‘Facade of tolerance’: Is Indonesia’s blasphemy law unfair to minority groups?
- Ethnic Chinese Christian evangelist Jozeph Paul Zhang’s provocative video on Islam has sparked controversy in majority-Muslim Indonesia
- The scandal has cast the spotlight on how convictions under the blasphemy law have always been of members of minority groups, even though the law is meant to protect other religions besides Islam
The 40-year-old claimed he was the “26th Prophet” and had a mission to correct “heresies”.
Several Muslim clerics publicly called for Zhang’s murder, sympathisers of the Islamic State terror group insisted he be beheaded, and Indonesian politicians scrambled to deal with the fallout.
After Zhang, whose legal birth name is Shindy Paul Soerjomoelyono, was reported to the police for “hate speech” and “blasphemy against Islam”, authorities declared him a suspect and vowed to enlist Interpol’s help to track him down.
In an interview with media outlet Deutsche Welle after news of the scandal broke, Zhang said he merely wanted to draw attention to the Indonesian government’s discrimination against minority groups.
He claimed the authorities were betraying Indonesia’s state ideology of “Pancasila”, which promotes unity amid Indonesia’s diversity of cultures and religions, and also alleged that 200 churches had been forcibly shut under the current administration.