Bali Low

I must admit, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The Balinese, a majority Hindu culture of a particularly unique variety, is fed up to the back teeth with the aggressive, Javanese Islamic element now steadily populating their island (and bombing it).

And I don’t blame them one little bit.

SMS hate campaign in Bali

BALI'S police chief has called for calm amid a phone-message campaign urging Balinese Hindus to kill all Muslims on the island in retaliation for the triple suicide bombings by suspected Islamic extremists.

A mobile phone text message received by the AAP wire news service urges Balinese people to "wake up from a long sleep". The majority-Hindu holiday island had been invaded by Muslim settlers, mostly from neighbouring Java, the message says.

Calling on all recipients to gather en masse and attack Muslim street-food sellers and anyone else of Islamic faith, it reads: "Destroy the Bali destroyers from outside Bali. We'll burn a group of Muslim bakso (meatball) traders, Muslim satay sellers and anyone else with Muslim identity," the anonymous text says.

"Raze to the ground all these groups so they won't live in Bali.”

Bali counts almost 3 million Hindus and only 186,000 Muslims, an anomaly in the world's most-populous Muslim nation, which counts 180 million people of Islamic faith.
It's also important to remember that the latest bomb site, Jimbaran beach, was frequented by as many Balinese as foriegn tourists; we're not the only infidels the Islamics want to kill.

Apparently, Bali’s leaders are now discussing moves to have Bali effectively quarantined from the rest of the Indonesian archipelago, so as to protect the Balinese culture [from the Islamics]. Personally, I don’t like their chances, but next time you hear someone saying we should support the Balinese, understand, this is exactly what they mean: support the Balinese. . .

Don't you love the press, though. 'SMS hate campaign'? Any more hateful than setting off bombs under innocent people, I wonder? Of course, the inevitable parallels with Ambon are being drawn:
Bali police chief General Made Mangku Pastika said the text campaign threatened Bali's bomb-battered reputation for religious tolerance, warning it could turn Bali into a new Ambon. The eastern province of Maluku based in Ambon was wracked by a five-year conflict between Muslims and Christian bloodshed in the late 1990s and 2000, attracting extremist Islamic militias into Ambon from other parts of Indonesia.

For my part, when we start talking about religious tolerance, and we want to draw parallels with situations like Ambon, it's kind of important to remember what lead up to the start of that particular little slash-fest. . .

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