04/03 Links Pt2: World Vision, Prominent U.S. Evangelical Charity, Caught Funding Jihadis; How J Street Turned Democrats Against Israel; Telling a Story Founded the Jewish Nation

From Ian:

World Vision, Prominent U.S. Evangelical Charity, Caught Funding Jihadis

When U.S. officials discovered that World Vision was funding a designated terror group, they ordered WV to stop paying ISRA, but WV maintained its relationship with the organization. In January 2015, WV said it had "discontinued any future collaboration." Yet almost a year later, WV posted a job position working with ISRA in December 2015, apparently indicating it had not ceased collaborating as it claimed.

Around the same time, World Vision partnered with yet another group that "has helped fund the Hamas military wing," the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH).

In 2012, World Vision was exposed using Australian government dollars to fund a terrorist front group operating in the West Bank. World Vision was funding the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a front group for the U.S. terror designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Australian Solicitor Andrew Hamilton, who worked with the Israel Law Center which exposed the funding, told the Jerusalem Post that, "The Union of Agricultural Work Committees is an integral part of the proscribed terror organization, the PFLP, that Australian citizens and corporations are prohibited from providing support to."

In an email to FWI, Hamilton called on the recently elected Australian Government "to initiate a detailed criminal investigation into the Halabi scandal."

"For more than a decade, World Vision Australia has avoided justice in Australia for its criminal activities in funding PFLP terrorism using Australian taxpayer money obtained by deception," Hamilton told FWI.

"It would be reasonable to assume that if a smaller organization, whose CEO [Tim Costello] was not the brother of a former federal Treasurer [Peter Costello], had similarly deceived the Australian Government to obtain taxpayer funds which were then sent to terrorists, then they would have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law." (FWI has attempted to obtain a response from the Costellos and from World Vision Australia, but has been unsuccessful.)

In 2010, World Vision partnered with a group headed by a PFLP operative, Khaled Yamani, who led the Palestinian Children and Youth Foundation in Lebanon. And a few years prior to that, WV signed joint memoranda with the U.S. designated terror group Interpal, a financial supporter of Hamas.

WV responded to FWI's inquiry regarding the claims made by Cliff Smith in an email declaring, "We remain adamant we are committed to a positive relationship with Israel in our humanitarian work and we do not now, and never have, supported terrorism."

World Vision portrays itself as a "global Christian humanitarian organization." McDonnell asks how WV's support of Islamist terrorists is really in line with the Gospel message it presents. "To see this activity from World Vision in Sudan and then continuing in Israel too—it just makes me wonder: 'What kind of Christians are supporting a group that is funding terrorists?'"

Yisrael Medad: Update on Cordoba: "cultural reductionism"

Spanish Church ‘accused of glossing over Muslim identity of Cordoba’s Great Mosque’

February 28 2023,
The Catholic Church has been accused of glossing over the Muslim identity of the Great Mosque of Cordoba with a visitor centre that emphasises its Christian origins.

The Church’s planned centre for the mosque, which has served as a cathedral since the Spanish city’s reconquest by Christian forces in 1236, aims to “correct” what it deems to be an overly Islamic vision of the city’s past.

“The need to redesign the entire space [of the mosque area] derives from the finding that Cordoba is marked with a very powerful cultural label: that of a Muslim city,” said a report by Demetrio Fernandez, the Bishop of Cordoba.

The mosque has served as a cathedral for hundreds of years and is used for traditional processions at Easter

“The cultural reductionism is so strong that it has the capacity to eclipse the brilliant Visigoth, Roman and Christian [periods]..."

So, Muslims are engaged in cultural reductionism of Jerusalem as the capital of Judea, where the Temple stood on Mount Moriah?

Telling a Story Founded the Jewish Nation

Many of the basic fundamentals of the seder—not only eating matzah and bitter herbs, but also relating the story of the liberation from Egyptian bondage to one’s children—can be found in Exodus 12, which is set in Egypt just before the tenth plague. By imagining what this archetypal seder might have been like, Cole Aronson explores the ritual’s meaning for Jewish history:

You don’t tell the children they were once slaves in Egypt, because that’s all they know. But it wasn’t always so, you tell them—long ago, their ancestors enjoyed over a century of freedom under God. God chose to raise the patriarchs up from the idolatry of their native culture and gave them a covenantal life. A famine some generations later compelled the chosen family to live in Egypt, first as guests and then—until now—as slaves. Tonight, God will keep His promise to the patriarchs and restore the Israelites to His service.

What the parents of the Exodus told their children was the very first maggid the first “telling” of Passover night. But the story as originally told didn’t commemorate the founding of the Jewish nation. Telling the story founded the Jewish nation.

Until the Exodus, the before-time of the patriarchs was a rumor whispered by strangers subjugated in a strange land. On the Exodus night, teaching the children about God’s choice of Abraham converted his descendants into his self-conscious heirs. A free nation was created by restoring a memory of itself. The pageantry of the seder is often and correctly said to recreate the Exodus night in order to tell a story. The reverse is also true. Jews recreate the Exodus night in part by telling a story that the Exodus parents must have told their own children 3,500 years ago, and with the same function—initiating youngsters into the chosen people of God.

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Are Indonesia and Pakistan next?

The Jerusalem Post reported:

Diplomatic delegations from Pakistan and Indonesia are both in Israel for secret visits this week, according to Pakistani news reports on Monday.

The Pakistani delegation is headed by Pakistani-American Nasim Ashraf, a former minister of state in former prime minister Pervez Musharraf 's government.

During their visit to Israel, the Pakistani delegation was given tours across Israel. They are also scheduled to meet with President Isaac Herzog later this week, the report added.

The Indonesian delegation in Israel is headed by a "senior official." Reports of a diplomatic presence of the two most populous Muslim nations in the world in Israel come amid recent warming of ties between Israel and Indonesia.

 The Indonesian Foreign Ministry denied any such visit. 

Whether it is true or not, Arabs are taking the report seriously. This is especially in the wake of Turkish president Erdogan restoring relations with Israel and even saying he wants to visit Israel. Together with the second anniversary of the Abraham Accords, anything seems possible.

The combined Muslim population of Indonesia and Pakistan is higher than the combined population of Arab states, and having those two countries normalize relations with Israel would be a staggering psychological blow for the holdout Arab nations - they would be in the minority of Muslims worldwide!

And even if Indonesia and Pakistan only warm up relations without making them official, it points to a pattern that the anti-Israel crowd cannot downplay, much as they want to. Even unofficial relations and trade ensure Israel is considered a permanent part of the Middle East, and when countries stand to lose Israeli trade and scientific expertise they will think twice about trying to treat Israel as a pariah again.

The Abraham Accords broke open the dam, and the flood of new relationships with Israel cannot be easily stopped.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Indonesian books on Jews are uniformly filled with hate

An Iranian news agency said that the Indonesian International Book Fair was being held in Jakarta this week. As far as I could tell, it is being held in November. 

Either way, since Indonesia is the largest Muslim country, I was curious as to what their books say about Jews.

A cursory look at the top search results for books in Indonesian about Jews shows nothing but pure antisemitism. 

History of Judaism's blurb includes:

What kind of events happened until today we witness how Jews dominate almost all aspects of life? The dominance that makes them act as they please; seized the land of the Muslims by force, houses were demolished with barbarism, children, women and the elderly were brutally killed, their possessions greedily robbed. What's worse, they don't even feel ashamed or guilty, instead they become proud and arrogant.  Before the end of the world, a great war will occur between the Muslims and the Jews. This book will be very helpful in providing knowledge and understanding about the religion so we understand who is really the enemy and who is the friend. 

Jewish Red Reports Throughout History:

Lots of rottenness, cunning, tyranny, and all the crimes committed by the Jews, all have been described in the Qur'an. Where the Qur'an shows us about the opposition of the Jews to the Prophets, their denial of the Apostles, their defilement of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, and much more.

Alhamdulillah, this book unpacks and explains the Jewish red report cards, which are explained in 30 chapters throughout history, based on the Qur'anic sources which are explained clearly and are easy to understand. I hope this book is useful.

There is an entire book that is the transcript of a 2006 interview between a pastor and a fake Jew who called himself "Rabbi Abe Finkelstein" who "admits" that  Jews made up the Holocaust and kill Christian children for Passover matzoh. This is a popular audio on American antisemitic sites today.

The Zamzam Illustrated  Encyclopedia of Judaism Book of Religion by Dr. Tariq As-Suwaidan is described this way: "The Jews always instill hatred and hostility towards the Muslims, both openly and hidden. Thus, understanding the causes of hostilities, their history, and the methods they use requires in-depth and careful research; includes history, creed, system, and all things related to Judaism. So we will be alert and know where their strengths and weaknesses are. Furthermore, we will be able to deal with them by focusing attacks on those weaknesses. Because, how can we be able to face an enemy that we do not know? ...So, this book is very important and deserves to be owned by every Muslim in order to know the true nature of the enemy. 

These are the first four books I found. The next one, another encyclopedia,  looked like a somewhat more objective history but it still claims that Freemasons and Lions Clubs are Jewish organizations and Jews killed all the prophets. 

This is what a quarter of a billion Muslims are being taught about Jews, today.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Jews were interned in Indonesia during WWII

From Asahi Shimbun:

A Dutch woman has come forward to confirm that occupying Japanese forces rounded up and placed Jews in Indonesia into a separate internment camp during World War II, where they were subject to beatings and near-starvation rations.

Anne-Ruth Wertheim, 78, a former senior high school teacher who is now living in Amsterdam, confirmed its existence as a living witness of the camp.

“When I was in Indonesia in my childhood, I was put in an internment camp for Jewish people,” she said in an e-mail.

At her home in Amsterdam, Wertheim talked about her past while clutching her mother's diary.

She was born in Batavia (current Jakarta) in Indonesia, which was then a colony of the Netherlands. Her father, who was Jewish, was the principal of a law school. Her mother was not Jewish.

Japan occupied Indonesia in March 1942 in an attempt to secure oil supplies and shore up its defense lines in Southeast Asia. Wertheim's father was sent to an internment camp for Dutch and other civilians in Indonesia. At that time, other family members were allowed to remain at home.

In January 1944, however, Wertheim was sent to an internment camp for women and children in Jakarta along with her mother, older sister and younger brother. At that time, she was 9 years old.

In September 1944, a Japanese officer told internees in the camp, “If even one drop of Jewish blood flows in your bodies, tell me.”

Her mother wrote in her diary, “Though I am not Jewish, I wrote my name in the list of Jewish people in order not to be separated from my children.”

In December 1944, Wertheim and her family members were transferred from Jakarta to an internment camp in Tangerang, in the western part of Java Island. Two-thirds of the people in the camp were Jewish. The remaining detainees were members of the Freemasonry fraternal organization, and those who had belonged to the ruling class.

In the camp, iron bars were installed on the windows. Boards, each measuring only about 50 centimeters in width, were placed in rows to serve as beds.

“The living conditions in the camp were clearly worse than those in the previous camp,” Wertheim said.

Meals in the camp, which consisted of only one scoop of rations, were decreased from three times to twice daily. On such near-starvation rations, women stopped menstruating and children's growth became stunted.

Harsh disciplinary measures were observed in the camp. If internees did not bow sufficiently to Japanese soldiers, they were struck by camp staff. In addition, all the prisoners would then be forced to stand in the hot sun for many hours to take collective responsibility for a breach.

The article gives some background material:

Aiko Utsumi, director of the Center for Asia Pacific Partnership of Osaka University of Economics and Law, has detailed knowledge of Japan’s policies concerning wartime internment camps in Indonesia. Among historical materials she copied at the national archives of the Netherlands, there was a list of names of Jewish internees.
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After the end of the war, employees of the Japanese Justice Ministry visited released war criminals and interviewed them. The records of the interviews were also found in the National Archives of Japan.

According to the records, one of the former war criminals said about the former section chief, “As a researcher of Jewish issues, he clamped down on Jewish people and, as a result, he angered them.”

During the war, the former section chief contributed several articles to The Java Shimbun, a newspaper published on Java Island by The Asahi Shimbun, and also gave interviews. One of the articles read, “Jews and Freemasons are plotting to control the world.”

Judging from these historical materials, Utsumi said, “It is certain that there were internment camps exclusively for Jewish people in Indonesia that was under the occupation of Japan.”
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According to Ikuhiko Hata, an expert on modern history, the view that Jews and Freemasons were plotting to control the world was spreading widely in Japan during the war.

There was a conference on this topic in 2010:

A key aspect in the factors leading to Jewish suffering in Indonesia was one known in other areas too. Indonesia’s economic position and the ongoing war inevitably led to a severe financial crisis. As part of the Japanese effort to pacify the local population in these difficult times, a scapegoat was targeted: the Jew. With a Muslim majority, anti-Semitic incitement and mobilizing a war on the Jewish “enemy” was no great challenge.

“This distinctive combination of causes led to greater suffering for the Jews of Indonesia, compared to the other minorities – including Jews – in other regions under Japanese occupation. Unlike the calculated German racial doctrine, this was not part of some Japanese ideology or planned policy; but the results were tragic for the Jewish community,” Prof. Kowner summed up.

(h/t Yoel)

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Indonesia Muslims clerics against "2012"

From Al-Arabiya:

Hollywood's latest doomsday offering "2012" has caused a storm in Indonesia, with conservative clerics condemning it Thursday as a "provocation against Islam".

[W]hile most viewers said they had enjoyed the film's apocalyptic vision of life after December 21, 2012, when the fulfillment of a Mayan prophecy sees the Earth engulfed by catastrophe, senior clerics were deeply troubled.

The country's top Islamic body, the National Council of Ulema (MUI), is divided over whether or not to issue a fatwa or religious edict against the film. One local branch has already done so, to little apparent effect.

"The controversial things about the film are, first, in Islam doomsday should not be visualized or predicted, it's the secret of God," council chairman Amidhan told AFP.

"For the common people, the portrayal of doomsday in this film could distort their faith, that's what I'm worried about."

He also complained that the film showed mosques being destroyed but not churches, despite sequences depicting the Vatican collapsing and Rio de Janeiro's monumental Christ the Redeemer statue crumbling to pieces.

"The film shows that everything including Kaaba (Islam holiest shrine) and mosques were devastated except for churches. The film is a provocation against Islam," Amidhan said.

"The Indonesian film censorship body should have cut part of the scene on the devastation of mosques or the Kaaba because it hurts the Muslim people."

But few people who emerged from a packed matinee showing in Jakarta on Thursday shared the clerics' worries.

"It's actually a beautiful film. The MUI branch is wrong about issuing a fatwa as the movie actually has increased my faith and not the other way around," insurance broker Ian Ramelan, 49, said.

"I'm a Muslim, my faith in Allah is stronger after watching this flick," he added, urging the clerics to worry more about rampant corruption in Indonesia than about Hollywood's apocalyptic Christmas blockbuster.

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Indonesian cleric arrested for marrying 12-year old girl

From Monsters and Critics:

Police arrested a Muslim cleric in Indonesia's Central Java province for marrying a 12-year-old girl in violation of the country's child-protection law, an officer said Wednesday.
Pujiono Cahyo Widianto, 43, revealed in August that he had taken a 12-year-old girl as a second wife in a traditional Islamic wedding ceremony, sparking criticism from child-protection groups.
Police in Semarang, the capital of Central Java, said they had charged Pujiono with sexual exploitation of a child.
The country's child-protection law defines children as people under 18.
'The maximum jail term for such an offense is 15 years,' said Roy Hardi Siahaan, chief detective for the local police.
Pujiono has defended his action, saying he would not consummate the marriage until the girl reaches puberty.
Child rights activists have accused Pujiono of paedophilia and of depriving the girl of an education.
Religious Affairs Minister Maftuh Basyuni also condemned the marriage and demanded it be cancelled.

While it is admirable that Indonesia has arrested the man, an AP report adds a relevant detail:

The cleric's wedding and proclamations that he intended also to marry two other girls, aged 7 and 9, angered many in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation with more than 210 million believers.

And finally another interesting point from Gulf News:

Pujiono Cahyo Widianto wed the girl before thousands of people in Central Java province last August.

Where was the outrage then? It looks like the real problem was his public intentions to marry the younger girls, not the marriage to the 12-year old.

(photo h/t Andre)

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A true, religious, moderate Muslim leader

Reading this, one can almost have hope.

BY BRET STEPHENS
JAKARTA, Indonesia--Suppose for a moment that the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world openly says "I am for Israel." Suppose he believes not only in democracy but in the liberalism of America's founding fathers. Suppose that, unlike so many self-described moderate Muslims who say one thing in English and another in their native language, his message never alters. Suppose this, and you might feel as if you've descended into Neocon Neverland.

In fact, you have arrived in Jakarta and are sitting in the small office of an almost totally blind man of 66 named Abdurrahman Wahid. A former president of Indonesia, he is the spiritual leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Islamic organization of some 40 million members. Indonesians know him universally as Gus Dur, a title of affection and respect for this descendant of Javanese kings. In the U.S. and Europe he is barely spoken of at all--which is both odd and unfortunate, seeing as he is easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism.

Conversation begins with some old memories. In the early 1960s, Mr. Wahid, whose paternal grandfather founded the NU in 1926 and whose father was Indonesia's first minister of religious affairs, won a scholarship to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which for 1,000 years had been Sunni Islam's premier institution of higher learning. Mr. Wahid hated it.

"These old sheikhs only let me study Islam's traditional surras in the old way, which was rote memorization," he recalls, speaking in the excellent English he learned as a young man listening to the BBC and Voice of America. "Before long I was fed up. So I spent my time reading books from the USIS [United States Information Service], the Egyptian National Library, and at the cinema. I used to watch three, four movies a day."

As Mr. Wahid saw it, the basic problem with Al-Azhar was that the state interfered in its affairs and demanded intellectual conformity--a lesson he carries with him to the present day. In 1966 he left Cairo for Baghdad University, where he encountered much the same thing: "The teaching [suffered from] conventionalism. You were not allowed to go your own way."

Here Mr. Wahid digresses into Islamic history. "In the second century of Islam, the Imam al-Shafi'i began remodeling the religion," he says. "He put into place the mechanism of understanding everything through law [Shariah]. Now people can't talk about that anymore. We cannot attack al-Shafi'i."

The point is crucial to Mr. Wahid's understanding of Islam as being something broader, deeper and better than the tradition-bound view of life imposed by traditional schools of Islamic law (all the more striking because Mr. Wahid is himself a leading theologian of the Shafi'i school). It is equally crucial to Mr. Wahid's politics, not to mention his relaxed approach to social issues.

"The globalization of ethics is always frightening to people, particularly Islamic radicals," he says in reference to a question about the so-called pornoaksi legislation. For the past three years Indonesian politics have been roiled by an Islamist attempt to label anything they deem sexually arousing to be a form of "porno-action." Mr. Wahid sees this as an assault on pancasila, Indonesia's secularist state philosophy from the time of its founding. He also sees it as an assault on common sense. "Young people like to kiss each other," he says, throwing his hands in the air. "Why not? Just because old people don't do it doesn't mean it's wrong."

Mr. Wahid is equally relaxed about some of the controversies that have recently erupted between Muslims and the West. Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech from last September was "a good speech, though as usual he pointed to the wrong times and the wrong cases." As for the furor over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, he asks "why should we be angry?" And he dismisses Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the al-Jazeera preacher who helped incite the cartoon riots, as an "angry, conventional" thinker.

What really concerns Mr. Wahid is what he sees as the increasingly degraded state of the Muslim mind. That problem is becoming especially acute at Indonesian universities and in the pesantren--the religious boarding schools that graduate hundreds of thousands of students every year. "We are experiencing the shallowing of religion," he says, bemoaning the fact that the boarding schools persist in teaching "conventional"--that word again--Islam.

But Mr. Wahid's critique is not just of formal Islamic education. He also attacks the West's philosophy of positivism, which, he says, "relies too much on the idea of conquering knowledge and mastering scientific principles alone." This purely empirical and essentially soulless view of things, broadly adopted by Indonesia's secular state universities, gives its students a bleak choice: "Either they follow the process or they are outside the process."

As a result, Western-style education in Indonesia has come to represent not just secularism but the negation of religion, to which too many students have responded by embracing fundamentalism. At the University of Indonesia, for example, an estimated three in four students are members or sympathizers of the "Prosperous Justice Party," or PKS, an ultra-radical Islamic party.

This raises the subject of religion and politics. "For us, an Islamic party is not a thing to follow," he says, adding that "religion and morality is tied to person, not a party." To illustrate the point, he observes that religious parties in the Muslim world have more often been the handmaids of dictatorship than democracy. "Whenever governments tried to enforce their institutions they use 'Islamic' people as potential allies." The Front for the Defense of Islam (FPI), a radical vigilante group that uses violent means to suppress "un-Islamic" behavior, was, he observes, originally a creature of the Indonesian military.

So why did Mr. Wahid, as a religious leader, make the choice to go into politics himself? He demurs at the suggestion of choice. "I am against politics, so to speak. In 1984 I tried hard to convince people that the NU should not be in politics." He was overruled by others in the organization, and eventually he founded the Party of National Awakening, or PKB. Yet the party, he insists, is "based on non-Islamic principles," a fact he illustrates by pointing to a nearby aide who is an Indonesian Protestant. "We have to go for plurality, for tolerance."

He also believes that the "only solution" to the challenge of Islamic radicalization in Indonesia is more democracy. But what about the example of Hamas, which came to power through democratic means, and of other groups like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood that would probably do the same if given the chance? Mr. Wahid's answer is to distinguish between what he calls "full democratization" and the "hollow imitation of democracy" that he sees taking place in Indonesia as well as among Arabs in Palestine and Iraq.

"The problem is not personalities, it is institutions," he says. "For the past 250 years the Americans have had not just Jefferson's concept of the rights of the individual but also Alexander Hamilton's belief in a strong state." In order to function properly, democracy requires competent government that can effectively uphold the rule of law. It also requires a broadly understood concept of self-rule, which is missing in too much of the developing world: "Here, ordinary citizens expect the government to do everything for them."

He therefore takes a fairly dim view of Iraq's democratic prospects. "Iraqis understood that Saddam had caused them trouble," and were grateful to be rid of him, he says. "But as for the U.S. concept of democracy, they don't understand it at all." The problem, he adds, goes double in the rest of the Arab world, where, he says, the prevailing view is that being a democracy is an expression of weakness, while being a dictatorship is a sign of strength.

What's needed, in other words, is for countries like Indonesia and Iraq to find a way to combine effective government with a powerful respect for the rights of the citizen. But how one goes about doing that is itself a deeper problem, a problem of culture. "How do we follow the West without [becoming] Westerners? How do you do that? I don't know."

In fact, Mr. Wahid has begun to develop an answer through two organizations he chairs, the Wahid Institute, run by his daughter Yenny, and LibForAll, an Indonesia- and U.S.-based nonprofit run by American C. Holland Taylor, which works to discredit Islamism's ideology of hatred. "It's up to LibForAll to introduce both sides to Muslims; to show that common principles are also the principles of Islam," Mr. Wahid says. "Hundreds of thousands of Muslim youth learn in countries where there is technological modernity. We need to [nurture] the emergence of a new kind of people who think in terms of being modern but still relate to the past."

In fact, that perfectly describes Mr. Wahid, who is keenly aware of his own roots in both Islamic and Javanese traditions. Among his ancestors are the last Hindu-Buddhist king of the Javanese Majapahit dynasty, and Sunan Kalijogo, a Sufi mystic who married Islamic and local traditions and, according to lore, defeated Islamic extremism in the 16th century. Can Mr. Wahid, heir to this venerable tradition, accomplish the same feat? "Right now, the fundamentalists think they're winning," he once told a friend. "But they're going to wake up one day and realize we beat them."

Possibly the most unbelievable part of his website is a joke page, filled with religious humor (some stolen Jewish jokes reworked as Muslim, but still...)

Unlike the Muslims that too many people pin their hopes on (see my comments here,) who generally have much larger numbers of Western followers than Muslim followers, this guy seems like the real deal - someone who can speak about Islam in the Islamic playing field and not be dismissed easily as a heretic or crackpot.

40 million followers is of course only a small percentage of the Muslim world, and he probably has no Arab followers at all, but this is the sort of person who could truly effect change and show the world's Muslims that there is another way to remain Muslim and not have to blindly follow the corrupt, immoral and shortsighted sheikhs and ayatollahs.

(Robert Spencer disagrees, saying that Wahid's views of the religion are so against a literal reading of the Koran as to make him meaningless. But in any religion that has reformed and changed over time there are going to be new ways to adapt the religion and parts that end up being all but ignored, which is effectively what Wahid is doing - and more importantly, succeeding at. If he has millions of followers, that indicates that his message is being accepted as being a valid interpretation of Islam; that is more important than finding Koranic texts that seem to disprove him. Both Christianity and Judaism have source texts that contradict themselves when read literally; this does not stop the religions from continuing on. Similarly, Islam can thrive with a less-literal interpretation of the Koran as long as there are respected leaders espousing it.)

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