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Sunday, January 22, 2006

Jeff Jacoby writes about a serious propaganda effort to combat the radicals in Indonesia. Sounds like Indonesia makes leaders slightly differently than Malaysia does.

Defeating Islamist extremism

''I HAVE been called 'Chrislam' because I am so close to Christians," Abdurrahman Wahid is saying. ''When I was criticized by a certain Muslim preacher for not being harsh enough against the 'kaffir' [infidels] -- for being too close to Jews and Christians -- I told him to read the Koran again. Because when the Koran speaks of 'infidels,' it means idolaters," not monotheists.

Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, is speaking to me by phone from his office in Jakarta. With him is C. Holland Taylor, an American entrepreneur who fell in love with Indonesian culture en route to making a fortune in the telecom industry. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Taylor created the LibForAll Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting Islamist extremism by promoting a culture of liberty and tolerance in the Muslim world; Wahid is the foundation's patron and senior adviser.

With 200 million residents, Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim nation, and Wahid -- popularly known as Gus Dur -- was not only its first democratically elected president but the longtime chairman of its largest Muslim organization, the 35 million-member Nadhlatul Ulama. A revered religious scholar who studied in Cairo and Baghdad, Wahid is a longtime champion of a moderate, progressive, and nonpolitical Islam. As a result, he has frequently clashed with militant fundamentalists whose growing influence, fueled by Arab/Wahhabi oil money, is undermining Indonesia's traditional religious pluralism...

Wonder how he feels about Israel and the Jews. That is the elephant in the room, after all.

2 Comments

This is off topic, but have you seen these articles about a Danish firm that's selling t-shirts with part of the profits going to the Colombian terrorist group FARC and the Palestinian terrorist group PFLP?

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3204297,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4632578.stm

Unreal. I'll post that now, thanks.

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