Indonesian Muslim protesters display posters of Jews as apes (a Qur’anic epithet for Jews: 2:65; 5:60; 7:166), accompanied by “May Allah curse the Jews,” in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, Jan. 2, 2009. More than 10,000 Muslims marched through Indonesia’s capital (AP photo/ Dita Alangkara)
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The ADL just released Tuesday, 1/14/25, their massive, worldwide assessment (58,000 adults from 103 countries surveyed) of the prevalence of extreme Antisemitism, i.e., defined as agreement with at least 6 of 11 antisemitic stereotypes. Sadly, just like 10-years ago in 2014, Muslim nations are the most Antisemitic in the world by wide margins, certainly relative to Western Europe and North America (see tables below). Perhaps the most ominous finding was that since 2014, the prevalence of extreme Antisemitism in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, still touted for its alleged “moderate and tolerant” Islam, doubled from 48% to 96%, the second highest prevalence in the world!
As reported in 2017, this threat, was issued to the barely ~200 Asian descent Jews in Indonesia, the country at that time exhibiting only an average level of extreme Antisemitism (48%) vis-à-vis the world’s Muslims: “We don’t want you to use your kippah in this country [Indonesia]. If you continue to use it, we’ll kill you.”
The 2017 report also warned of “faith-based tension mounting in Indonesia, undermining its pluralist reputation,” successive governments had failed to address for “fear of being accused of attacking Islam.” Although still deemed a “tolerant and moderate” nation, following Indonesia’s 2019 elections, Reuters noted, forebodingly,
Hardline groups that were once on the fringes of Indonesian politics, most notably the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), have increasingly muscled their way into the mainstream and arguably provide a political voice for conservative Indonesian Muslims. The FPI and similar groups call for an Islamic state, with Islamic law for all Muslims in the country. That may be popular with many voters – according to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Muslims favor making sharia the official law.
ADL’s salient finding that 96% of Indonesians currently harbor extreme Antisemitism, in conjunction with recent prior data on popular (almost ¾) Indonesian longing for Sharia supremacism, and Indonesians’ overt menacing behavior toward the nation’s infinitesimal Jewish population, should put to rest the quixotic canard about “tolerant Indonesian Islam.”
