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Paper long abstract:

Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel 'Platform' (2002) manages to combine an account of sex tourism with an horrific terrorist attack in Thailand. Whatever the merits of the book, which was originally published in French in 1999, the author is eerily prescient about how tourist resorts could become terrorism targets in Southeast Asia. Houellebecq may be concerned with Thailand, which has suffered attacks on nightclubs and centres of entertainment, but has not experienced the same level of terrorist violence as other Southeast Asian countries, notably the Philippines. There the militant Islamic group Abu Sayyaf took 21 hostages, including 10 foreign tourists, from a diving resort in the Malaysia state of Sabah. The worst outrage to date occurred in Bali in 2002 where over 201 people lost their lives when three bombs were ignited. In this case the bombers were rounded up relatively quickly and on admitting their guilt where quick to point out why they had acted as they did. Thailand, however, is arguably one of the most iconic of tourism destinations and the fact that the real terrorist outrages have happened elsewhere does not detract from one of the main messages of the book: tourists are easily attacked and some of what they engage in may be used as a justification for attacking them.

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