Now Indonesian Christians are charging that the church burnt down in jihad violence was actually torched by Indonesian soldiers. From the Sydney Morning Herald, with thanks to Jean-Luc:
Christians have claimed that Indonesian soldiers razed a church to the ground and looted houses in the fourth day of bitter religious fighting in Ambon.More than 100 Ambonese Christians demonstrated outside police headquarters to demand action against at least five soldiers who they said had burnt the Nazaret Church early yesterday.
Several witnesses at the smouldering remains of the church insisted soldiers from the army's 111th Airborne Battalion had been involved in the attack.
Piet Hatu, whose lives 50 metres from the church, said he was one of about 30 people guarding the church when soldiers arrived around 7.30pm on Tuesday and said they would help protect it.
The soldiers stayed with them until around 2am when small bombs began exploding next to the church and the soldiers ordered everyone to leave. "They said it's too dangerous, we have to go. We went to the road about 50 metres away and waited and after about half an hour they burnt the church," he said.
He was adamant the soldiers had burnt it and eight houses, but said he did not see them doing so and had no proof.
He said it was possible the army had attacked wrongly believing that Christians like him supported the tiny separatist group, Republic of South Maluku, whose supporters staged a march on Sunday which sparked the violence.
The spokesman for the army's Maluku command, Major Paiman, denied the military had burnt the church. He agreed his men were there.
He did not know how many soldiers had been assigned to guard the church and by late yesterday he had heard no reports from them of what had happened.
According to the Barnabus Fund, which monitors carefully the condition of Christians worldwide, several thousand churches -- the initial figure was 2,300, later raised to close to 4,000 --have been destroyed, by Muslims, in Indonesia, in 2003 alone.
Not a word, not a syllable, has been devoted to the destruction on this scale in The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS. Not newsworthy? Not, possibly, of relevance to the attitude of hostility toward American infidels in Iraq? Not relevant to the ongoing Jihad against Israel? Not relevant to the Muslim demands in France, Italy, Spain, England?
Why the news blackout -- are we all doing the bidding of some behind-the-scenes Grand Panjandrum of Interfaith Harmony, determined to keep the truth from us, so that we may draw our own melancholy conclusions?
The ONLY religion allowed to be defended in the Western Media (with a sanitized view taught in the US Public School System) is Islam - all others are suspect even though Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, etc have been and are DAILY being slaughtered by "peace-loving" Muslims throughout the world.
jihan
Itis possible that during the 1990s several MILLION fundamentalis Muslim from the Middle East illegally entered Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations (including Cambodia). Unlike other illegal immigration activity, these illegal immigrants arrived with plenty of cash and a political agenda: to turn SOutheast Asia intoa vassal state of the Middle Eastern theocracies. This was a much under-reported topic in the worldwide media, which unfortunately due to this under-reporting, hinders the world's overall understanding of what has been going on here. This silent invasion is almost certainly the source of much of the turmoil that plagues the SOutheast Asian region today. Yet I see little evidence that Jihadwatch is aware of this.
One outgrowth of this situation may be that the Indonesian armed forces were bribed by al-qaeda,something which would go a long way in explaining the disastrous situation occurring in Indonesia's Maluku province today, and Jakarta's seeming inability to end it.
I too have read the Barnabus figures.
As Hugh rightly points out added to this horror is another horror- the almost complete silence of the west or its press to report any of it.
Along with the massacres and persecution of christians on the african continent this is a tottally taboo subject.
How come ?
1 the unewsworthyness of reporting the suffering of non westerners .
2 The fear of causing internal muslim backlash in the west and the accusations from CAIR et al of rascist propaganda perhaps leading to more attacks.
3 exposure of the UNs ineptitude in even approaching this subject {let alone the oil for food scandals} would be an act of betrayal by the predominantly pro UN left wing press of the west.
in the same way that Israel must be offered as a sacrificial lamb to Islam so must the Black Christians of the third world.
So the Blacks and the Jews do not attack us, hence they are expendable.
But we bow to the will of those Muslims who do and use oil as a weapon.
shame on us.