Correction

ISIS has now claimed responsibility for the Sri Lanka bombings, which makes much of what I wrote about them yesterday obsolete. It really was, then, done by Islamist terrorists.

But it also means the Sri Lankan government was wrong to blame the attacks on a local Muslim organization. In doing this the government may have been exploiting the affair to pursue their own agenda. Or they may only have been trying to cover for their own prior incompetence by being seen to take some swift action against someone.

This also does not speak well for either the intelligence or the abilities of ISIS. Supposedly, the church bombings were in retaliation for the Christchurch shootings in New Zealand. Yet the motive for the latter was not religious, and it is not clear that the shooter even identified as a Christian. He also does not appear to have been Sri Lankan, does he? And the point that the Western media does not care about Christians being bombed still holds.

The explanation may be that ISIS has grown so weak that they are now incapable of coming up with anything more relevant or compelling to the media. They needed some soft targets. They happened to have the assets in Sri Lanka, the churches had little security compared to any historic temples, and ISIS had nothing anywhere else.

Sri Lanka Easter Bombings

The Temple of the Tooth, Kandy. As significant for Buddhists as Notre Dame for Christians.

I’m not usually one to go in for conspiracy theories. But the official account of the recent Easter bombings in Sri Lanka does not sound probable. The authorities say the carnage was done by a local Islamist terrorist organization.

Problems:

1. Neither the organization named, nor any other, has yet taken credit. The whole point of a terrorist bombing is to send a message. Where’s the message? Were it a “lone wolf” attack, the absence of a communique might be explicable, but not for something widespread and organized, like this was.

2. Believing the official explanation actually requires a conspiracy theory. This was a series of coordinated attacks across the width of the country. It could not have been managed without a lot of planning by a lot of people. The reason conspiracy theories are dubious is that it is improbable to expect a large number of people to all keep an important thing secret for a long time. Especially if it involves something illegal, and they could hope to escape the consequences with a word to the authorities in case it goes wrong. That applies here. How could the authorities not have uncovered it?

3. More mysteriously, the day after the attacks, the authorities knew who did it and had dozens—I’ve seen higher figures-- in custody. How could they have known so little before the bombing, and so much immediately after it?

4. Where’s the motive? If Islamists want to strike a blow against unbelievers, why target Christians? The Quran declares Christians fellow “people of the book,” supposedly well-disposed to Islam. Buddhists, by contrast, are kaffirs, unbelievers. Why attack your natural allies, a fellow minority, instead of the declared religious enemy? And if there is a threat of cultural assimilation for Sri Lankan Muslims, again, it has to come from the majority faith, not another minority.

5. If the motive was just to get publicity, as might well be the case in a terrorist bombing, why target Christian churches? Hotels make sense, but the local Sri Lankan press would care more about temples. And so would the foreign press. Some Sri Lankan temples are truly historic, comparable to Notre Dame in Paris. By comparison, the Western press consistently underreports any attacks on Christians. So much so that many reports of the present massacre use the awkward circumlocution “Easter worshippers” rather than call the victims Christians. Nobody in the West seems to want to admit that Christians are under threat anywhere. Possibly the attackers are too ignorant of Western attitudes to understand this, but this is unlikely. Those who go in for terrorism are almost invariably the most Westernized of Muslims. And Muslim extremists have recently seen this Western disregard for the fate of Christians play out in Iraq and Syria. How stupid are they really likely to be? 

Also in Sri Lanka: a tree grown from a shoot of the original Bodhi tree, under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

6. Any Muslim group blowing up churches gives the local authorities a gold-plated excuse for suppressing Muslims without facing international condemnation. They can claim they are nobly protecting another religious minority.

7. Note that unless they actually hold a geographical region under their control, Muslim terrorist organizations almost always do their dirty work in another country. Notice that there have not been a lot of terrorist attacks in the Persian Gulf countries, for example; although the al Qaeda leadership came from there. There is an obvious reason for this. Otherwise, the leaders and the organization are committing suicide; they are too vulnerable to being round up and executed. Especially when they are part of a small ethnic minority in the country attacked. Yet the Sri Lankan authorities are blaming a local organization.

8. Another body here has an obvious motive for either staging the bombings, or misassigning the blame: the state; the government. Which, interestingly, has just declared martial law and suspended civil rights.

Connect the dots, folks.

The Sigiri Maidens

In Sigiri, the legendary ancient capital of Sri Lanka, dating to the 5th century BC, there is a mountain on which, long ago, some unknown artists painted many portraits of beautiful women. Originally there were 500 of them, and it was probably the largest single work of visual art in the world.

Ever since—for over two millennia—tourists have come to admire them. It is properly one of the seven wonders of either the ancient or the modern world. Many have left short poems engraved in a nearbly part of the rock face called the “mirror wall”; this has become a tradition.

Some of the oldest have been translated into English by Dr Senerat Paranavitana. But these are my own “translations,” attempting my own reconstruction from his versions and those of several other translators since:

I

Though you are 1,500 years old, if you are a day,
You look younger than most women a fraction of your age.
Isn’t it amazing what can be done with a little paint?


II

You are so beautiful you are transparent;
And I can see through you to the heart
Of him who made you.
The hand that painted you loved you very much,
Painfully much;
And that has made you beautiful.

Remember him.


III

I love you, and hopelessly:
I know you cannot be mine.
But I cannot bear these others, bald and sweaty,
Seeing you.
You, up there on your mountain pedestal,
Half-undressed in front of all men’s eyes.
I will come to you again tonight
My beloved 

And will have brought with me a pot of ink…

-- Stephen K. Roney

Sigiriya.