Thursday, August 13, 2009

INDONESIA: Tabloid expert declares terrorists poised to take over ...

Daily Telegraph resident blogger Tim Blair is worried about Indonesia being on the verge of taken over by the likes of Noordin Top. Apparently there are Noordin Tops in schools across Indonesia.

Understanding the cultures of non-Western countries and non-white peoples isn't one of Blair's strengths. So it's not surprising that Blair can't notice it's highly unlikely that Indonesian boarding schools are filled with Malaysians.

And what of these boarding schools? Well, Blair describes Indonesia's pesantren as ...

... these terror-breeding fundo-pods ...

... and after noting that there are 45,000 of these, states ...

The scale of the problem becomes clear. It’s broad-based rather than Top-down, you could say.

Yes, that was quite amusing. What's even more amusing is Blair's refusal to do some basic elementary research on indigenous Indonesian boarding schools and their role in Indonesian society, instead of writing them all off as terror factories.

And we all know about these nasty Indonesian schools. Blair's ideological compatriots in the US were busy during the last US Presidential Election trying to prove that US President Obama attended an Indonesian pesantran.

If Indonesian boarding schools were such terror factories, surely the biggest terrorist on the planet is this bloke. Still, Blair isn't the only "expert" to pontificate on pesantren.