A Governor Accused Of Blasphemy In Indonesia. Islamists And The 1965 Genocide

     A non Muslim governor in Indonesia is accused of blasphemy. He allegedly told voters they were being deceived if they believe a certain verse in the Quran prohibits Muslims from electing a non Muslim as leader. For saying that, he is now facing five years in prison for blasphemy.
      Islamists in that still democratic nation insist Muslims must not be ruled by a kafir ( i.e.,non believer in Islam, a generally derogatory term), and that the governor must be punished for blasphemy.
      The governor, a Christian man of Chinese descent, is up for re election. Many assert that his leadership has been transparent and not corrupt. His opponents have much to gain by playing the Islamist card. By making this about religion, evil politicians have an easy way to stir up people's hatreds and thereby gain political and economic control.
       Indonesia is one of the only Muslim majority states in the world that is a secular democracy. The Indonesia of today is far different than the Indonesia of the 1960's. In the mid 1960's, unleashed and egged on by politicians and military leaders, Islamists and others killed hundreds of thousands (some place the numbers slaughtered between one to three million people) of their fellow Indonesians. It started as a killing spree against alleged communists, and quickly spread to include the settling of personal and religious vendettas (Islamists declared Indonesia had to be purged of atheists, which opened the doors to further unrestrained mass killings of innocent people). Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of defenseless people were hacked to death. It was not the clean killing some associate with a murderous regime by a bullet to the head. It was unrestrained mobs and death squads hacking and chopping off their imagined enemies limbs, their penises, the breasts of women, and heads.
        The United States had a hand in this genocide. So did Sweden, which provide arms to the Indonesian military. (Source- Wikipedia, Indonesian Mass killings 1965 to 1966.) So eager was the United States to oppose communists, it did not recognize the genocidal nature of Islamists. (Decades later, in supporting the Islamists in Afghanistan against the former Soviet Union, the United States made a similar mistake.)
         The world better pray that Indonesia chooses the path of tolerance, religious freedom and democracy. If Indonesia goes the way of many Islamist regimes, it will mean genocide for its religious minorities. It will mean the murder of untold thousands of Muslims that are moderate, reasonable human beings. It will be the slaughter of 1965 all over again.