Gee What?

Like red dwarfs, BabbelOn’s posts appear to be getting larger and further apart (not to mention full of hot gas). 

Speaking of cosmology, there are some people who can only be described as living on another planet.  One recent example is Columbia University’s Lee “Bubbles” Bollinger.   In welcoming a visiting world leader to the podium to address the university student body, Bubbles made the following introductory remarks:  

“When you have come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

… frankly and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. … I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do.”

The shocking thing about these insults is that they weren’t directed at POTUS but to the Iranian President Ahmadinejad.   

Some of it may have been lost in translation but we can be assured that the Evil Leader got the gist. 

BabbelOn asks world-weary readers to willingly suspend their disbelief for a moment to imagine what would happen if POTUS were to visit Iran to speak at a university.  Is this a leap of faith too far?  What if I said “visited with” Iran? 

It would never happen.  For one thing, the security entourage would take three years to assemble.

In further POTUS news, Bush the Younger is to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington.   

China is understandably outraged as this amounts to the US interfering in its internal politics (see “shooting of Tibetan nuns“).  On the other hand, POTUS has urged US legislators not to pass a resolution declaring the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks to be genocide.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, go figure. 

In defending the Turkish government, it was reassuring to hear POTUS refer to the Global War on Terror (TM).  It had appeared to BabbelOn that references to the GWOT have fallen away lately (see “attrited”, “Iraqi insurgents”).  Perhaps the message is wearing thin, even for battle-hardened voters lucky enough to reside in western democracies that have been targets since The Day The World Changed Forever (TM) (9/11, 11/9 or 12/9 if you live east of GMT).  Of course, the GWOT is still being waged by the Brave Men & Women Of Our Military (TM).  However, it doesn’t seem to be called the “GWOT” with the same brain-numbing regularity that it once was. 

Could it be that the language just isn’t carrying the same punch that it did?  Is the marketing (see “propaganda”) wearing a bit thin with voters (see “customers”, “suckers”).  Let’s analyse the words.     

“Global”:  Adding “global” to a slogan is a great way to give it a “now” feel (see Global Warming (TM)).  And can’t we all agree that globalisation is a good thing?  Surely the only voters/customers who don’t like it are those minority green (in a bad way not a recycle your newspapers, drive a Prius way), left (as in not right), anti-globalisation (see Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, Naomi Campbell) freaks (freaks in a political not a physical sense, although not sure about Naomi C).   

Perhaps the voters/suckers have finally come to realise that when POTUS and the neo-cons (see “new”, “confidence artists”) refer to global in the GWOT sense they mean “We are all in this together and don’t you try weaseling out of it, we may need your satellites or your navy one day and don’t forget that you are either with us or you’re with the terrorists, buster”. 

“War”:  Everyone knows what this means; particularly those voter-suckers who live in countries that have been invaded in living memory (see Iraq, Afganistan, France, Japan, China, Russia).   

Again, it has a slightly nuanced meaning when wedged into the phrase GWOT.  Voter-suckers now understand that when POTUS declares war on something it means “We (see “I”)  need extra powers, this being wartime n’all, and don’t you try to stop us (me) because that would be un-American.” 

Voter-suckers lucky enough to live in countries with strong historical, economic and cultural ties to the US (see “Free Trade Agreements”) will have observed their own elected leaders making similar calls (see “sedition laws”, “military spending”) with any objections dismissed as un-Australian/British/(insert name of country) or, in extreme cases, appeasement.   

“On”:  Against (see “Drugs”, “Poverty”)

“Terror”:  Unnamed dread, fear of the darkness (Islamic), boogeyman (in a turban), forces of evil, Satan, never-ending existential enemy of all things white, free and democratic.

As an aside, a terrorism expert, the aptly named Marc Sageman, recently commented that because fame and glory motivated terrorists it was critical that the West responded to the threat by treating terrorists as common criminals, not adversaries in a war of epic proportions.

It was the duty of political leaders not to exaggerate the danger posed by terrorism.

But many politicians had hyped the terrorist threat “out of proportion”. “This is not some existential threat,” Mr Sageman said.

“[September 11] was a terrible, terrible tragedy. That being said, and with great respect for the victims, it did not warrant a complete change in direction in policy to the point where $1 trillion has been spent on it.”

To which BabbelOn replies:  Ha!  What would he know?  He’s probably never even appeared on Fox News.        

Summing up, GWOT as a rallying cry now seems to lack oomph.  Given the various election cycles in the Coalition of the Willing democracies (COWd), BabbelOn calls for a new slogan to be coined.  Suggestions humbly offered include the War Against Islamic Fundamentalism (WAIF), Nuke Fascist Islamists (NFI), Outsourcing Via the US Military (OVUM) and Let’s Get Re-elected Playing The 9/11 Card (LGRPT9/11C). 

First acrylamide, now acronyms.  BabbelOn fears he has overindulged again.      

Sayyid Isn’t So

Occasionally the internet throws up a perfectly conceived web-site.  Simple, on the money and instantly gratifying.  An example sprung up before the last soccer World Cup; “Create your own Brazilian football name“.  I dare you not to enter the names of everyone you know.  Minutes of guaranteed fun.     

Another pearler is “The Oracle of Bacon.”  Readers will be familiar with the Kevin Bacon dinner party game.  The idea is to link actors by degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon; the number of steps is known as the actor’s Bacon number.  Type in the name of any actor and the Oracle of Bacon will give you their number.  For example, Paul Hogan’s Bacon number is 2 (he was in “Almost an Angel” with Brian Frank who was in “Where the Truth Lies” with KB.)   

The original idea probably came from the film “Six Degrees of Separation” which, ironically, was one of the few films made in the last 20 years that didn’t feature His Baconness.  According to Wikipedia, “Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one “step” away from each person he or she knows and two “steps” away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each person on Earth.”

The game can thus be moved into the so-called real world.  Let’s play Six Degrees of Osama.  I’ll go first.  David Hicks admitted to having met the Big O. Hicks’s US military lawyer was Michael Mori. A friend of mine met Mori while he was on one of his tours of Australia. So my Osama number is 4. That is probably enough to get me on an ASIS data base.

At a recent dinner party we went round the table and played “Who’s the Most Famous Person You Have Met?”  Slightly drunken but no doubt authentic answers included celebrity heavyweights Princess Di, Pope John Paul II, Rupert Murdoch and Bush the Elder (I shook his hand from the crowd at the Open at St Andrews in 1995.  That’s probably enough to get me on a Secret Service data base). 

However, the winner by popular acclaim was K, who met Dale (“The Flea“) Weightman at a pub in Melbourne in the 80’s.  “Big deal”, I hear discerning readers cry, “how can the Flea compete with the Pope?  I don’t care how many All Australian (3) or Richmond best & fairest (3) medals he won.  I don’t even care if he is in the AFL Hall of Fame and is a diabetic.”  But, dear readers, did you ever give the Pope a lift home in your car and pash him?  I thought not.  Not even Mel Gibson can claim that one. 

Finding out that one’s Osama number is 4 is pretty impressive.  But it’s not going to shake BabbelOn’s world.  On the other hand, take a look at this bloke.  Does he look familiar?  His name is Azahari bin Husin.  Resist the temptation to google him for a moment and bear with me.  

Malaysian born, he lived in Adelaide in the mid-70s and went to Norwood High, just up the road from where I was schooled.  I may have even shared a bus with him.  After that, however, our career paths diverged a tad.  Thirty years later he was a very dead Islamic terrorist, the bomb-maker behind the Jakarta and Bali bombings, killed in a police raid in Indonesia. 

Just how, one muses, does one travel from pimply Adelaide schoolboy to world-ranked jihadist?  Did he have terrorist DNA or was he radicalised somehow?  If the latter, what triggered his conversion to the dark side?  Was it a single moment or a slow process?  And, the sixty four million rupiah question – did it have anything to do with his experiences in Adelaide?   

(Perhaps we can look beyond his adolescence and blame the British.  It turns out that Azza went on to earn a PhD in Property Valuation from the University of Reading.  It is somewhat ironic that his post-doctoral career consisted of blowing up buildings.)   

Could there have been something in 70’s Adelaide that triggered his radicalisation?  After all, those were the heady days of Abba and the Bay City Rollers, platforms and flairs, Don Dunstan and colour TV.  Could exposure to Australian culture have so revulsed him that he could only find solace in the Koran and jihad?  It is easy to forget, from the comfort of the Noughties, how shocking and depraved the Seventies really were; the crimes against decency that were committed.  Is it really possible that this could have had anything to do with the good doctor going to the dark side?  Surely not, the rest of us managed to survive punk and square-dances relatively unscathed, embarrassing school photos aside.  But continue to bear with me patient reader as we take a quick detour through Islamic fundamentalist history in search of a clue. 

The Muslim scholar credited with inspiring Al Qaeda and the Big O himself was the almost unpronouncable Sayyid Qutb.  A leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and an extensive author of Koranic studies, he was hanged in 1966 after being convicted of attempting to overthrow the Egyptian government.  While still in the public service and before joining the Muslim Brotherhood, he spent two years in the US studying.  According to Wikipedia: 

“Qutb was extremely critical of many things in the United States: its materialism, racism, brutal boxing matches, poor haircuts, triviality, enthusiasm for sports and “animal-like” mixing of the sexes (which went on even in churches). In an article published in Egypt after his travels, he noted with disapproval the sexuality of Americans:

the American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.

And their taste in music :

Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires …

Qutb’s experiences in the U.S. partly formed the impetus for his rejection of Western values and his move towards radicalism upon returning to Egypt.”

Apparently, the nadir of Qutb’s fact finding mission to the West occurred at a Colorado church social, where he witnessed with his own eyes young men and women dancing together. 

So, there you have it.  Two years in the US in the late 40’s produced the man whose anti-Western, pro-jihad writings most influenced Big Osama.  Is it not possible that four years in Adelaide in the 70’s could have the same effect on our nascent Malaysian bomb-maker?  Perhaps the brutal boxing matches and jazz were not a big factor but the poor haircuts, triviality, enthusiasm for sports and animal-like mixing of the sexes would have been much in evidence.  Particularly at Norwood High.

Homeland Insecurity

If Dick turns out not to be just another paranoid schizophrenic with a death wish, and he is actually right when he says that the world changed forever on 11 September, then surely it’s time we got serious about security. 

I don’t mean squeezing out toothpaste tubes and baby bottles in airport departure lounges and body imaging cameras.  I mean good, old-fashioned surveillance.  The kind that can make a country safe.  Really safe.  Cold War, Eastern Bloc, Communist Party Safe.  Ask yourself how many suicide bombs ever went off in East Berlin?

Our homeland security organisations should be recruiting superannuated Stasi operatives; luring them from their Chilean rest homes with promises of broadband and amnesty and long lunches with Philip Ruddock. 

If our spies knew what everybody was doing every minute of the day, there couldn’t be a problem could there?  Nobody complains about Singapore and you can’t even chew gum there.  The tax rate is only 15% for goodness sake; it’s an Earthly Paradise.  Is the fact that they have a law that allows detention without trial a coincidence?  I think not.  And what’s wrong with public whipping for felonies, including graffiti? Clean buildings lead to clean, safe minds.  We need an Internal Security Act.  Just like Malaysia.  When was the last time you heard of a Malaysian suicide bomber, in Malaysia? 

The problem is that the problem is not being taken seriously enough.  Yahweh knows we are in a war zone in the middle of a long war between good and evil.  Our enemies hate us because of who we are and how we live.  We can’t change who we are so we just have to live with greater vigilance.  Or vigilantes.  One terrorist getting into our country is one too many.  After all, a terrorist is just a tourist with more baggage. 

Our enemy is clever and sophisticated.  They are no longer just Saudi engineers or Yemeni playboys; they are now Indian doctors and Adelaide horse-breakers.  They are getting harder to pick.  How can we tell them apart?  This is the problem – we can’t.  So, we must cast the net wider.  Anyone with a beard, dark skin, an email account, who has travelled overseas, eaten nasi goreng or laksa or migrated to Australia from somewhere poor or the UK.  Anyone with a camera or a mobile phone.  Anyone with a suspicious name like Mohamed or variations thereof.  Or Osama or variations thereof. 

Our biggest enemy is cynicism.  There are critics who act like they want an attack to happen before we take action.  Don’t they realise that our government has done everything in its power to limit the chances of a terrorist attack apart from not blindly following US foreign policy?  How much more can they be expected to do apart from having proper airport security?

Comrades, we need a great leap forward in surveillance.  A national network of citizens, alert, with alarms.  The only thing we have to be afraid of is not having anything to fear.  Remember, we have God on our side.  Our enemies only have Allah.