It's ironic that at a time when popular culture is dominated by a cartoon hero's moral stand against a sadistic and grinning killer, the Indonesian Government is less than a month away from doing what Batman refused to do in The Dark Knight. It will send the 'smiling assassin' Amrozi bin Nurhasyin and his cronies to death by firing squad for the 2002 Bali Bombings.
I'm sure enough people have now seen The Dark Knight for me to write, without spoiling the plot, that Batman refuses to become a monster to stop a monster (The Joker). And this, despite the fact that Heath Ledger's Joker is a truly evil character.
Unlike other brutal criminals in the movie, who are motivated by money, power and prestige, the Joker is motivated only by the desire to see good people turn evil. In short, he wants to prove that even the most righteous among us is, deep down, like him: self-serving and willing to murder if the right buttons are pushed.
Batman, of course, refuses to swoop to this level. There are occasions in the movie when he could terminate the cackling one, but he knows that to do so would make him no better than the monster that is the Joker. Instead, he graphically shows the Joker that people aren't always willing to kill when their survival is threatened. The Joker ends up in a padded cell rather than under the fat wheels of Batman's motorbike.
Amrozi's motivation for killing 202 people, many of them Australians, was obviously different from the Joker's murderous motivations. Amrozi claimed his religion mandated him to wage jihad on non-believers.
But do believers in justice, peace and human harmony gain anything by waging a microscopic jihad on Amrozi and his henchmen?
I'm not defending Amrozi's actions any more than Batman would defend the Joker's. When Batman refuses to take his revenge — and Gotham City's — on the psychopathic clown, he actually defends himself and the whole city from the barbarism that the Joker wants to let loose inside him and the public.
A simple fact: Indonesian law allows the death penalty and Australian law does not. Do we think that therefore our hands will be blood-free when Amrozi and his clan smile their last in a few weeks time? Some of us don't even care. Many Australians interviewed in the last few weeks, none of them