http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/05/25/1022243277604.html

Bully for Australia, when it
stands up for itself

By Terry Lane
May 26 2002

The first casualty of war is precision. I offer an example from
this newspaper last Sunday. This comes from the story about a
bunch of Australian soldiers who had to be rescued by the Poms
- oh the bitter humiliation - in Afghanistan last week.

"The Australians were (searching) the area for possible Taliban
and al Qaeda fighters."

Now then, when did Taliban and al Qaeda become the same thing,
equally deserving of extermination? I was under the impression
that al Qaeda is an organisation whose goal is to spread death
and destruction amongst the supporters of Israel and that the
Taliban are a bunch of youthful Muslim zealots who think that
television is the work of the devil - or whatever it is that Islam
has equivalent to Beelzebub.

I yield to no one in my utter contempt and hatred for an
organisation that would deprive me of Big Brother and The
Footy Show - these are self-evidently wicked people - but I'm
not sure that they deserve to die. Extreme puritanism is not
new. Christianity has had more than its share of anti-fun
Savonarolas over the centuries. And many of them came to an
unhappy end at the hands of offended pleasure lovers. Poor old
Savonarola himself, whose only crime was to rail against luxury
and to destroy great works of art, was strangled and burned. I
doubt that we would do that today.

One of the little paradoxes about our official,
government-enforced attitude towards the Taliban and their ilk
is that, although it is mandatory to hunt them down and kill
them in Afghanistan - always assuming that they don't get in
first and that our lot get some assistance from the effete
Poms - we are not even permitted to mock them in this country.
It is against the laws of the Commonwealth and the state of
Victoria to make fun of, ridicule or otherwise vilify any religious
group for its treatment of women or its attitude to television
or booze. We have legislatively enforced respect here at home
and government-sponsored murder over there.

It occurs to me that if we were to read in the newspaper that
the government of Ecuador had dispatched its army to Malawi to
hunt down and kill Mormons on the grounds of their extreme
puritanism - never mind television, they would deprive you of
your beer - we would think that the Ecuadorians were exceeding
their prerogatives. What happens in Malawi has nothing to do
with Ecuador. They speak different languages. They are on
different continents. They are of different racial types.

We would be cheering on the Malawians and encouraging them to
put up a good fight - like the Taliban - and send the
presumptuous invaders packing, as our SAS chaps were.

Well, you may say, we are only tagging along on George the
Smaller's coat-tails, and has he not declared that we will smite
hip and thigh and utterly lay waste any nation that provides
hospitality to terrorists? In which case, we had better be girding
our loins to face more substantial foes than a bunch of Muslim
fundamentalists at a nuptial knees-up. The attacks on the
American targets in September were hatched in Germany and
Spain. What's more the attackers themselves lived for some
time in the US learning how to fly planes. And, according to the
FBI list of suspected terrorists, it seems that only one was an
Afghani, the rest were Saudis, Egyptians, Yemeni and Lebanese.
And these nations don't even make it into the "axis of evil".
We've got a hard job ahead of us. We can only hope that our big
cobbers are on hand to rescue us when, in our enthusiasm and
hubris, we overreach.

One day Australia may grow up and cease playing the weedy
side-kick to the school yard bully. I fear I may not live long
enough to see that frabjous day.