 was one of the bloodiest months of terror I've ever seen, with the Bali bombings, the Moscow theatre terror, the Beltway Snipers, bombings in the Phillipines, church burnings in Indonesia and Nigeria, and the never-ending suicide bombing campaign in Israel. In all, there were something like 30+ discrete terrorist attacks around the globe that month. Only ONE of them, by the FARC terrorists in Columbia, was not related to Islamic extremism.

If Muslims still think they're unfairly stereotyped as belonging to a violent religion, they really have to do some introspection and think about ways to reform and rehabilitate the bad reputation they have,

Seems like those Thais know how to deal with Islamic terror attempts. Read the Koran if you really want to scare yourself one night.

Greg Barnes first surfaced as an anti-Howard Liberal, peeved the Liberal Party disendorsed him just for attacking the Prime Minister in the middle of an election campaign. Then a particularly shrill and vitriolic Republican. Funny, isn't it, how these people, once they've begun, seem compelled to swallow the whole adversary-culture package deal?

Can't think right now of any other group that
embrace blowing yourself up (and anyone in the near
vicinity) with such vigour.

Although perhaps there's some militant methodists
I'm not aware of.

PPS. I've always found it rather ironic that the
"religion of peace" has a branch called "Militant
Islam".

right, its those crazy Budhist fundamentalists at it again !

Just another manifestations of western prejudice. You never see reports of the Buddhist terrorists, do you? There hasn't been much coverage of the Shinto fanatics for the last sixty years. Why not?

That's also a stupid statement because how many times before September 11th was Islam in the Western Media for anything other than terrorism?

It wasn't like the '90s were filled with stories in the NY Times lauding Muslim astronauts and the BBC wasn't profiling the latest in Muslim medical innovation.

What a dumb f-ing thing to say.

Tamil Tigers

The Tamils are some bad bastards, but the Tigers are a nationalist movement with specific demands, not a totalitarian, expansionist ideology with deluded ambitions of global domination.

And the Thais DON'T know how to deal with the Jihadis, read the Belmont Club for some insights into that.

Wait until the Nobels are announced - there'll be plenty of good Muslim stories then - NOT!

Barnes also gets all upset with the Howard government's detention of illegals.

Guess what? The High Court's just given him something else to seethe and whine about. Those Pakistani kiddies who cannot be named but appeared prominently in the media last year are going back to detention.

And another thing...

Barns and Rankin-Read ought to have checked out the Shariah before penning this article.

When Shar'ee authorities issue fatwas like this, it's hard to see why "Islam" and "terror" appear in the same sentence with such regularity.

...um that should be "NOT hard to see"...

I can tell a mostly irrelevant but slightly amusing story about Jane Rankin-Reid because I knew her slightly when we both lived in New York in the mid-1980s.

During most of the time I knew Jane she ran an art gallery, Matignon Gallery, which was owned by a Hungarian man named Paul Kovesdy. One day I dropped by the gallery to say hello to Jane and she told me that she had resigned from the gallery and that, by coincidence, it was her last day there. As we chatted, a mutual acquaintance, a French art dealer, stopped by and, finding that it was Jane's last day there, offered to go down the street to a liquor store to get some beer with which to celebrate Jane's moving on to greater things. Everyone agreed that that would be a fine idea and off he went. Jane and I continued to chat for perhaps another minute when an expression of horror came over her face. She had realized that she had sent a Frenchman off to buy beer without having specified what kind. So I got to witness Jane, in a skirt and heels, charging down Madison Avenue shouting, "Foster's Lager! Foster's Lager!"

It took two peoples to write this stories? har!

I usually save myself a lot of time when reading Age/SMH opinion pieces by starting at the bottom first.
Therefore "Greg Barns is a Hobart writer; Jane Rankin-Reid is an art critic." tells me all I need to know.

Rob A:
It wasn't like the '90s were filled with stories in the NY Times lauding Muslim astronauts and the BBC wasn't profiling the latest in Muslim medical innovation.

Maybe not the BBC, but I was watching a CNN report last week about a new medical centre for rehabilitation opened up in Saudi Arabia. Apparently its one of the most advanced in the world ... and CNN were drooling all over it.

Well whoopdeedoo.. those CNN editors who spun for Saddam are at it again spinning for the Saudi royal family.

They totally ignore other aspects of Saudi living. Like women being oppressed and denied the same rights as men. Or the policy that bans all Jews from entering the country. Or the fact that non-Muslims are not allowed to enter Mecca. Or the fact that they are building a massive wall to keep all Kuwaitis out of the country.

Take a look at this photo:

http://homepage.mac.com/cfj/.Pictures/hway-2-mecca-muslims-only.jpg

People at Atocha station in Madrid have a message for Greg and Jane: **********

Yes i'm certainly going to "immerse myself in Islamic culture.
let's see i'll start with Islamic sculptural art and staues!
then i might explore Islamic portrait painting.
And then there's books on the History of the crusades, The arabic versions of the protocols of the elders of Zion, mein kampf and Jihadic Koranic texts....MMMM
Anyone else want to become a dhimmie ?

"Since September 11, whenever Islam is highlighted in Western media, it is somehow inextricably linked with acts of terror."

Um.. could it be because there are a lot of Islamic fanatics causing problems around the globe? (Not: Not ALL Muslims, just the fanatics.)

Why should we have to pretend these things are NOT happening by fanatical Muslims that want to create a world-wide Islamic Kingdom?

"Why should we have to pretend these things are NOT happening by fanatical Muslims that want to create a world-wide Islamic Kingdom?"

Because then we might respond approriately. And even worse, successfully.

In a nutshell, political correctness is all about ignoring the bleeding obvious, about portraying things how you wish they were, rather than how they actually are, and about arseholes like Barns being taken seriously.
Truth, more often than not, is a casualty of this lunacy!

Jono, you forgot those sinister Swedish Zwinglians. Just seeing thee or four blonde-haired ABBA types travelling together on a plane...brrrrr...scary.

More deploable than Mr Barnes's comment is the complete indifference to what could have been the first WMD attack during the War on Terror.

Understandably, the Wall Street Journal is today asking why the recent foiled poison-gas attack in Jordan is not being acknowledged or seriously covered in the media.

"Perhaps", says the WSJ, "the problem here is that covering this story might mean acknowledging that Tony Blair and George W. Bush have been exactly right to warn of the confluence of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

"Prime Minister Blair has said it's simply 'a matter of time unless we act and take a stand before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together.' According to Jordanian authorities, that sometime was intended to be last week. That strikes us as news."

I'll say.

"Apparently its one of the most advanced in the world ..." and staffed with infidel western doctors & filipino nurses, i bet...

last week CBS in NYC, had a tear-jerking story about 3 muslim teens killed in car accident. a 16 y.o lost control of his SUV, while returning from "religious retreat" in pennsylvania. nobody asked an obvious question about type of religious traing they were receiving. instead reporters were on the verge of sobs describing how nice & promising those 3 boys were...i'm sure they were nice, but it was hardly a leading story of the evening, for whole 4 minutes.