Islamic Fascist Terrorists Use Charity Work To Their Advantage In Indonesia

Below is a copy of a September WSJ front page story entitled Curfews, Obligatory Prayers, Whippings: Hard-line Islam Emerges In Indonesia.  The article not only shows how the specific Islamic goal of making Indonesia Sharia Law compliant got started but how it is rapidly progressing – something every country in the world, including America, should fear for themselves.

 

Indonesia is the fourth most populated country in the world.  It has a larger Muslim population than any country on Earth & makes up 12.7% of the world's Muslim population, but it is not a Muslim country despite BO, Hillary Clinton, & Robert Gibbs trying to promote it as such during BO's administration.

 

From 1967 to 1998 Indonesia, a secular nation per its Constitution, was ruled by the dictator General of the Army Hajji Suharto – himself a Muslim.  Although Indonesia had long had a hard-line Islamic fascist minority it had been held in check by the strong central government under Suharto much like Egypt had been from the 1950s until 2011 under the mighty Nasser, Anwar Sadat, & Hosni Mubarak. 

 

After Suharto resigned a group of Muslim clerics, who had been waiting their chance, established the Islamic Defenders Front or FPI (Indonesian for Front Pembela Islam).  For the past 19 years the FPI has been notorious for hate crimes & religious violence in the name of Islam in Indonesia – i.e., terrorism.

 

The FPI, along with another group, Hizb ut-Tahrir – a Pan-Islamism political movement – also @ work in Indonesia, dreams of making Indonesia part of an international Islamic caliphate.  Indonesia would be a gigantic trophy for the Islamic fascists to pick up.

 

But, as the story below explains, the FPI has made its best inroads in winning Indonesians over to their way of thinking by widening FPI's appeal by performing charity work. 

 

As an example, the FPI handed out food, water, & tarps in one of Jakarta's poor neighborhoods after the city government demolished homes to make room for new luxury housing units thereby displacing many residents – this was a big winner for FPI as it endeared the displaced residents to them.  These displaced workers view the terrorist group as sticking with them in times of trouble.  Now other politicians feel they have little choice but to follow FPI's lead.

 

Now charity work has historically been a proven winner for corrupt people, such as:

 

1.  Al Capone, the nation's most infamous gangster was also a respected community leader for a lot of people due to his charity work in starting a soup kitchen in Chicago that fed thousands of starving men three meals a day.  See photo below.  Some say he did more for the people of Chicago that the state did – a similar type feeling to ones being expressed by Indonesians regarding the FPI.

 

click on photo to enlarge

 

2.  In January, 2006 the terrorist group Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) – the parliament of the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank & Gaza Strip territories.  This was a surprise electoral victory for those who had not noticed Hamas's charity & community work of establishing & supporting schools, orphanages, mosques, medical centers, & food banks.  Hamas rebuilt the al-Wafa Medical Rehabilitation Hospital after Israel had destroyed it during a return attack.  Hamas distributed food, clothes, & school materials where they thought they would do the most good in promoting their cause – the destruction of Israel – much like the FPI is doing today in Indonesia.

 

3.  Martha MacCallum (FNC) reported that the Clinton Foundation donates 10% of the money raised to charity & the Daily Caller reported that just 5.7% of the 2014 Clinton Foundation budget went to actual charitable grants – the rest went to salaries, employee benefits, fundraising & "other expenses".  The donations constituted just enough charity work to make it look like the Clinton Foundation was doing something useful while hiding the appearance of corruption that is now just starting to be investigated.  IBD reports that Russian nuclear officials sent millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation after their purchase of 20% of the uranium in the U.S. – a deal that required Secretary of State Clinton to sign off on.  And the AP found that over half the private visitors Hillary received as SOS were donors to the Clinton Foundation.  Hillary & the hostile anti-American media have been masters of using a principle derived right out of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals – namely, accusing their opponent of the very thing they are guilty of: in this case colluding with a possible enemy.  Hillary was trying to use the sleight of hand charity play accumulating money before running for President to a level that FPI can only dream about in Indonesia.

 

4.  The New York Times uses a natural outgrowth of the charity play by providing good sports pages & cross word puzzles to attract unsuspecting readers.  The typical sports fan or wordsmith probably doesn't realize what they have gotten into when they read the rest of the paper.  I met a woman @ a town hall meeting who was an excellent speaker & obvious patriot.  In talking to her after the meeting she mentioned how much she liked the NYT cross word puzzles – never realizing she was supporting an organization she had just railed against during the meeting.  This woman has a choice, to buy the paper or not – I asked her to find another cross word puzzle - but the people of Indonesia are finding it a harder choice to turn down charity help from the FPI – even realizing the terrorist fascist lifestyle that will come their way through the implementation of Sharia Law once the FPI takes control.

 

In addition to charity work the FPI also reaches teenagers & young men through social media.  The map below shows in red the zone of influence the terrorist FPI has in Indonesia.

 

click on map to enlarge

 

The FPI's end goal is to make Indonesia a country based on Sharia Law – the terrible individual rights denying laws that dominate Islamic nations.  As documented in several RTE posts over the years once Islam wraps its tentacles around a society it is hard for either side to let go – the aggressive fascists or the frightened people who are the target of the aggression. 

 

Europe is currently in the process of submitting to Islam with the pitiful examples of the United Kingdom, Germany, & France experiencing one terrorist attack after another with no intention to preemptively fight back for politically correct reasons or just plain because of the lack of will that is going to literally bury the citizenries.

 

The FPI is interested in Indonesia in what long time subscriber Economics501 refers to as SC – stealth coup that stems right out of the political correctness shown by the petrified European leaders.

 

The United Kingdom's MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5) has seen a recent dramatic uptick in Islamic fascist terrorist threats to the U.K. occurring faster than @ any previous point not only in the U.K. but all across Europe "& beyond".  What Prime Minister Theresa May & others in power do with this information, if anything, is not promising or hopeful based on previous capitulations by the U.K. to the Islamic fascists. 

 

But there are two countries that are fighting back against the politically correct mindset that allows Islamic fascists in their midst – Burma & Australia.

 

This past August Rohingya Muslim militants living in the Burmese state of Rakhine killed twelve Burmese security officers in border post attacks – ever since the attacks the Burmese military has been working to drive all (800,000) Rohingya Muslims out of Burma into Bangladesh.  Burma is a predominantly Buddhist country, whose de facto leader is 1991 Nobel Peace Prize pro-democracy laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi – who is (has been) greatly admired by Hillary Clinton.   Burma says the Rohingya Muslims are Bangladeshi & Bangladesh says they are Burmese – in short neither country wants the Rohingya Muslims.

 

But back in Indonesia Muslims show support for the Rohingya Muslims fleeing Burma– see photo below noting that Myanmar is another name for Burma. 

 

click on photo to enlarge 

 

Anti-Muslim sentiment has grown in Australia due to a slowing economy & global worries about terrorism like those expressed above for Europe by the U.K.'s MI5 unit.  Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has tried to raise hurdles for immigrants but has met resistance from the Australian Parliament.  Turnbull has been working since April to make an immigrant English test more difficult & implementing a test on commitment to 'Australian values'.  The idea is to have would-be immigrants prove their commitment to Australia by asking, among other things, whether the immigrant applicant thinks it is acceptable to strike one's spouse – a major tenet of Sharia Law.  Muslim leaders have taken offense with this line of questioning saying the questions were clearly aimed @ Muslims.  Whatever can the Australian Parliament be thinking? – I thought the points raised by Turnbull were what immigration control was all about in protecting a nation.

 

The story below shows the type of danger that the politically correct mindset of America is all too prone to surrender to.  It won't require a majority of Muslims – just a steady slide where right cannot be determined from wrong & people of substance are tricked into thinking everything they worked their entire life for is an ill-gotten gain.

 

Curfews, Obligatory Prayers, Whippings:

Hard-line Islam Emerges In Indonesia

 

Conservative Islamic groups are using political activism & charity work to build wide support for Sharia-inspired laws  

 

By 

James Hookway

Updated Sept. 13, 2017 9:12 p.m. ET

 

In the Indonesian market town of Cianjur, new rules require government workers to clock in with their thumb prints at a downtown mosque to confirm attendance at morning prayers. That's on the order of district chief Irvan Rivano Muchtar, who also wants a 10 p.m. curfew for the town and is sending police to stop teenage girls and boys hanging out without parental supervision.

The 36-year-old elected official, who belongs to a mainstream, secular political party, likes traveling and listening to bands such as Coldplay. These days, he said, Islam is the key to political success.

Hard-line Islamic groups are using the country's democratic system to promote new, Sharia-based laws, and have built support among citizens with charity work and public preaching. Being pulled in their wake are politicians such as Mr. Muchtar, and in concert, these forces are tipping a country known for its moderate brand of Islam toward the more politicized form associated with the Middle East.

"I didn't come from a pesantren, so I have to learn and follow the culture," said Mr. Muchtar, using the local term for an Islamic school. "I'm ready to recite the Quran, and sing rock 'n' roll."

Indonesia, the world's most populous Islamic country, has laws protecting the rights of Christians and other groups, a robust democracy and an open economy attracting investors such as Toyota Motor Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. There is a Hooters restaurant in Jakarta, where female staff in skimpy outfits serve up spicy chicken wings and frosted glasses of beer.

In recent years, lobbying groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front have helped introduce more than 400 Sharia-inspired laws, including those that penalize adultery, force women to wear headscarves and restrict them from going out at night.

They are supported by a popular mood that has turned more religiously conservative. Protesters last month forced officials to cover a 100-foot statue at a Confucian temple they called an affront to Islamic traditions. Over the past year other conservatives have demolished statues in Java and Sumatra depicting characters from traditional, pre-Islamic folk tales.

Students at an Islamic boarding school in June in Indonesia's Banten province,

an area that supports the FPI. PHOTOS: MUHAMMAD FADLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL(3)

Women wearing headscarves are more visible, and the wait time for the limited permits to attend the Hajj to Mecca has risen to 30 years, from two years in 2000, according to government data.

Local elections take place across the country next year, and a presidential vote is scheduled for 2019. Some political analysts and local leaders expect conservative Muslims to expand their footprint. Some potential challengers to President Joko Widodo, a religious moderate, already are aligning themselves with hard-liners. "They are playing the long game," said Sidney Jones, a director at the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta.

One hard-line group that has seen success is the Islamic Defenders Front, known locally as FPI. In April it helped engineer the electoral defeat of Jakarta's governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian and close ally of Mr. Widodo.

The group and other conservative Muslims accused Mr. Purnama of blasphemy, a criminal offense, and organized mass protests to demand his prosecution. He lost re-election, was convicted and is serving a two-year prison sentence.

"The [Jakarta] governor election turned the FPI into something bigger than it had ever been before," said Ms. Jones. "No one would have thought of it as a political power broker, and now that's the role it has assumed."

The FPI's vision is clear. "The end goal is for [Indonesia] to be based on Sharia," said Slamet Maarif, the group's spokesman. That includes being whipped for violating rules concerning alcohol and extramarital sex.

"If you want to practice Islam, you cannot just be cherry picking. You should follow everything," he said.

Other groups involved in the protests against Mr. Purnama question the economic influence of Indonesia's minority ethnic-Chinese population, many of whom are Christian. Islamic leader Bachtiar Nasir, leader of the National Movement to Safeguard the Fatwas of the Indonesian Ulemas Council, wants Indonesia to follow its neighbor Malaysia by introducing an affirmative-action program to provide indigenous Indonesians with better access to capital and contracts.

Mr. Widodo, the president, was caught off guard by the strength of the Purnama protests, which were among the largest in Indonesia's history, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

After not engaging with protesters for weeks, Mr. Widodo joined them at a prayer rally once Mr. Purnama's political survival seemed in doubt.

More recently, his administration banned Hizbut Tahrir, a group that dreams of making Indonesia part of an international Islamic caliphate. During his annual state of the nation speech to parliament last month, the president, dressed in a traditional sarong instead of the usual business suit, said the country must unite behind its founding principles of respect for different faiths.

Police are investigating FPI founder Rizieq Shihab on suspicion of breaking Indonesia's strict pornography laws, which were approved partly at the FPI's behest several years ago, after he allegedly exchanged lewd text messages and images with a female admirer. Mr. Shihab, who has taken refuge in Saudi Arabia, denies wrongdoing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FPI, highly organized and with members dressed in white, paramilitary-style uniforms, distributed food to the needy in a North Jakarta neighborhood in June.PHOTOS: MUHAMMAD FADLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL(3)

 

Mr. Widodo has encouraged moderate Muslim groups to join his efforts to reassert Indonesia's older, more inclusive traditions. One group, Nahdlatul Ulama, or Awakening of the Muslims, was formed in 1926 to resist ascetic strains of Islam from the Arabian peninsula. It is providing safe houses for people who have come under attack from the FPI for criticizing Mr. Shihab.

Indonesia began tilting toward a more austere version of Islam about two decades ago. A sprawling nation of 18,000 islands, it has long had a hard-line minority kept in check by a strong central government.

After the fall of autocrat Suharto in 1998, Jakarta devolved some powers to local provinces to prevent the rise of another dictator. Around the same time, Saudi Arabia began spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build mosques and schools in Indonesia to export its fundamentalist strain of Islam. FPI's founder, Mr. Shihab, attended a Saudi-funded Islamic university in Jakarta and later studied in Saudi Arabia.

Many hard-liners view Aceh province, on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra, as a role model. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed nearly 170,000 people in the province, Indonesia's government offered even more autonomy to local leaders to help speed reconstruction. The leaders introduced Sharia laws, based on Islamic teachings. In 2015, the laws were further tightened to permit caning for a wide range of moral offenses, from selling alcohol to gay sex.

A public caning there in May made national headlines. Ten people, including two men who had sex with each other, and an unmarried heterosexual couple who had been alone together, were struck by hooded enforcers in front of a roaring crowd.

Aceh remains the only place in Indonesia where Sharia forms the basis of the criminal code. Polling data is sparse, but a 2013 Pew Research Center survey found that 72% of Indonesian Muslims favored applying Sharia principles nationwide.

The FPI, with its cell-like organization and its followers' white, paramilitary-style uniforms, is the most visible example of the growing strength of Indonesia's conservative religious groups.

A man was caned in Aceh in May for having sex with another man. PHOTO: CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

 

In its early days the group was known for smashing up Jakarta bars or scrawling graffiti such as "Jew-Free Zone." U.S. diplomats have said the FPI served as a kind of paramilitary force for the police to extract bribes from brothels and other illegal businesses.

Mr. Maarif, the group's spokesman, acknowledges working with police "like brothers" but denies being paid to do so.

Over time, the FPI revised its strategy to widen its appeal. It found new audiences on Facebook and other social media—often teenagers and young men.

FPI stepped into the national scene in the mid-2000s, when it drummed up protests against a no-nudes Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine. In 2012 it forced Lady Gaga to scrap a Jakarta concert, and the following year it compelled a Miss World pageant to move from the capital to the predominantly-Hindu island of Bali.

It successfully lobbied Indonesia's Supreme Court in 2013 to overrule the government and allow local authorities to restrict sales of alcohol, arguing it was eating away at traditional Islamic values. In 2015, national authorities banned convenience stores from selling beer and liquor, contributing to the decision of the local franchisee for 7-Eleven to close its 160-plus stores in the country earlier this year.

"We still wreck bars. I want to emphasize that we still do that," said Novel Bamukmin, another FPI leader with a punchy preaching style. But he said the group has used social media to grow. "We can reach a lot more people now."

On Sept. 6, the FPI led a rally in Jakarta to protest Myanmar's treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority.

The group now has offices in 30 of Indonesia's 34 provinces. It relentlessly raises funds at prayer rallies, and has built public support through charitable projects.

Over the past year it has been preaching and handing out food, water and tarps in Jakarta's poor Kampung Akuarium neighborhood after the city government demolished homes for a new luxury housing development, displacing residents who worked nearby at the fishing port.

"They're still helping us. It's important just to know that someone is there because this situation is so stressful," said Suyitono, a 63-year-old. (Many Indonesians use one name.)

The outreach programs reinforce Islamic values in many areas, said Fatah Sulaiman, a vice rector at Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa University in Serang, a city just east of Jakarta where the FPI also has a strong presence. "The politicians don't have much choice but to follow," he said.

The FPI had been looking for a way to oust Mr. Purnama, the former Jakarta governor, for years because it objected to the city of 14 million being ruled by a Christian. When Mr. Purnama last year made a lighthearted reference to a Quran verse that said Muslims shouldn't be led by members of other faiths, the FPI accused him of blasphemy.

The group helped organize protests in Jakarta, including one with an estimated 500,000 people, many dressed in white, to demand his prosecution.

When campaigning began for the April elections, the FPI backed Anies Baswedan, a former university rector with a reputation as a moderate who cultivated the group's support by meeting with them and reassuring them he had a conservative stance on social issues such as gay rights.

Mr. Baswedan won the vote comfortably. His political mentor, Prabowo Subianto, a politician who ran against Mr. Widodo for president in 2014 and is a likely presidential candidate in 2019, publicly thanked the FPI for its help in the win.

The FPI is now focusing on swaying the election in West Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, by putting up posters and holding prayer rallies. When the Christian governor there leaves office after reaching his term limit next year, they want to make sure a conservative Muslim succeeds him.

Appeared in the September 14, 2017, print edition as 'In Indonesia, Islam Hardens.'