In another court
Meanwhile, in Indonesia:
An Indonesian court has sentenced a Buddhist woman to 18 months in prison for blasphemy after she was accused of insulting Islam.
Meiliana, a 44-year-old ethnic Chinese woman, had complained the Muslim call to prayer, which is repeated five times a day, was being played too loudly at the mosque near her house in North Sumatra.
She burst into tears as the presiding judge, Wahyu Prasetyo Wibowo announced her sentence on Tuesday and she was taken from the court in handcuffs.
Damn I hate religion sometimes. This is one of those times. People shouldn’t be persecuted by any “call to prayer” in the first place, much less one that’s electronically amplified, much less five times a day every day starting at dawn.
In July 2016, mobs burned and ransacked at least 14 Buddhist temples throughout Tanjung Balai, a port town on Sumatra, following reports of Meiliana’s complaint about a mosque’s noisy loudspeakers.
Her lawyer, Ranto Sibarani, said they would appeal the verdict.
“We will appeal the verdict because the judges could not prove that our client has committed blasphemy,” he told The Jakarta Post.
Another reason to hate religion. Muslims persecuting Buddhists in Indonesia, Buddhists persecuting Muslims in Burma.
Responding to the sentencing, Usman Hamid, Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director, said: “Making a complaint about noise is not a criminal offence. This ludicrous decision is a flagrant violation of freedom of expression.
“Sentencing someone to 18 months in prison for something so trivial is a stark illustration of the increasingly arbitrary and repressive application of the blasphemy law in the country.”
It’s also a flagrant violation of people’s right to sleep, work, read, think, talk without amplified yammerings about religion disturbing them five times a day every day. A pox on religion.
Which should be irrelevant. Even if she did commit blasphemy, it should not be against the law. In fact, I would love to see a law that required at least one act of blasphemy per day. Wouldn’t that be fun? (Of course, I probably manage to exceed that, anyway).
There’s probably more to the persecution of that unfortunate women than religious prejudice. She’s described as “ethnic Chinese’, anti-Chinese racism has a long and deadly history in Indonesia.
Blasphemy laws are indicative of the weakness of a religion, not its strength. We don’t hear or read much about Indonesia as an example of a ‘secular Muslim-majority democracy’ recently. It’s only a matter of time before it, like Turkey, goes down the Islamic plug hole.