AS STAGE ONE of the war on terrorism picks up momentum, Americans continue our crash course in radical Islam. We’re getting used to the notion that Osama bin Laden represents an extremist movement with manifestations worldwide. Today’s lesson spotlights a group called the Laskar Jihad, now waging a holy war against Christians in eastern Indonesia, with a mounting death toll already in the thousands.
It hasn’t exactly been front-page news, but for the last 18 months this Islamist militia has been pressing its fight to convert, drive out, or kill Christians in the Moluccas and Central Sulawesi. The group claims to have 15,000 fighters; independent guesses put its strength nearer 3,000-5,000. A Western diplomat told Newsweek that “hundreds of foreign mujahedeen have fought with the Laskar Jihad.” Be that as it may, back in June 2000, BBC News quoted militant leader Jaffar Umar Thalib as saying he personally would be traveling to countries “such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan” to discuss the jihad.
For the most part, Indonesian Islam, introduced centuries ago by Arab traders, has been of the gentler Sufi strain and has coexisted peacefully with the Protestant and Catholic Christianity of some 13 percent of Indonesians. The Sukarno and Suharto regimes forbade the politicization of mosques. But in recent years, the government has pressed Muslims to emigrate from overcrowded Java to outlying Christian areas, exacerbating tensions, which the militants inflame.
Now, in the areas under attack, ethnic cleansing and forced conversion–sometimes followed by forced circumcision for men, women, and children–are the order of the day, according to Paul Marshall, senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House, in Washington, D.C. An e-mail Marshall received Monday from a Christian contact in Indonesia conveys the present danger: “Over 50,000 Christians are in terrible peril as I write. The Jihad are attacking and the situation is critical. Unless there is a miracle many lives will be lost. I have just talked with Christian leaders in Tentena and they are crying out for help. They are desperate for food, medicine and PROTECTION. They are completely surrounded. . . .”
Marshall, who is general editor of an annual report on religious freedom and persecution around the world, stresses the lack of solid statistics but estimates the number of dead so far at up to 7,000.
Incidentally, if the holy war in Indonesia doesn’t keep you awake nights, be sure to take in Daniel Pipes’s explanation of the Islamists’ plans for the United States: yes, farfetched though it may seem, mass conversion to Islam and a Sharia state. Pipes’s authoritative article in the current Commentary is a must-read.
Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
