Storm Track Intimidation: Mystical Tree in Indonesia an Affront to Muslims

Here’s another sign of why I think Islam is a mental illness and produces bizarre perceived offences. Well, what do you expect from people whose main goal in life is to memorize some ancient religious book.

A Muslim Indonesian group attacked a century-old ‘mystical’ tree to propagate Islam.

Muslim hardliners chopped up a 100-year-old banyan tree in Jakarta to halt a rumor about its special powers from spreading, officials in the Indonesian city said Tuesday. "Surely, no one can believe that a tree is more powerful than a human," Zainal Arifin, the leader of the Muslim group that admits to attacking the tree, was quoted as saying by Detik.com news website. "We did this to propagate Islam."….. Arifin said the fact that nothing supernatural happened to the Muslims who attacked the tree proves that it has no mystical powers.

Duh! You think! So they had to cut down the tree to prove it? I wonder if TV psychics and other fuzzy headed thinking is a booming trade in Indonesia. This just anther sign of a secular state being intimidated into accepting one religion’s version of reality.

The governor of Jakarta has filed a complaint with police after a Muslim youth group hacked and damaged a 100-year-old banyan tree.

Whoa!! Did you catch that? The word ‘muslim’ and ‘youth’ actually tied together? Will wonders never cease? Could Indonesia be awakening from its slumber and see the threat before it as some European countries are beginning to see?

Perhaps we should take a cure from China who doesn’t take any crap from its Muslim population.

• All mosques must register with the government supervisory body, the Islamic Association of China.
• The party closely monitors activities at mosques in Xinjiang, where it wages a public battle against what it terms the “three evil forces” of religious extremism, separatism and terrorism.
• The government launched a “political re-education campaign” for imams in charge of mosques in Xinjiang following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

As for the rules for the celebration of Ramadan in China they let Muslims know that it’s their culture and social rules that are in charge.

• New restrictions were also placed on religious practise at schools and other institutions during Ramadan. “The authorities force Muslim schoolchildren to have lunch,” the US-based Uighur Human Rights Project said in a recent report. “State employees are under similar pressure,” it said. A religious affairs official in Khotan, a poor Uighur-majority area of southern Xinjiang, confirmed that a new regional regulation covering celebration of Ramadan had been in force for “five or six years”. “The cadres work for the state, and students and teachers also cannot take part in it (fasting),” said the official, who declined to give his name.
• “There is time limit for the religious activities in the mosques,” the Khotan official said by telephone. “All the activities should be finished before 11:30 a.m. and nobody can stay in the mosques at night.
• “All the restaurants should open as usual, to provide a service to the people who do not believe in Islam or to the tourists from outside (Xinjiang),” he said.

How refreshing - telling the minority to adapt to the host nation’s culture and social rules.