In commenting on the Bali bombings, I’ve avoided linking to the writings of others, either bloggers or other commentators (with the exception of a brief response to one US-based critic of my comments). I didn’t want to have the difficult task of clarifying my own thoughts and emotions made more difficult by arguments with others.
But now that the immediate aftermath is behind us, I thought I’d record my views on the way in which bloggers and other dealt with these awful events. On the whole, I thought Australians responded pretty well – showing sympathy those injured and bereaved, grief for those lost, and anger at those who would do such a thing, but not giving way either to panic or to calls for indiscriminate revenge on Muslims or Indonesians in general.
Thus far, at least, our political leaders have responded both decently and sensibly. I was disappointed by reports that Bob Brown had said that the bombing was a result of our possible involvement in an attack on Iraq (and I said so in a comments thread somewhere) but as Don Arthur notes, these reports turned out to be false. And while I don’t suppose they are blind to the possibilities, neither Howard nor Crean has gone after political advantage as yet.
Nevertheless, some people, including deplorably, Archbishop Carnley, have tried to use the bombing to make a political point about Iraq. It will be a long time, if ever, before we know if the Australian position on Iraq played a role in the decisions of the terrorists about who should be targeted (I doubt it, but I have no more evidence than anyone else). But regardless of what we might or might not find out some time in the future, the important fact was that many Australians and others were murdered by evil criminals. Any attempt to exploit that for political purposes, especially in a way that might be seen to mitigate the guilt of the killers, is wrong and offensive.
Coming to the blogosphere, I’ll begin by agreeing with just about everybody else that Gareth Parker‘s contribution has been superb. Gareth’s conveyed all the emotions Australians have felt about this atrocity, while remaining reasonable and balanced in his determination that we should bring those responsible to justice.
The negatives are much harder to find. Fortunately, as far as I know, no Australian blogger has taken the line that ‘we are to blame for all this’. The main blogging fault has been on the other side, with people so eager to sniff out heresy that they were happy to make it up if they couldn’t find it. An example was James Morrow’s beat-up about the way the SMH rewrote the Reuters feed they got.
Tim Blair gave us a mixed bag – some great, impassioned and obviously sincere writing on the victims of the bombing mixed with a lot of petty point-scoring and heresy-hunting. His American audience loved it, but most of the Australian commentary I saw was more ambivalent and rightly so.
Between the extremes, the majority of bloggers struggled to come to terms with the bombing but managed to make valuable contributions in the end. I’d particularly mention Don Arthur, Bargarz, Tim Dunlop, Ken Parish and Scott Wickstein. I won’t say anything about my own contributions, but the comments thread on this blog has plenty of interesting ideas from among others, Jason Soon and Jack Strocchi. And there are lots of others I haven’t listed – readres could start by checking the links on the left .