Beyond Wallacia

ANZAC Day in Indonesia 70 years after the Battle of Java

2012-04-20T17:28:00.000+08:00

THERE IS AN EXTRA EFFORT this year to inform Australian residents in Indonesia of commemorations marking ANZAC Day - the memorial day shared by Australia and New Zealand. In Jakarta, the capital city, the Dawn Service is traditionally held in the picturesque Allied War Cemetery in Menteng Pulo. Unlike Dawn Services in Australia conducted by the RSL, Jakarta’s for some reason continues a specific Christian reference; perhaps this is due to the sharing of management with the New Zealand Embassy....

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Flakey comment about snow but great photo

2010-01-08T16:04:00.002+08:00

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall in Britain would become ... “… a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he told The Independent in March 2000.. Flash forward 10 years: This striking image taken by Nasa's Terra satellite on 7 January shows the UK deep in the clutches of the current “cold snap”. Dr David Viner...

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How was your New Year’s Eve?

2009-01-01T03:13:00.002+08:00

In Indonesia, the ‘Gregorian’ calendar is used officially and January 1 is a public holiday. The Muslim new year, which was celebrated quietly in the mosques on December 29, is also a national holiday … and is actually a double celebration for the 150 million people living on the island of Java. Their traditional calendar used to be Hindu (and still starts in the western year 78 AD) but was made to line up with the Islamic Arabian calendar’s lunar months by the Muslim Mataram Empire in 1633 AD....

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The enlightenment driven away ... ?

2007-03-05T08:25:00.000+08:00

British-American writer Christopher Hitchins uses words of the poet W.H. Auden to illustrate the "pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally 'fundamentalist'" as a religious faith which is "simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships." One of Auden's most beloved poem, September 1, 1939, laments Europe's toppling into a chasm of darkness and reflects on how this catastrophe for civilization had come...

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Indonesian editor on trial for Prophet cartoons

2006-09-01T00:24:00.001+08:00

While Tommy Thomdeanm, cartoonist for Indonesia's leading daily newspaper, Kompas, is being feted by the Islamic Republic of Iran for his entry in a $12,000 first-prize competition to insult millions of murdered Jews (see Indonesian may win world's 'best' Holocaust cartoon), one of his colleagues is on trial in Jakarta for publishing cartoons of a different sort. Teguh Santosa, editor of the online version of daily Rakyat Merdeka, is accused of religious defamation under the Indonesian penal...

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Foreign aircrew who died for Indonesian freedom

2006-08-23T16:31:00.001+08:00

Rahardjo Mustadjab, a former Indonesian Air Force pilot, contributed an interesting article to today's Jakarta Post on the origins of the Indonesian Air Force and its choice of 29 July as "Air Force Dedication Day". Following the unconditional surrender of Imperial Japanese forces throughout Asia in 1945, nationalists declared the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia over the territory of the Dutch East Indies on 17 August. Unfortunately, the Netherlands, itself just liberated from Nazi...

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Nervous Gaddafi slowed nuclear bomb spread

2006-08-19T18:43:00.001+08:00

It appears that Iran and North Korea may soon be armed with nuclear weapons. One privateer gave them a head-start. James Button writes in today's The Age (Melbourne): Just days before the bombs fell on Iraq in March, 2003, Britain's secret service got an unexpected phone call. It led two MI6 officers to private rooms in a Mayfair hotel. There, a nervous young man told them that "the leader" was ready to reconsider his weapons of mass destruction program. The agents were astonished. The leader...

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Indonesian may win world's 'best' Holocaust cartoon

2006-08-15T02:35:00.000+08:00

Indonesian cartoonist Tommy Thomdean is in the running for the prize for the world's "best" anti-Jewish-Holocaust cartoon being presented by Iran Cartoon and Iran's largest selling newspaper Hamshahri. Interest is mounting as an exhibition of the competition's 204 finalists from the more than 1,100 cartoons submitted by participants from 60 countries was opened in Tehran's Palestine contemporary art museum yesterday. The top three cartoons will be announced on 2 September with the winners being...

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Arab media comments: Rejecting 'agents' of Iran

2006-08-11T23:40:00.000+08:00

Despite heart-rending visual imagery of war in Lebanon and the Palestinian districts, public attacks on Lebanon's Party of God (Hizb'Allah) and its militia, as well as the Islamic Republic of Iran's strategic goals, have become commonplace in the Sunni Arab world since the start of Israel's powerful (yet underwhelming) counter-attack against Hizb'Allah provocation from southern Lebanon. Amir Taheri, for instance, the Iranian-born senior columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat, the thirty-year-old...

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Hizb'Allah hits UN post: Kofi Annan not yet outraged

2006-08-06T18:11:00.000+08:00

A Hizb'Allah rocket attack on an UNIFIL monitoring base in southern Lebanon today, injured three Chinese members of the interim peace keeping force, just hours after China called on the United Nations to ensure the security of UNIFIL forces, China's official Xinhua News Agency announced. "The rocket landed near our post at 11:55 a.m. (0855 GMT) as an Israeli military unit passed by a village close to the post," Luo Fuqiang, a Chinese officer who heads a sapper battalion, was quoted as...

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Indonesian Islamists threaten "new wave" of terror

2006-08-04T02:20:00.000+08:00

The Indonesian-based Asian Muslim Youth Movement claims it has sent hundreds of South East Asian suicide bombers around the world with a mission to attack Jewish interests in countries that support Israel such as Britain, the US and possibly Australia. Its leader, Islamist author Suaib Bidu, warned The Australian that thousands more jihadis were preparing to join the resistance against Israel and die as"martyrs". Bidu said a "passing-out" ceremony for more than 3000 jihadis will be held...

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Ahmadinejad very clear on Israel's "elimination"

2006-08-03T02:38:00.000+08:00

Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dropped all opacity regarding the fate of Israel (see Subtle Ahmadinejad. What does he really mean?) and finally got to the point. He told delegates to the emergency summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference being held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that Muslims should support an immediate ceasefire in southern Lebanon as a stage in the destruction of Israel. "Though elimination of the Zionist regime is the main solution to the current crisis, at...

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Malaysia's UMNO Youth to boycott Jewish products

2006-08-01T01:09:00.000+08:00

Malaysian blogger Husin Tapa is impressed with the chutzpa of investment banker Khairy Jamaluddin, the son-in-law of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and leader of the governing party's UMNO Youth League, who led the recent anti-Israeli and anti-US demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur during which he attempted to barge into the convention centre to rebuke US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "Khairy?s action reminds us of those days when Anwar Ibrahim or Ibrahim Ali and some others led...

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Impartial RTM continues reports on Israeli atrocities

2006-07-30T00:55:00.000+08:00

Malaysia's state broadcaster, Radio Televisyen Malaysia, will continue broadcasting reports of "Israeli atrocities" in Lebanon and Palestine, Deputy Information Minister Datuk Ahmad Zahid announced. A South East Asian multicultural and multiracial state but with a Malay Muslim majority, Malaysia does not recognise Israel. "The government has no other motives in broadcasting the reports but to explain to the people the importance of unity to prevent outside elements from threatening the peace...

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Jihad curse spoils good news from Papua province

2006-07-29T01:29:00.000+08:00

The Jihad cause seems to erupt whenever there is good news about democracy in Muslim-majority countries. For instance, in Indonesia's two New Guinea provinces, Papua and Irian Jaya Barat, the first direct elections for their provincial governors -- by law reserved for ethnic Papuans -- attracted the participation of more than 80 percent of entitled voters in both provinces as citizens appear willing to give Special Autonomy status an opportunity for implementation. The inauguration of both...

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Lebanon background: The Hizb'Allah missile myth

2006-07-28T16:15:00.000+08:00

From Lebanon resident, anti-Israel activist and middle-east affairs writer and commentator, Robert Fisk: " ... it's Syria that is being lined up for attack next, not the Saddam Cabinet. And the signs were clear long ago. "Take the article in The New York Times by Larry Collins - joint author with Dominique Lapierre of O Jerusalem! - which last month announced that the Syrian-supported Hizbollah resistance in Lebanon had 10,000 missiles that could fly to Tel Aviv and 'leave in their wake...

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Australian citizens in Lebanon: two opposing stories

2006-07-27T23:57:00.000+08:00

A dual Australian-Israel citizen was killed in action with the Israeli army in southern Lebanon yesterday. He was one of nine Israeli soldiers killed in a Hizb'Allah ambush near the guerilla stronghold of Bint Jbeil. Sergeant Asaf Namer was close to completing his two years of volunteer military service. Born in Israel, he emigrated to Sydney, Australia, as a child with his mother and older sister in 1991. He returned to his birth country to be with his father and was living with his...

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From peace promoter to anger "just beyond belief"

2006-07-25T15:56:00.000+08:00

Nobel peace laureate Betty Williams, one of Northern Ireland's peace movement leaders in the 1970s, now questions the concept of 'non-violence'. Addressing young people at Mikhail Gorbachev's Earth Dialogues forum, being held in Brisbane, Australia, Mrs Williams now 64 and head of the World Centres of Compassion for Children International, said she had a "very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent." "Right now, I would love to kill George Bush,"...

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Socialists rally around world in support of Hizb'Allah

2006-07-23T23:08:00.000+08:00

According to its official program, Hizb'Allah-Al-thawra Al-Islamiya fi Lubnan (Party of God of Lebanon) is a unit of the world Muslim "vanguard" which was "made victorious by God in Iran" and which "obey the orders of one leader ... Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini." It lists as a main objective "the destruction of Israel ... the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve ... Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty...

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Security Council ponders new Lebanon intervention

2006-07-21T02:15:00.000+08:00

Kofi Annan's presentation on the Lebanon-Israel crisis to the UN Security Council last night had an air of grim realism. After declaring Hizb'Allah the aggressor and condemning Israel for excessive force, he put aside the blame game to discuss steps to de-escalation. While demanding a ceasefire for humanitarian purposes, he agreed that full cessation of hostilities were unlikely until Israel's abducted soldiers were returned and its minimum security issues - removal or disarming of Hizb'Allah...

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Malaysians demonstrate for Israel's destruction

2006-07-21T00:40:00.000+08:00

Hundreds of Muslims in Malaysia burnt Israeli flags and accused the Jewish state of terrorism in protests against the country's military actions in Lebanon. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's largest city, hundreds of protesters, many of them linked to government parties, rallied outside the US Embassy chanting, "Destroy Israel, down with Israel!" According to reports, demonstrators set afire about one dozen Israeli flags and activists handed US embassy officials a memorandum demanding the UN...

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Subtle Ahmadinejad. What does he really mean?

2006-07-20T08:47:00.000+08:00

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said the volcano of the rage of nations is on the verge of eruption. "The Zionists themselves have realized that they have launched a risky move and are aware that the flame of the fury of the regional states will set them ablaze," he added. "The world is standing on the threshold of great development." - 20 July, Islamic Republic News Agency. President Ahmadinejad warned "bullying powers" will burn in the fire of regional nations' wrath. The world is on...

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What the UN's 2,000 soldiers are doing in Lebanon

2006-07-19T13:39:00.000+08:00

Urging the international community to "end the fighting and the killing," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan backed a UN "stabilisation force" to take control of areas in Southern Lebanon corrently controlled by the Hizb'Allah party and its armed forces. He said it should be "larger than the 2,000-man force we have there [and] have a different concept of operation and, hopefully, a different mandate from the Security Council that will allow them to operate." (AP) "Indonesia is prepared to...

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Lebanese President comments on security forces

2006-07-19T01:24:00.000+08:00

Lebanon's Syrian-backed president, Emile Lahoud, has accused neighbouring Israel of wanting to "destroy Lebanon" and "paralyze its security forces." His comments on Israeli plans were made during a visit to Lebanon national army military barracks east of Beirut where 11 soldiers were killed in an Israeli raid earlier Tuesday. According to Jaffee Center's Middle East Military Balance, there are 64,000 members of Lebanon's armed forces, which has 36 helicopters, four shoulder-launched missiles,...

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Background and objectives of Hizb'Allah and Hamas

2006-07-18T12:50:00.000+08:00

Hizb'Allah-Al-thawra Al-Islamiya fi Lubnan (Party of God), an Iranian-backed Lebanese Islamic Shiite group, was founded in 1982 and subsumed members of the 1980s coalition of groups known collectively as Islamic Jihad. Following Lebanon's 2005 national elections, Hizb'Allah holds 23 seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament and participates in the Lebanese government with two direct ministers. However it still maintains its own military force, independent of the Lebanese National Army. The...

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