Sadanand Dhume | July 22
TERRORISTS love luxury digs, but not for the same reasons as most of us.
LAST Friday's bombing of the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta underscores the emergence of a new terrorist target of choice: the international luxury hotel.
In the 19 months leading up to the Jakarta attacks, Islamic terrorists have brought their holy war to upscale properties in Kabul, Islamabad, Mumbai and Peshawar. The casualties thus far number about 116 people killed and hundreds more injured.
More often than not, the terrorist predilection for five-star mayhem is explained in purely practical terms. Compared with fortified and heavily guarded embassies, hotels, welcoming to strangers by design, make relatively soft targets. Their international clientele, as well as the visual effect of the mangled facade of a familiar building, guarantees terrorists publicity.
When the hotel brand in question is American, such as the Marriott or the Ritz-Carlton, the terrorist faithful gain the added benefit of hurting their foremost foe.
From a radical Islamic perspective, however, an international hotel is much more than merely a convenient target of opportunity. It also represents, in microcosm, the antithesis of the world that radical Islamists, violent and non-violent, seek to create.
In a modern hotel, for example, men and women are treated equally. More effort is expended on segregating smokers from non-smokers than on segregating the sexes.
The bar, the gym and the swimming pool are gender-neutral spaces. Nobody seeks to enforce special dress codes on women.
Nor would any international hotel dream of privileging one faith over another. By contrast, under the radical Islamic world view, Muslims are entitled to special privileges.
This world view provides the underlying principle for things such as Pakistan's harsh anti-blasphemy laws and Malaysia's lopsided affirmative action program for its Malay-Muslim majority. True, a hotel in, say, Jakarta, may place a Koran by the bedside table and mark the direction of prayer to Mecca on the ceiling. But these are innocent gestures, designed as a convenience for Muslim guests rather than to inconvenience, much less to actively discriminate against, those of other backgrounds.
For Islamic radicals, who seek to order all aspects of 21st-century life, from banking to burkas, by the medieval precepts enshrined in sharia law, the secular nature of a hotel is galling enough. But perhaps this would not matter as much if it didn't appeal to local elites. In a place such as Peshawar or Kabul, and to a large degree even in Jakarta or Mumbai, a five-star hotel represents an island of order and prosperity in a sea of squalor. It hints at the prosperity promised by free markets and a culture of individual liberty. It is living proof that the worldly can be split successfully from the divine. Read more here,,,
Source: The Australian
Sadanand Dhume is a Washington-based writer and author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist (Text Publishing, 2008).
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