| MercatorNet | May 10, 2017 |
West ignores Indonesia's slide toward Islamic extremism
The Christian governor or Jakarta has been jailed for blasphemy against the Qur'an
NEWSFLASH! The Lord Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has been sentenced to two years in jail for blasphemy. Khan, the first Muslim to serve as mayor, told a crowd at an election rally recently that Islamophobes were twisting the words of the Bible to denigrate Muslims. A complaint was lodged by an extremist Christian group and Khan’s case was swiftly dealt under the Blasphemy Act of 1697. He was taken immediately by police escort to Belmarsh Prison.
Actually, this is Fake News. Sadiq Khan is so popular in the UK that he might have a shot at replacing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Blasphemy Act was repealed in 1967.
But what is not fake news is that the mirror image of this story in Indonesia is appallingly true. Ahok, the Christian Governor of Jakarta, the country’s largest city, has just been sentenced to two years in jail for blasphemy against the Qur’an.
Ahok, whose full name is Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, is a popular, competent, effective politician with a reputation for incorruptibility. But he is an ethnic Chinese and a Protestant.
In September, while campaigning for re-election in an island near Jakarta, he appealed for the votes of Muslim voters. He told a crowd that they should not trust agitators who used Quranic verse Al Maidah 51 to tell Muslims that they could never vote for a non-Muslim.
Extremists filmed the speech, edited it, and used it to accuse him – successfully – of blaspheming.
The charge was so absurd that prosecutors asked for a one-year suspended sentence. The judges, however, said that Ahok was "found to have legitimately and convincingly conducted a criminal act of blasphemy, and because of that we have imposed two years of imprisonment".
Outside the court people wept – because the sentence was too lenient.
Ahok’s sentence is a huge blow for religious freedom in the world’s largest Muslim nation. Yet the news has gone almost unnoticed. Which world leaders have protested against this religious persecution? Where are the editorials about the dangers of radical Islam in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the London Times?
If Sadiq Khan had been convicted of blasphemy, the United Kingdom would have become a pariah state and the media would have been awash with editorials raging against Christian fanaticism. A Spanish judge would have issued an international warrant for the arrest of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
What explains the difference? I have three theories.
“Muslims are like that.” Some Indonesian Muslims are like that, but not most of them. Indonesia’s official ideology of Pancasila commits the nation to tolerance of the six major religions. There is no reason for the rest of the world to refrain from criticising this inconsistency with the country’s foundational principles.
“Indonesia doesn’t matter”. This is nonsense. With 263 million people, 87 percent of them Muslim, it is the largest Muslim nation in the world, in a very strategic area.
“Religious freedom for Christians doesn’t matter.” Perhaps this is the fundamental reason why Ahok’s imprisonment on trumped-up charges has rung so few alarm bells in the West. Its media and diplomats regard persecution of Christians as an insignificant local issue.
But for Ahok it is terribly real. For being a committed Christian he will spend two years in prison. Furthermore, the verdict may embolden Islamic radicals to campaign against Christians, especially if the rest of the world turns a blind eye.
How would the media have reacted if Ahok had been gay?
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet
May 10, 2017
If I were invited to attend a two-day seminar which had been praised as “transformative, powerful and life changing”, a significant commitment of time”, but one which “will have great dividends for our community,” I would refuse to go. I associate words like “transformative, powerful and life changing” with endless hours of waffle.
Great minds think alike. Duke University professor Paul Griffiths was invited to a seminar on racism which promised all this and more. He responded that it sounded “intellectually flaccid”, potentially totalitarian and a waste of time. That was three months ago. This week he was forced to resign.
What is going on in America’s great universities? Denyse O’Leary explains below.
Michael Cook
Editor
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