Obama's Indonesia Speech Sweeps Ugliness Under the (Prayer) Rug

As expected, Barack Obama's Indonesia "outreach" speech was one long ingratiation exercise. Obama, in major suck-up mode (his default setting when in any Muslim country) praised this most populous of Muslim lands as a model of democracy, equality and religious tolerance.

Following which, as reported by the Chrisitan Science Monitor, a truth-teller stepped up and cut down Obama's shibboleths:

“By entertaining us, using Indonesian words, saying he’s part of Indonesia, it sweeps over the more important issues,” says Noor Huda Ismail, a former hardline Islamist who founded and heads the Jakarta-based Institute for International Peacebuilding. “What tolerance is he talking about? Only the elite will enjoy the benefits of that tolerance.”

Mr. Huda referred specifically to the discrimination facing a minority Islamic group called the Ahmadiyah. In recent months Islamic extremists have attacked their homes and mosques, and the religious affairs minister has called on the group to disband for failing to acknowledge Muhammad as the last prophet, in keeping with the majority Muslim faith.

Obama’s brief nod to the equality achieved across a country that encompasses 17,000 islands also rang hollow for some.

“People say the situation is good for us in Papua, but it’s not,” says Markus Haluk, head of a group pushing for autonomy in Papua, a resource-rich province on the far eastern reaches of Indonesia. “We have no freedom, no liberty, genocide is a fact of life for us.”

Oh, well. In the Dar al Islam scheme of things, it's probably only a little genocide.

Update: About that "wee" genocide Sultan Knish writes:

The media narrative is that Barack Hussein Obama is returning to the place where he grew up as part of a diplomatic tour. The truth is that Obama is visiting a genocidal country and paying homage to its regime, even while many of the atrocities continue.

While Obama found time to blast Israel for building housing in Jerusalem, he made no mention of the Indonesian genocide in East Timor. No word about the Indonesian mass murder of between 100,000 to 200,000 people in a country whose population totaled little more than half a million. Shortly after Obama left Jakarta, the Indonesian regime began an occupation that lasted until 1999. An occupation armed and aided by successive US administrations.

But there is a reason you won't hear about the meat hooks where Indonesian backed militias hung their victims, before mutilating and killing them. You won't hear about the fields of the dead where the corpses of men, women and children were piled into mass graves. You won't hear of the machete squads who hacked people to death in full public view and on video. You certainly won't hear about the ethnic cleansing, the mass deportations, the gang rapes or even the murder of Western reporters. And there's a simple reason for all that.

Indonesia is a Muslim country. Their victims in East Timor were Christians.

To understand the significance of Obama's biography-- imagine that an American President who grew up in Nazi Germany on the eve of war, wrote only about his idyllic childhood running around the streets of Berlin and learning to read Mein Kampf, and then returned decades later, with no concession that a genocide had occurred here...

Silly Sultan. Everyone knows that Jews building housing in Jerusalem is a far more heinous "crime" than Christians hanging from Indonesian meat hooks.