Southeast Asia’s most unruly response to the film has erupted in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. Riot police and protesters hurled stones and tear-gas grenades this week near the US Embassy in Jakarta. The Indonesian vigilante group Islamic Defenders Front, one the rally’s chief organizers, has vowed to repeat these raucous rallies in coming days.
“I hope it becomes an important lesson, for all Western countries, to no longer allow insulting the Prophet Mohammed and Islam in any form,” said Habib Rizieq, the group’s leader, in a statement posted online. “Allah Akbar!”
Recent anti-“Innocence of Muslims” rallies in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia mark the Southeast Asian debut of a phenomenon that has swept the world from England to Africa to the Middle East and beyond.
Southeast Asian Muslims’ anger over the America’s perceived tolerance of the film is perhaps owed to their own government’s tight controls on expression that is liable to start riots. When most of the region's own governments prove reasonably adept at censoring far less incendiary videos, there is a sense that America should at least attempt to thwart the film's spread and lock up its director.
Even in Singapore, a tiny state with a 15 percent Muslim minority, Home Affairs Minister Teo Chee Hean denounced the film by proclaiming that “freedom of expression does not mean that one has unfettered rights to insult and denigrate another’s religion or race.” Full story
