Bali Bombings ... Second Chapter

What a horrible way to start a Sunday morning, or any morning. Naturally, this morning's second terrorist attack in Bali will be used to justify every strangulation of our civil liberties that was brought to bear in this week's COAG meeting. It will be used to smother other issues. It will be used to do just about anything than to actually address the reasons that young men are feeling so disenfranchised, angered and helpless that they believe their only recourse is to blow themselves up, and take countless innocent people with them. Think back to when you were a kid - if your friend or sibling was ignoring you - wilfully ignoring you, staring at the TV with a twisted grin on their face, you'd go and yell in their ear, and eventually, you'd go and slap them to get their attention. Terrorism is no less. Until we enter into a genuine dialogue with the disenfranchised people of the world - and doing so is not conceding that the tactics of terrorism are legitimate - Bali bombings, London bombings, and even September 11th attacks, will keep occuring.

The Left are often accused of being apologists for Islamic terrorists. As someone who was in New York on September 11th, let me just say I'm not apologising for anyone. Flying planes into buildings to murder innocent people is unequivocably, irrevocably wrong. But the fact that such attacks keeps occurring shows that the current methods we are using to address them are not working.