Islamic Terrorism in Indonesia Home

Rebellion and Death: Another nation in the clutch of Islam
Indonesia is a nation of 210 million people scattered over an island chain 3,000 miles long. It is the world's most populous Islamic nation. What turns a gang of people into citizens who can form a national government (remember?) is an agreement on what ideas are right and wrong. Indonesia has long followed a moderate interpretation of Islam which renounced Koran's commands to kill Christians and Jews who resist Islam. This view was enforced with guns by Indonesian President Suharto until his fall in 1998. Since Suharto's fall, fundamentalist rebels have waged an escalating campaign of death - Jihad to them - attempting to fracture Indonesia into a number of autonomous provinces just like Muslim rebels split Kosovo from Serbia.	Indonesia is 10,178 miles by great circle from Citizen Soldier headquarters, just outside of Washington D.C. The green islands are the Philippines.
Indonesia first responded to this threat by allowing citizen militias to resist the terrorists. This promptly earned them sanctions for human rights violations from the Muslim-dominated U.N. and, of course, the Clinton Administration. Clinton order the U.S. military to break ties with the Indonesian military. The situation is now desperate. Indonesia sent its Foreign Minister, Alwi Shihab, to Washington on 12 March. Mr. Shihab, who is a former professor from both Temple and Harvard Universities, warned America that the Islamic terrorists threaten the moderate, tolerant values that have kept Indonesia intact as a nation. Mr. Shihab urged the Bush Administration to renew military ties. He said "There is an attempt to derail democracy and derail religious tolerance, openness and a broad-minded interpretation of Islam." The bottomline is Islam - true Islam - is a religion of violence because it commands proselytizing with the sword. You can cover this up for a while, but where ever people read Koran, sooner or later the ugly truth comes out.