Indonesia farewells its boldest president Abdurrahman Wahid

INDONESIA's fourth president, Abdurrahman Wahid, was one of the boldest and most eccentric leaders the Asia-Pacific region has seen - and one of the most supportive of Australia.

He died on Wednesday after finally succumbing to his many longstanding illnesses, including kidney failure and diabetes, and was buried yesterday in his family's graveyard in Jombang, East Java, which was surrounded by 10,000 praying followers.

The memorial service was presided over by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who ordered a week of national mourning for the mystical, whimsical one-eyed cleric.

Wahid - more widely known as Gus Dur - became Indonesia's president after the first national elections following the ousting of strongman Soeharto in 1998.

His power base, Nahdlatul Ulama, is one of Indonesia's two mass Islamic movements, whose moderation has been crucial in combating attempts to hijack the world's most populous Islamic nation in an extremist direction.

Wahid cobbled together a coalition of supporters to defeat Indonesia's founding president Sukarno's daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri in 1999, even though her Democratic Party of Struggle performed exceptionally strongly in the election.

Since then, presidents have been elected directly and not via parliamentary votes.

He lasted only two years in the presidency before parliament, which had taken a punt on him in the first place, sacked him amid unproven allegations of corruption and incompetence.

That short term in office, however, saw key policies endorsed and initiated. He followed through predecessor B.J. Habibie's extraordinarily radical plan for devolving power - not so much to the 27 provinces, but further down, to the country's 360 kabupaten or regencies. He strengthened the crackdown on Islamist violence, encouraged dialogue with separatists in Aceh and West Papua, and urged the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel.

He did not succeed in the latter. But Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said: "We have lost a true friend and a warrior for peace and mutual respect."

He visited East Timor after it became a new nation, apologising for human rights abuses committed by Indonesian forces during the 24-year occupation.

He was an ardent supporter of inter-faith dialogue, whom NU vice-president Maskuri Abdillah said would be remembered above all as a "pluralist". But his eccentricity, including his tendency to doze off during important meetings, disqualified him from the leadership of a rapidly modernising nation of the size of Indonesia. When predictability, calmness and inclusiveness were required, he had been at times capricious and prickly.

He was never able to provide ASEAN with the leadership it needed, and which it had formerly expected of Indonesia, where it is headquartered.

He liked Australia, and visited a number of times when he was a refreshingly frank figure. He sought to engage Australia in a West Pacific Forum, a concept Canberra embraced but which has since faded away. Viewers of ABC TV were rivetted, in the latter days of Gus - "Uncle" - Dur, by an extraordinarily intimate profile of him filmed by his friend Curtis Levy.

In that program, Dur walked endlessly around the palace gardens, propped up by aides. He was the first person to live there since Indonesia's almost equally odd founding father, Sukarno.

When he was elected by parliament despite his party gaining only 11 per cent of the vote, he had Suharto's art works replaced with the Sukarno collection, including his library. But not his music. His study table was typically littered with CDs ranging from Kenny Rogers to Janis Joplin and Beethoven.

The Australian

Muslim Brotherhood-linked group putting up Islamic supremacist billboards in Minneapolis

The Islamic Circle of North America has been named in "a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends" by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is bent on waging "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

They say they want to encourage dialogue via these billboards. Great. I'll start. The billboard says that Islam is "the way of life of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus & Muhammad."

That is a reflection of the Islamic supremacist notion, rooted in the Qur'an (3:67, 5:116, 9:30, etc.), that the Biblical prophets taught Islam, and their messages were corrupted by their followers to create what we know of today as Judaism and Christianity. In this view, Judaism and Christianity have no legitimacy whatsoever: they are renegade, twisted, hijacked versions of the original Islam.

So my question is: How does ICNA hope to encourage dialogue by making a declaration at the outset that Judaism and Christianity are false, renegade religions? Wouldn't it be more likely to encourage dialogue if ICNA, instead of simply trying to convert people to Islam (which is really what this call to "dialogue" is all about), acknowledged the supremacist aspects of some Islamic texts and teachings, and offered a way forward for Muslims that would blunt the potential of those supremacist texts and teachings to incite believers to hatred and violence?

That is always way too much to ask. But if this call to "dialogue" were genuine, it would be merely Step One.

"Billboards going up to promote Islam," by Bob Von Sternberg for the Star Tribune, December 15 (thanks to Block Ness):

Hoping to encourage interfaith dialogue, an Islamic organization will unveil a pair of billboards in Minneapolis this week.

The Minnesota chapter of the Islamic Circle of North America plans to unveil the billboards Friday, the eve of the Islamic New Year.

The billboards will be located along Hiawatha Avenue in south Minneapolis and Central Avenue on the north side.

They are part of a nationwide multimedia campaign that also includes placing posters on buses and subways in other big cities.

The billboards will display a toll-free telephone number where people can get answers to questions about Islam, as well as obtain free copies of the Qur'an and other Islamic literature.

"Got Questions? Get Answers," the billboard states.

In a prepared statement, the campaign's organizers are quoted as saying, "Islam is often a misunderstood religion, leading some to hold bias view of Islam with discrimination and suspicion of Muslims. This ad campaign will provide an opportunity for the people of Twin Cities to take a fresh and positive look at Islam."

With thanks to JihadWatch

Minarets and the Concept of Reciprocity

The mainstream media continue to decry the Swiss referendum on minarets. To date, The New York Times has published one editorial and five additional articles on the subject, including one today.

Perhaps The Paper of Record views the 30% of the electorate who actually voted in Switzerland as traitors to their own multicultural, anti-racist, politically correct belief system.

The problem is that the Islamic world today does not share this hallowed belief system. Actually, it never did. Rather, it has destroyed or built over synagogues, churches, and temples, and denied that such infidel places of worship ever existed. Note the fevered Palestinian attempts to claim the Temple Mount, where once the ancient Jewish Temple stood, as really “Islamic.”

The Islamic world does not allow new synagogues or churches to be built.

Further: Muslim fundamentalists currently persecute, torture, and murder those Christians who dare remain in the Middle East, and they kidnap, forcibly convert, and “marry” their very young daughters.

It is time to demand—or at least to expect–reciprocity. Otherwise, we are really being racist in having one (higher) standard for Westerners and another (much lower) standard for the barbarians.

Granted: The West is not as barbaric and intolerant as the Islamic world; we do not willingly wish to become intolerant. Yet, tolerating the intolerant is unwise, or as the Jewish sages tell us: Being kind to the cruel results in cruelty to the kind.

Thus, if there can be no churches or synagogues built in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.—then why should the Swiss or the Europeans allow new, blockbuster size mosques, and sound-splitting loudspeakers emanating from minarets? According to Imam Kurdi, writing in the Arab News,

“And let’s not be hypocrites. If you held a referendum in a Muslim country asking whether the construction of new church steeples should be permitted, you are also likely to get an overwhelming no. So let us not brand this a Swiss phenomenon and let us also remember that it is not the majority of the Swiss population that supported the ban but the majority of those who voted, which if you do the maths comes to 30 percent of the population.” (Thanks to Esther for bringing this to my attention.)

Let me be clear. I am one of those westerners who has “dreamed East.” And, as a Jew, I have an undeniably dangerous but familial kinship with Arabs and Muslims. I find the Muslim call to prayer beautiful—but only if I refuse to understand that, as an infidel, an American citizen and patriot, a Jew, a woman, and a Zionist, that my place inside that mosque is that of a sub-human, fair-game target for hatred or worse.

Jews in exile from Arab and Muslim countries have launched a beautiful, haunted literature, one in which they manifest nostalgia for the places which endangered them and forced them to flee. Often, the danger is minimized, the customs romanticized. I am thinking of Andre Aciman, Roya Hakakian, and Lucette Lagnado.

I am in favor of interfaith gatherings. Peaceful voices are sweet to my ears and yet: telling the truth is far sweeter than lying. The truth is:

Mosque and minaret building in Europe probably represent a refusal to integrate; a refusal to separate mosque and state. Perhaps it also signifies an intention to one day vote in Shari’a law as the law of the European land. According to my colleague, Henrik R. Clausen, at Europe News:

“Minarets are built to ’stamp a site with Islamic character’, not for their religious signifiance. Actually, no building should in principle have any religious significance, for only Allah is to be worshipped, not stones, buildings and holy water. The reality, of course, is somewhat different. The core purpose of a minaret remains to mark the ownership, that this land is Islamic.”

Clausen points out that many Islamic minarets started out as church watchtowers.

Thus, the minaret (and what it symbolizes) is cause for concern.

Phyllis Chesler

Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi Explains His Objections to Muslim-Christian Interfaith Dialogue

Following are excerpts from a sermon by leading Sunni cleric Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, who heads the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS). The sermon aired on Qatar TV on October 30, 2009.

To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2267.htm.

To view the MEMRI TV page on Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi, visit http://www.memritv.org/subject/en/589.htm .

"No Pope Has Ever Apologized to the Muslims for What Happened To Them in the Crusader Wars"

Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi: "We halted this Islamic-Christian dialogue. We were preparing for the third summit, when the new pope came into office and delivered his famous speech, affronting Islam, the Prophet of Islam, the Koran, the Islamic nation, and the history of Islam, without justification and without any preliminaries. He alleged that the Prophet Muhammad did not make any contribution other than spreading Islam by the sword. This is an utter lie.

"Therefore, we, in the International Union of Muslim Scholars, demanded, on more than one occasion, that he apologize, in one way or another, or else we would halt the dialogue with the Vatican. Indeed, I'm sad to say, the man did not utter a word of apology. Even if some Muslims tried to say it's enough if he says I-don't-know-what... He did not say anything straightforwardly.

"The Vatican apologized to the Jews, who said that Christ was a liar, that he was the son of a prostitute, that his mother was not a virgin, and that he was fathered by Joseph the carpenter. They absolved the Jews, who organized and took part in his killing. They exonerated the Jews of the spilling of the blood of Christ.

"No pope has ever apologized to the Muslims for what happened to them in the Crusader wars, which were hostile wars. They came to our countries from Europe, and did what they did in the nine Crusades. Therefore, we have halted our dialogue with these people, with the Vatican."

"We Recognize Christianity... But These [Christians] Do Not Recognize Us"

"Let me tell you, with regard to the Christians, in general, there is a problem, which I raised at the third conference, held in Doha, as well as at the interfaith dialogue conference in Mecca, convened by the Saudi monarch a year and a half ago.

"I said: Brothers, the problem is that [although] we recognize Christianity, and we recognize Christ, his holy book, and his religion... A Muslim's faith is not complete unless he believes in this, because it is incumbent upon him to believe in every book that was sent down and in every prophet who was sent [by God]. 'And what was given to Moses and Jesus and other prophets from their Lord - we make no distinction between any of them, and to Him do we submit.'

"But these [Christians] do not recognize us. [They say]: “Muhammad was a liar. The Koran is a fabrication. They created the Koran and attributed it to Allah.'

"These things have practical implications. We were at a conference in Cairo, called The Christians of the Middle East. I wanted to say, in the closing statement: 'The people of the divine religions agreed...' But [the Christians] said: 'Stop!' I asked: 'What is it?' They said: 'We do not recognize Islam as a divine religion. It is not a divine religion.' They agreed to say all kinds of things, but not that Islam is a divine religion. I wanted to include another sentence, about 'Godly values.' They said: 'No, we do not recognize Islamic values as being Godly. They are human values, brought by a guy who claimed to be a prophet.' I exploded and said: 'So what are we convening for? If you do not recognize our religion and our values as divine, what are we meeting for? Go away.' And I left the meeting."

I Cannot Find "One Practical Thing That These Conferences Have Achieved for the Benefit of the Islamic Nation"

"Brother, there is a problem with our dialogue with these people, who look at our Prophet, our Koran, and our nation this way, while we flock to them, and do not achieve a thing. Give me one practical thing that these conferences have achieved for the benefit of the Islamic nation. I cannot find a thing."

MEMRI

Pope Benedict in Jordan stresses deep respect for Islam

May 09

POPE Benedict XVI underlined his "deep respect" for Islam yesterday in Jordan, on his first trip as pontiff to an Arab state, and stressed that religious freedom is a fundamental human right.

He also called the church a spiritual force that could contribute to progress in bringing about peace in the Middle East.

Speaking after a red carpet welcome from King Abdullah II and Queen Rania at Queen Alia Airport as he began his eight-day tour of the Holy Land amid strict security, the pope said he came to Jordan "as a pilgrim."

He said his visit "gives me a welcome opportunity to speak of my deep respect for the Muslim community, and to pay tribute to the leadership shown by His Majesty the King in promoting a better understanding of the virtues proclaimed by Islam."

The pope also called religious freedom "a fundamental human right."

"It is my fervent hope and prayer that respect for the inalienable rights and dignity of every man and woman will come to be increasingly affirmed and defended, not only throughout the Middle East, but in every part of the world," he said.

En route to Amman, the pope told journalists that inter-faith dialogue is "very important for peace and so that everyone can follow the tenets of their faith."

The church "is not a political force but a spiritual force which can contribute to the progress of the peace process" in the Middle East, he said.

Queen Rania said in a message posted on the Internet social network Twitter: "Just listened to Pope's speech. Our region so needs a message of Peace." Her office said she registered on http://twitter.com/QueenRania to mark the visit.

Jordan's opposition Islamic Action Front party said earlier this week the pope was not welcome unless he apologised for remarks he made in 2006, which it says targeted Islam.

In a speech the pope had quoted a mediaeval Christian emperor who criticised some teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as "evil and inhuman." He apologised later for the "unfortunate misunderstanding."

Welcoming the pope, King Abdullah urged an expansion of Christian-Muslim dialogue to dispel "divisions."

The monarch stressed the "importance of co-existence and harmony between Muslim and Christian," and warned that "voices of provocation, ambitious ideologies of division, threaten unspeakable suffering."

"We welcome your commitment to dispel the misconceptions and divisions that have harmed relations between Christians and Muslims... It is my hope that together we can expand the dialogue we have opened," the king said.

Benedict's first stop was the Regina Pacis centre for the handicapped in Amman where the crowd sang songs in Arabic and chanted "benvenuto," the Italian for "welcome."

"Friends, unlike the pilgrims of old, I do not come bearing gifts or offerings. I come simply with an intention, a hope, to pray for the precious gift of unity and peace, most specifically for the Middle East," the pope said.

Christians in Jordan number around 200,000 of a total population of about six million.
Benedict sees his first Holy Land trip as pontiff as a pilgrimage.

"I come to Jordan as a pilgrim, to venerate holy places that have played such an important part in some of the key events of Biblical history," he said.

After Jordan he will visit Israel on Monday, and will also go to Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday. More ...

Source: The Australian

Intolerant and Repressive Saudi Arabia to Preach Tolerance and Respect

By Savo Heleta

Saudi Arabia is a country that uses special police force, called the "Society for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice," to make sure that only "one narrow sect of Islam predominates in the kingdom."

Yet, this country will lead an upcoming discussion at the United Nations on religious tolerance.

Human rights organizations are "crying foul that Saudi Arabia is being given the platform of the United Nations to promote religious tolerance abroad while it actively combats anything similar at home."

Saudi Arabia does not allow its citizens and a large "expatriate community, including tens of thousands of Christians, from any public worship outside Islam. The more than two million Saudi Shiites face widespread discrimination in worship, education and employment."

Ali Al-Ahmed, a Shiite Muslim dissident from Saudi Arabia based in the United States said that this is like "apartheid South Africa having a conference at the UN on racial harmony."

On the other hand, the US president, George Bush, who will attend the discussion, has voiced his full support for Saudi Arabia's role.

This is not the first time that failed and repressive states lead UN discussions on development and human rights.

In May 2007, Zimbabwe, the country that cannot sustain itself and with inflation at that time of 2,200 percent (currently a few million percent), was chosen to lead the UN Commission on Sustainable Economic Development.

African leaders chose Zimbabwe as their candidate to lead perhaps the most important UN commission and help the world meet the human needs of the present and prepare for the future.

Many will blame the UN for these and other failures, forgetting that the UN is only an umbrella organization of sovereign states that decide what the UN can and cannot do. Above all, the five permanent members of the Security Council – China, United States, Britain, France, and Russia – have the veto power to overturn any decision taken by the UN General Assembly or requested by a UN member.

The permanent members found nothing wrong with Zimbabwe leading the discussion on world's sustainable economic development or Saudi Arabia preaching about religious tolerance.

What’s wrong with the world?

Source: Gather.com

Moderation in a Higher Place

By Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein

An Orthodox Jew and an Egyptian meet on an international flight. The debate turns to whether there were or could be Muslim moderates. Think that you can predict who picked which position?

It was just not what I wanted to hear. The middle seat on the flight from Los Angeles to London had stayed unoccupied, and both of us at the ends hoped it would remain that way. Just before the doors closed, a gentleman walked on and sat himself in what could have been great extra space on a long flight. Then, he turned to me and began speaking, and the flight became longer yet.

"Hi!" he opened with a large smile. "I'm Egyptian."

We did not reenact the Yom Kippur War at 35,000 feet. We did wind up debating Middle East politics for a tolerable portion of the journey, but it did not go the way you might have expected. He turned out to be a Christian, a Copt to be precise, a group that has been persecuted for quite some time in Egypt, has had its churches burned and its adherents assaulted, and is under increasing pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood. The argument concerned whether there were or could be Muslim moderates. He refused to consider such a thing. It took me, the Orthodox rabbi, to argue the contrary both from history and from my own experience.

We parted friends, although he continued to look at me like some naïve Westener, who couldn't possibly know what was going down. The question is not academic. At stake is just what the Western world can and will do to stop the jihadist juggernaut. If Islam is locked into a model that permits, in the final analysis, only loyal Muslims on the one hand and dead people on the other, then what the rest of us must do is arm ourselves to the teeth, build larger walls, and try harder to ferret out the danger already in our midst. If, as I strongly believe, the centuries-old struggle within Islam can resolve itself if a way that more pacific voices prevail, then there will be a different response. We must still take all precautions in the interim, but also do our utmost to identify and deepen our relationship with those who can become a significant counterforce from within to the jihadists.

Not that small numbers are the only possibility. Late last year, a delegation of Indonesian religious leaders visited Israel as guests of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, led by a colleague, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Center in conjunction with the LibForAll Foundation. These religious leaders met with Palestinians, and visited Ramallah, but also saw Sderot up close. They visited Jewish and Christian holy sites, and prayed at Islamic ones. They danced with hesder yeshiva students celebrating Chanuka in Kiryat Shemonah. They presented President Shimon Peres with a kippah emblazoned with "Kedamiain" the Indonesian word for peace. They stuffed packages in a food distribution facility that serves poor Jews and Arabs in Yaffo. One of them openly wept at Yad Vashem. "How could this have happened? They were only children!"

These Muslim leaders are part of two religious organizations that comprise seventy million people of the 195 million Muslims in the most populous Muslim country in the world. What will come of the visit? Hopefully, a changed perspective on the part of the participants, and future visits by others. The initial press coverage was positive; it later precipitated inspired fierce argumentation on Indonesian blogs. After a week, the model response was, "OK, perhaps Israel wouldn't be my personal travel destination. But all they did was talk. How bad could that be?" Minimally, a debate has begun.

Can we dare, though, to think of more? Might it not lead to a few less terrorists in the future, or a few more teachers in classrooms who will deliver a different message than the one heard in Gaza, or a rediscovery by some people of the interpretative tradition that was once the rule in Islamic thought?

What happens to Muslims trained in Salafist madrassas, taught from childhood that Christians and Jews are pigs and monkeys, when they meet Christians and Jews who act different in every regard from the ugly stereotypes they took for granted? We know that in many cases they not only change their attitudes towards those they previously hated, but they are forced to painfully reexamine every other stereotype, every other extremist view they were taught. When some of these become journalists, professors, and clergy, how many people can they reach, in the space of very few years? Might some in time become potential bridges to the Palestinians?

Jews in particular have historical reason to be hopeful. For close to two millennia, we had good reason to believe that Christianity itself was an enemy of Judaism, and that some of its texts and traditions precluded any softening of its stance against the Jews. A hundred years ago, could anyone have predicted a document like Nostra Aetate, or a Pope's visit to the Western Wall, asking G-d for forgiveness for the Christian treatment of Jews? Protestant denominations ate supersessionism -- the doctrine that the Jews of the Bible had been replaced in G-d's favor by the New Jews, i.e. Christians -- for breakfast. Who would have thought that group after group of Protestants, standing shamefacedly in the aftermath of the Holocaust, would have moved supersessionism to a locked cellar, reached out to the Jewish people, and worried about the theological details later? (No, they did not eliminate antisemitism from their midst, and the record of some of those groups regarding Israel is appalling. But the change in attitude is still a step in the right direction.) Reason overwhelmed them and they found a way for faith to accommodate it. Decades of interfaith dialogue will not be as effective as multifaith contact that leads to change coming from within, not negotiated or compelled from without. Could this not happen to Muslims? This optimism may prove to be groundless, but does it make any sense for Christians and Jews not to try to facilitate change?

On my way back from London, the cabin attendants brought out the meals rather quickly. As I struggled through the various layers of covering of my kosher meal, the fellow sitting next to me peered at the food. "I see you are eating a kosher meal. I am Egyptian…"

Then I noticed that he, too, had a special meal: halal. This flight, however, was not going to be a rerun. He was not a Copt, but Muslim. This could turn into a long flight, I thought. But my cabin mate continued. "Hmm. The kosher meal reminds me of a good friend of my oldest daughter. Shoshana from Tel Aviv…."

Might I dream that the pleasant conversation that ensued will take us all, in time, to a better place between Muslims and Jews?

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is Director of Interfaith Affairs at The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. He is also a contributing member to AskMusa.org, a site that promotes understanding and tolerance between Muslims and Jews through knowledge and dialog.