A hero's welcome awaits Australia's nemesis, Abu Bakar Bashir, the cleric convicted for blessing the Bali bombing, when he is freed on Wednesday after 251/2 months in an Indonesian jail.
Canberra is bristling at the early release of the founder and leader of the terrorist network Jemaah Islamiah – whose most deadly attacks were the 2002 Bali bombings, which took 202 lives, 88 of them Australian.
Meanwhile, Bashir's followers are planning celebrations and launching a book denouncing his time behind bars.
Jail has not mellowed Bashir. US President George Bush, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and an "infidel" John Howard forced a weak-willed Indonesia to "fabricate" the case against him and extend his jail term, he writes.
Proofs of The Days of Abu Bakar Bashir in Prison, written with an acolyte who paid regular visits to his cell in Jakarta's Cipinang Jail, have been obtained by The Age. To be released next week, the book demonstrate's that Bashir is determined to continue his crusade against the West, targeting Australia.
It was Downer who visited Jakarta in 2004 to insist he be arrested for assisting terrorism and the Bali attacks, claims the 68-year-old firebrand. Evidence from Bali bomber Amrozi that he blessed the "event" planned for Bali was fictitious, he says.
"I was sure that the detention and the sentence by the district, provincial and the supreme courts was purely an order of Allah's enemies, especially the US and Australia. Repeatedly these two infidel countries intervened into my case."
That Indonesia had capitulated to "Allah's enemy, Aussie Prime Minister John Howard", was proof of the weakness of a state that was "easily humiliated by infidel human beings who tried to separate Papua from Indonesia in a cowardly way".
Bashir plans to travel across Indonesia with his message of defiance, a lightning rod for radical followers of Islam. JI, the organisation he co-founded, is fragmented and damaged but still an active threat, according to the International Crisis Group's Sidney Jones – who has interviewed many of its leading members. It retains an ultimate aim of creating an Islamic state stretching from Indonesia to the Philippines and beyond.
Rather than planning more terrorist attacks, Bashir's role will be to augment the moral battering ram being wielded by fundamentalists trying to impose Islamic sharia law. Expect Bashir to be "cheerleading" attempts to introduce a draconian anti-pornography law that would criminalise kissing and exposed navels, Jones predicts.