Like many allies after 9/11 some Australian commentators caught root rot.

What is root rot?

An obsession with the root causes of terrorism: poverty, oppression, globalization, Israel, sun spots et al—the usual suspects. As Mark Steyn points out in The Spectator , all that went the way of the dodo come the Bali Bombing. The good news is he isn’t alone.

Even a lightweight like Brit chat show host Clive James (a native Aussie) was able to see through the fog of self-flagellating cant of most Euro-left-libs and slipped an editorial saying as much into that bastion of root rot— The Guardian.

Whither Indonesia? remains the next question. After years of tolerance the world’s largest Muslim nation is beginning to see the rise of the kind of Islamofacism that has turned the Arab Middle East into a world pariah. The root causes usually associated with the ME are mostly absent here. As Ralph Peters points out in the Wall Street Journal , the terrorists are stripped of the protective layer of patronizing rhetoric coming out of the west that recounts a litany of ME root causes and show themselves as “a perfect indicator of the utter heartlessness and savagery of Islam in arms”.