Radical Islam in Indonesia

Islam as historically practiced in Indonesia has been what any in the West would call a "moderate" form of the religion, as described in this post by Publius Pundit. That is changing.

It is changing because of the worldwide growth of radical Islam - itself a gift of Saudi Arabia that uses their billions of petro-dollars to export their triumphalist and radical Wahhabi / Salafi brand of Islam. The Saudi petro-dollars are used to export Wahhabi / Salafi trained clerics and to support them in each country with infrastructure - such as by building Salafi mosques, and the funding of other supporting institutions, such as Wahhabi / Salafi friendly Middle East studies programs, and groups such as CAIR. It is incredibly insidious and its effects are felt world-wide, where the Saudi poison is supplanting other schools of Islam.

I posted the other day on this cancerous growth among the Muslims of Somalia and included this article by Bashir Goth. Today, the WSJ is carrying an article on the same thing occurring in Indonesia, calling it "the Arab invasion" and noting that "Indonesia's radicalized Muslims aren't homegrown."

The headquarters of the Front for the Defense of Islam is reached by a narrow alley just off a one-lane street in a residential neighborhood near downtown Jakarta. But step inside the carpeted reception area, decorated by a mural of a desert mosque and partially open to the sky, and it's as if you've arrived in a bedouin kingdom.

Your host is Habib Mohammad Rizieq Shihab, 41. He is dressed entirely in white, a religious conceit far from typical of most Indonesian ulama, or experts in Islamic theology. To the question, "Where are you from?" Mr. Rizieq is quick to explain that he is descended from the Quraishi tribe, from what is now Yemen. Just how he knows this isn't clear, but it's the symbolism that counts: The Prophet Mohammad was a Quraishi, and the tribe is entrusted with the responsibility for protecting God's House, the Qe'eba, in Mecca. Mr. Rizieq, in fact, is a native of Jakarta.

For the better part of the past decade, Mr. Rizieq and his Front--known by its Indonesian initials FPI--have played a prominent role in Indonesian political life, although the FPI is not a political party. It is an Islamist vigilante group, with the self-appointed mission of policing and, if necessary, violently suppressing "un-Islamic" behavior. Squads of FPI militants have forcibly shut down hundreds of brothels, small-time gambling operations, discos, nightclubs and bars serving alcoholic beverages. They have also stormed "unauthorized" Christian houses of worship, attacked peaceful demonstrators from Indonesia's renascent Communist party, trashed the office of the National Commission on Human Rights and rampaged through airports looking for Israelis to kill.

. . . Less clear is whether the FPI also gets financial support from abroad; knowledgeable observers suggest Mr. Rizieq gets all the money he needs by extorting the victims of his Islamic purification campaigns. But as Imdadun Rahmat, a leading scholar of Islamic extremism in Indonesia, notes, "the radicals are all drinking from the same breast," by which he means the ideological inspiration and financial support provided by Saudi Arabia. The Mecca-based Muslim World League, for example, is notorious for sending its representatives to Indonesia with suitcases of cash to fund its pet projects, often extremist religious boarding schools. The Saudi religious affairs office in Jakarta finances the publication of a million books a year translated from Arabic into Indonesian, according to Angel Rabasa of the Rand Corporation.

Then there is the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Studies, or LIPIA, a Saudi-funded university in Jakarta, which offers full scholarships to top students. "LIPIA was designed to create cadres," says Mr. Rahmat. Its graduates include Jafar Umar Thalib, the founder of Laskar Jihad, a terrorist group responsible for the death of thousands of Indonesian Christians in the Moluccas.

Continue reading the article here. The maddening thing, of course, is that so little is being done to stop this infestation, whether it be in Indonesia, or Somolia, or the United States and Europe. A major, if not the only reason, as described by Bob Baer in his book of several years ago, Sleeping With The Devil, is the incredible wealth the Sauds spend in the West - buying the silence and acquiesence of our government and academics. In Europe, added to this is a virulent leftist philosophy of multi-culturalism and relativism. Thus, even while the tribe of Saud is trying to moderate the Wahhabi / Salafi beast in their own midst, there seems little if any effort to effectively fight the Wahhabi / Salafi message as it infests the rest of the world. It is suicidal insanity - and while I consider Al Gore a lower form of life, I concur wholeheartedly with his message that we need to wean the world off of oil yesterday. Only then will this export of pure poison from Saudi Arabia end, and only then will other governments begin to turn a jaundiced eye towards the vipers in their midst. Hopefully it will not be too late.