Religious Persecution In Yet Another OIC Member State – Indonesia
President Barack Obama and Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2010
Human Rights Watch has exposed widespread religious persecution of non-Muslims in Muslim majority Indonesia (1). Some commentators have pointed to Indonesia as a as a ‘moderate’ Muslim country (2) and that includes the obviously easily led British Prime Minister David Cameron. Of course Indonesia is a member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), that curious organisation that claims to be in favour of religious tolerance. Unfortunately, to the OIC religious tolerance actually means tolerance of, and indeed complete acceptance of sharia law. That is why the OIC claims that freedom of speech leads to ‘defamation of Islam’ in the West but does not seem to mention the actual persecution that goes on in its own member states.
It seems that the more the OIC makes ridiculous allegations about discrimination and persecution of Muslims in the West the more non-Muslims suffer actual persecution in Muslim majority countries as well as in the West itself.
If this sort of thing is going on in ‘moderate’, democratic Indonesia, then what is happening in the rest of the OIC? The OIC presumes to lecture the West on human rights and religious freedom when as in reality of you to the OIC nations as a whole it would probably be one of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. Do we really live in a world where backward feudal dictatorships like Saudi Arabia get to lecture the countries with the best human rights record? It is like experiencing the Orwellian nightmare of 1984:
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984 (3)
(1) Indonesia: Religious Minorities Targets of Rising Violence (Human Rights Watch)
(2) Moderate Indonesia? (the American Spectator)
(3) 1984 (George Orwell)
Sharia Watch UK