Bad News for Tourists

As one of those who has always wanted to visit Bali and never had the chance, I find the release of Abu Bakar Ba’asyir personally disturbing in an admittedly selfish way. I won’t be in a hurry to put that island paradise on my itinerary since the authorities there are… to put it mildly… somewhat ambivalent about terrorim. But it is vastly more disturbing to the good people of Bali themselves who rely on tourism for their livelihood. The freeing of the Islamist cleric after only 26 months is not going to encourage visitors to come back to Indonesia.