For most Indians, it is hard not to feel a deep sense of historic gratitude towards Israel and the Jewish people. The State of Israel came to our military aid in just about every war India fought as an independent nation since 1947. Our elected leaders, in their vanity, polished their statesmanlike credentials denouncing Israel at every possible international gathering, even as they kept on turning to the Jewish State for help in times of dire need, whether civilian or military. From Golda Meir to Ariel Sharon, Israel never turned down any request.

Getting nothing in return, the tiny and beleaguered nation paid a price for its support for India. At times, adversely affecting its relations with China or annoying its most vital ally, the United States, by extending support to a “socialist” country at the height of the Cold War.

If there ever was a true sign of goodwill extended from one nation to another, Israel had shown it toward India and so many other nations, from Zaire to Haiti and elsewhere.

Despite this, it took India more than four decades just to treat Israel as an equal partner on the world stage — when India established full diplomatic relations with Israel in January 1991.

India, however, had one redeeming quality. Although our political leaders hitched their wagon to the Soviet Union and the Pan-Arab nationalism in the early days of the Cold War, the Hindus of India, who constitute an 80% majority of the country’s population, have been steadfast and consistent in their support for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. An international survey conducted by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2009 found Indians having the most favorable opinion of Israel, even ahead of U.S. respondents by a small margin. In August 2014, at the height of Gaza conflict, the city of Calcutta staged a 20,000-strong rally in support of the Jewish State, making it probably the largest pro-Israel rally that Asia ever witnessed.

Finally, with the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2014, the India’s official policies have begun to reflect the desires and aspirations of the majority Hindu population of the nation.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New York, on September 29, 2014. (Image source: Israel Government Press Office)

To become a successful nation, we realize that we have to emulate the Jewish quest for spiritual and worldly learning. We need a nation of empowered men and women, free and fearless to develop social, technological, entrepreneurial and humanitarian creativity, even while under constant attack.

The homecoming of the Jews and restoration of the Jewish State in its historic land has been a source of great hope for us Hindus. When we see the restoration of Jewish State and revival of Judaism in its ancient land, we Hindus see ourselves.

If Judaism is incomplete without the Jewish homeland, the essence of Hinduism is indivisible with the geography of India. Just as Jews were forced out and in exile for millennia, Hindus too suffered a millennium of Islamic and later European subjugation in their own homeland.

After surviving the most vicious genocide in human history — a brutal and systematic attempt by Nazi Germany to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe, claiming six million Jewish lives, the Jewish people worked to create a nation based on democracy, freedom, equality for people of all religions and ethnicities — the only democracy in the Middle East.

Today, over a million Arabs enjoy equal citizenship rights in Israel, and a level of religious liberty and rule of law never seen before in the Middle East. Arab Israelis are present in all walks of Israeli life; holding top positions in business, academia, media, government as well as military leadership.

The tiny nation of Israel absorbed wave after wave of immigration, including a million Jews driven out of the Arab lands soon after the creation of Jewish State in 1948, Ethiopian Jews, and Russians escaping communism. Today, Israel is home to over 80,000 Jews of Indian origin. They have been fully integrated, and have excelled in all areas of society. They serve gallantly in the Israel Defense Force and bring glory to the country in sports. An IDF soldier of Indian origin, Barak Refael Degorker, was killed by Hamas during the Gaza conflict of 2014. Mumbai-born Sarah Avraham became Israel’s 2012 women’s Thai boxing champion.

As the nation-states of Europe drive toward an impending disaster in failing to assert their spiritual and national identity in the face of the massive influx of Muslim migrants, only the example of Israel offers us hope.

We must admit the failures, based on European liberalism, in our nation-building project. Western-style “affirmative-action” has failed to rid the country of caste-based discrimination, and all that the European style of hyper-sensitivity towards “Muslim sentiments” has done is stifle cultural freedoms in the country. India became the first nation to ban Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, before even Iran, Saudi Arabia and other theocratic Islamic regimes announced their fatwas and bans. For decades, India shied away from technological and academic cooperation with Israel. India seemed to have been trying to act even more Arab than the Arabs themselves.

Only an enlightened nation, built on a strong bedrock of Hindu unity, can ensure a secure and prosperous future for India. We cannot build a nation on foundations of an unjust and immoral caste system.

Just as the resurgence of Judaism in its historic and ancestral homeland means no threat to the Muslim faith, Hindu resurgence and unity should cause no harm to religious minorities of other faiths. Countries that would like to succeed and thrive would do well to follow the example of Israel.

The terrorism originating from neighboring Muslim lands must not only be countered militarily, but also with a renewed assertion of our on spiritual and national identity.

Arabs and Muslims might surely realize that they themselves have been the biggest losers of the wars of fanaticism they have waged, and turn their attention to rebuilding their societies and facing the real issues of violence, bigotry, ignorance and poverty — to name just a few.

Until then, we all have a nation to build and a home to defend.

Recent terrorist attacks in Brussels, Mumbai, Paris, Istanbul and Ankara are simply what Israel has been living with for decades — and India, France, Belgium and Turkey do not have “settlements.” The conflict is not about “settlements”. It is about one group of people trying imposing its will, culture, religion and way of life on another group. With Israel, the “settlements” are only the pretext. If you look at any map of “Palestine,” it has the exact outlines of Israel.

It is beyond our scope, as Indians, to heal the pathologies of the Muslim world. We can only limit the damage by defending our home and securing our national borders.

Until that day comes, we would all do well to stand with Israel.

Vijeta Uniyal is an Indian current affairs analyst based in Europe.

Humanity seldom seems to learn its lessons. The governments of the world’s leading democracies appear to be suffering from this predicament in their nuclear dealings with the Islamic Republic of Iran. To avoid catastrophe, democracies need quickly to correct their course.

One of the fatal blunders of Western democracies is their repeated commitment to appeasing and delaying action against aggressive regimes. Between the two World Wars, despite plenty of evidence of the widely-declared global racist agenda of Germany’s Adolf Hitler, democratic powers waited to take action until it was too late. Hitler was able to carry out a genocide that continues to haunt many nations.

Today, Western democratic governments, with their Eastern counterparts such as India, seem on a similar course in dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The domestic and international agenda of the Khomeinist government is publicly documented. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, part of the regime’s open grand strategy is to inflict “death to America,” the leader of the free world, and replace it with its own radical version of Islamic governance. Under the current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Iran has been gaining influence across the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and South Asia. Despite nuclear talks with the West, Iran’s goal of “death to America” remains. The Ayatollah himself even called for America’s destruction amid nuclear negotiations.

Currently, Iran is a major player in aiding the autocratic regime of Basher al-Assad in Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza and the Islamic State (IS) in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

To advance its imperial agenda, Iran has proceeded to develop its conventional and nuclear ballistic missile program. According to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Iran has “one of the largest inventories of ballistic missiles in the Middle East.”

In line with Iran’s missile development program, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy Rear Commander, Ali Fadavi, announced: “Based on the fifth five-year plan, we should materialize our objective of mass-producing military speedboats with the speed of 80 knots per hour… and are equipped with missiles with a range of 100km; the vessels no one can catch.”

Aside from its military aspirations, since the fall of the Shah in 1979, successive Iranian governments have voiced their plans to annihilate the State of Israel, the only pluralist democracy in the Middle East, and an effective military deterrent to Iran’s designs in the region.

Hostile messages have been pouring forth from Iran. Mohammad Neza Naghdi, Commander of the Basij paramilitary force, stated in clear terms in April 2015, that, “The destruction of Israel is non-negotiable.”

Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a former IRGC commander and a top military aide to Khamenei, warned in May 2015, that “More than 80,000 missiles are ready to rain down on Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

As late as November, Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei himself tweeted, “This barbaric, wolflike & infanticidal regime of #Israel which spares no crime has no cure but to be annihilated.”

Bewilderingly, Western democracies have chosen to overlook Iran’s speeches and actions. They chose instead to appease the regime. Last July, despite genuinely serious reservations expressed by international strategic and military experts (including retired American military officers), the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany – the four democracies in the P5+1 — concluded a nuclear deal with themselves that they proposed to Iran. Iran so far has not signed the deal, and apparently even if it did, according to the U.S. Department of State, the deal would not be legally binding.

Tehran will greatly benefit financially from the terms of the nuclear agreement in the months to come. Under the administration of President Barack Obama, nuclear sanctions against Iran have been lifted. To advance the deal and make it more appealing to Iran, the president has also agreed to pay Iran a $1.7 billion settlement for $400 million in “frozen” assets held in the United States since 1981.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), “the electronic bloodstream of the global financial system,” had disconnected 15 Iranian banks from its system in 2012. after coming under pressure from both the United States and the European Union at the height of efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Today, SWIFT is ready to let those banned banks, including the Central Bank of Iran, use its system once again. Iran now has an even greater ability to fund its terrorist proxies around the world.

European political and business leaders have been rushing to Tehran to sign new agreements. On January 28, in Paris, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and France’s President Francois Hollande signed major business deals, including a joint venture between car-makers PSA Peugeot Citroen and Iran’s Khodro. Iran is in the process of buying 118 Airbus passenger planes to update its aging fleet. The construction group Bouygues and the French airport operator ADP are now set to build an extension for Tehran’s airport, while Vinci, another construction firm, has been commissioned to design, build and operate new terminals for the Mashhad and Isfahan airports. The French oil company Total has agreed to buy Iranian crude oil, and agreements in shipping, health, agriculture and water provision have also been signed.

Democratic India is also cultivating relations with Iran. In a meeting in May, India’s Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, and Iranian Transport and Urban Development Minister, Abbas Ahmad Akhoundi signed a Memorandum of Understanding on India’s participation in the development of the Chabahar Port in Iran.

The Chabahar project will impart strategic leverage to India and its access to Afghanistan and energy-rich Central Asia by bypassing Pakistan. The distance between the Chabahar Port and Gujarat – India’s westernmost state, located near the Persian Gulf, is less than the distance between Delhi and Mumbai. Transit times are estimated to be reduced by a third. Indian firms have already agreed to lease two existing berths at the port and operate them as container and multi-purpose cargo terminals.

The Chabahar project, New Delhi calculates, will be highly beneficial. As India has invested over $2 billion in Afghanistan, the Indian government plans to link the Chabahar port with the Zaranj-Delaram road it built in Afghanistan, thereby opening alternative routes to Afghanistan and enhancing access to regional and global markets.

Russia and China, permanent members of the UN Security Council, are also strengthening their cooperation with Iran. Both Russia and China adopted a policy of ambivalence towards Iran and saw to it that sanctions imposed by the West were not too tough. They also repeatedly blocked attempts at sanctioning Iran’s ally, the current Syrian regime, out of concern over financial ties in the region.

China is also capitalizing on the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Chinese President Xi Jinping rushed to Iran after the so-called nuclear agreement to discuss a 25-year strategic cooperation plan. In a landmark deal worth up to $600 billion, Xi committed to increase trade between the two nations during the next decade. Beijing and Tehran also agreed to enhance security cooperation through intelligence-sharing, counter-terror measures, military exchanges and coordination. Incidentally, despite international sanctions, China-Iran trade increased from $3 billion in 2001 to more than $50 billion in 2014.

Given its fanatical and sectarian ideological agenda, Iran is likely to use the new funds to boost its armament program and ongoing clandestine terror acts. Sanctions relief will mainly benefit Khamenei and members of the IRGC: they control up to one-third of Iran’s economy.

Iran now poses an even greater threat to the entire civilized world. The pattern of Tehran’s behavior shows the government can never be trusted on any promises it makes not to advance its nuclear weapons program. Khamenei has made an open declaration that Tehran will not allow effective inspections of its military sites or interviews with its nuclear scientists.

The links of the IRGC’s Qods Force with Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and other terror militias pose a major threat to peace and stability in the Middle East.

Hezbollah’s networks have expanded over the years, infiltrating Latin America and the Caribbean through Shiite cultural centers in the region. According to an official Argentine report, Tehran has established its terrorist, intelligence and operational networks throughout Latin America as far back as the 1980s. Iran’s intelligence activities in the region are being conducted directly by Iranian officials or through its proxy, Hezbollah. Criminal activity may already be underway in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. Iran’s involvement in the cocaine trade has bolstered the regimes regional access and strengthened ties with its allies in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and elsewhere.

According to senior Western intelligence officials, the IRGC has transferred tens of millions of dollars to Hamas to be used for weapons, military equipment and training, and that Iran also delivers arms and funds to Hamas through the Red Sea and the Sinai. Officials also believe Iran is indirectly funding the Islamic State (IS) in the Sinai. “Suitcases of cash” are sent directly to Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip; part of the money is then transferred to IS.

Tehran’s links with Hamas and IS are part of a grander strategy of using proxy forces to gain hegemony over the Middle East and undermining American allies such as Egypt and Israel. In Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, Iran seeks to preserve its influence. By fighting IS, Iran strengthens existing pro-Iran regimes and maintains its relevance in the region.

While Iran does support IS indirectly in the Sinai, the government’s goal is to weaken the current Egyptian regime and the Sunni Arab alliance between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. It has no problem with IS gaining strength in the Sinai right now. If IS does gain more power in the Sinai, Iran can use it to impose its own agenda in the future. Tehran evidently wants to use IS victories against Sunni states as an opportunity to take over.

Iran also supports the Gaza-based terror group al-Sabireen [“The Patient Ones”], established in the wake of previous tensions between Iran, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The group has about 400 followers and its emblem is identical to that of Hezbollah. Each member receives a monthly salary of $250-$300, while senior members receive at least $700. Annually, the terror group receives a budget of $10 million from Iran, smuggled in suitcases through tunnels along the border with Egypt. Potential members are wooed by al-Sabireen through familiar channels of philanthropy and education. The group’s publications refer to the United States as “the source of superpower terrorism,” and its slogan is, “The road to the liberation of Palestinian goes through Karbala” — a Shiite holy city in Iraq.

Al-Sabireen has extended its operations from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank and Jerusalem with Iran’s backing. Hisham Salim, the founder of al-Sabireen, admitted that his group is directly financed by Iran. “We have an armed branch whose goal is to wage war on the Israeli occupation everywhere,” Salim said. “Within this framework we have members in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

The Obama administration has forged ahead with its Iran policies despite knowing the regime’s support of global terrorism. U.S. President Barack Obama himself spoke about Iran’s terror activities in a press conference last year. “Now, we’ll still have problems with Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism; its funding of proxies like Hezbollah that threaten Israel and threaten the region; the destabilizing activities that they’re engaging in, including place like Yemen,” he said, adding that the nuclear “deal is not contingent on Iran changing its behavior. Its not contingent on Iran suddenly operating like a liberal democracy.”

History urges those living in democracies today to rein in their governments and correct their fatal Iran policies. The world cannot afford to overlook the damage of these governments. If democracies today continue their present policies towards Iran, it will only embolden Iran’s regime to continue its quest to obtain nuclear weapons as well as its terrorism and human rights violations.

Jagdish N. Singh is a leading journalist based in New Delhi, India.

France, with the support of the United States, is leading a new attempt at peace between Israel and the Palestinians, with the implied goal that an independent Palestinian state would be created — but what should we expect from such a state?

Although past behavior is not a perfect predictor of future behavior, it is a strong indicator of it, especially if no corrective action has been taken.

Violence

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared, “The dawn of freedom rises with the evacuation of the last Israeli soldier and settler.” Yet, instead of using that freedom to build a successful economy, Palestinians destroyed the greenhouses that the settlers had left, and terrorists launched rocket attacks against Israel. These attacks forced Israel to institute a naval blockade of Gaza, to limit the supply of weapons to terrorists.

The Oslo Accords signed by Israel and the Palestinians in the 1990s provided a transition period meant to lead to Palestinian statehood. However, instead of peaceful coexistence with Israel, the Palestinian leadership launched an assault that became known as the Second Intifada.

During the recent stabbing attacks by Palestinian terrorists, Abbas declared, “Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid (martyr) will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will.”

These violent actions and the incitement are not exceptions. They are part of a pattern of Arab denial of the Jews’ right to exist, which started well before Israel declared its independence, and that caused several wars and innumerable terrorist attacks against Israel.

Lack of democracy

Palestinian democracy has so far been a failure. Yasser Arafat was elected in July 1994 as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) for a four-year term, but he stayed in power, without further elections, for more than 10 years until his death in November 2004. Mahmoud Abbas was elected President in May 2005, and is still in office, without further elections, eleven years later.

Hamas, which won the PA legislative elections of 2006, was never invited to take the PA reins of power, but it took control of the Gaza Strip through a violent overthrow of Fatah, and still controls Gaza — also without further elections — ten years later.

Fatah and Hamas have used elections to create a semblance of democracy, and both have abused their authority to go far beyond their legitimate mandates. Both routinely use control of the media, control of the education system, and violence to maintain their power, as documented extensively by Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (left) and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas (also president of the Palestinian Authority) are pictured voting in the last election for the Palestinian Legislative Council, which took place in 2006.

Corruption

Corruption in the PA and Hamas is widely recognized, by commentators who range from extreme anti-Israel, to somewhat moderate pro-Palestinian, to pro-Israel.

As reported by CBS News in 2003, “Yasser Arafat diverted nearly $1 billion in public funds to insure his political survival, but a lot more is unaccounted for.”

Abbas has continued the tradition. Haaretz reported that the Panama Papers “show that Tareq Abbas, the son of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, held shares worth nearly $1 million in a company associated with the PA”.

Khaled Abu Toameh has written that, “$4.5 billion the Americans invested in promoting Palestinian democracy went down the drain or ended up in secret Swiss bank accounts.”

Hamas, which was elected partly in opposition to Fatah corruption, is just as corrupt. Moshe Elad wrote in Tablet Magazine that the Hamas government, “is centralized and corrupt, it lacks effectiveness, bribery plays a very important role in society, and nepotism is prevalent, with just few families or relatives benefiting from state monopolies on basic services and commodities”.

Associated Press reported that 95.5% of Palestinians in the West Bank believe that the PA is corrupt while 82% of Palestinians in Gaza believe that Hamas is corrupt.

Promotion of hatred

As noted previously, promotion of hatred by Palestinian leaders is widespread, and it is the main obstacle to peaceful co-existence with Israel. An example of Palestinian hate propaganda is a made-for-children movie where, as reported by London’s Daily Mail,

“The little girl, dressed in a hijab, is seen pretending to stab two boys dressed as Israeli soldiers, who respond by ‘shooting’ her. Then, amid cheers from the baying crowd, a boy dressed as a masked terrorist massacres the soldiers with a replica semi-automatic weapon.”

The newspaper added that the video was filmed at a “festival of hate,” which was partly funded by a UK charity supported by British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and some other Labor MPs.

Oppression of the Palestinian people

Both Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza run their governments as dictatorships, where freedom of speech is denied and where dissent is punished by jail, beatings, torture, or death. This retribution is widely recognized, even by organizations that are often considered biased against Israel, such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI).

In 2011, in a 35-page report, HRW documented “cases in which security forces tortured, beat, and arbitrarily detained journalists, confiscated their equipment, and barred them from leaving the West Bank and Gaza.”

In their 2015/16 report, Amnesty International wrote,

“The Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Hamas de facto administration in the Gaza Strip both restricted freedom of expression, including by arresting and detaining critics and political opponents. They also restricted the right to peaceful assembly and used excessive force to disperse some protests. Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees remained common in both Gaza and the West Bank.”

Lack of economic drive

Palestinian leaders have concentrated all their efforts on waging war against Israel and increasing their own personal wealth. The best economic opportunities presented to average West Bank Palestinians are in working on settlement construction or commuting daily to jobs in Israel.

The lack of Palestinian economic development in the West Bank is often blamed on Israel, yet when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, Palestinian leaders did not seize that opportunity to build the economy of Gaza. They chose instead to spend their resources on rockets, terror tunnels, and enriching the leaders of Hamas.

Bad behavior is rewarded

Those who provide funding to the Palestinians are aware of this behavior, yet they have not used their influence to curb it. In fact, they reward it.

The Palestinian leadership in Gaza is rewarded for every war it initiates with Israel in two ways. During the war, it is rewarded by the international media, which provides wide coverage of Palestinian casualties while ignoring the terrorist actions that led to those casualties (thus playing into Hamas’s “dead baby strategy“). After the war, Gaza’s leadership is rewarded when more funding is provided for reconstruction, despite the knowledge that a large portion of it is used to rebuild the terrorist arsenal.

The Fatah/Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank is rewarded by international donors who provide ongoing funding to President Mahmoud Abbas while knowing the extent of the corruption of his regime and its lack of democracy.

Realism

Palestinian leaders have repeatedly shown that their priority is not peace, or a two-state solution, or a Palestinian state, but repression. If a Palestinian state is created without correcting these destructive practices, it is highly likely that the new Palestinian regime will follow the same pattern already established, and be a hatemongering, corrupt, undemocratic, oppressive, belligerent, and ineffective regime. This would not only be a security threat for Israel, it would mean more of the same for the Palestinians.

Current talk by Western leaders of peace, a two-state solution, and a Palestinian state makes no mention of these dangers. If those leaders wish to achieve a lasting peace that is beneficial to Israel and the Palestinians, rather than to create an unstable situation that could cause irreparable damage to both sides, peace discussions must account for the Palestinian reality.

Fred Maroun, a left-leaning Arab based in Canada, has authored op-eds for New Canadian Media, among other outlets. From 1961-1984, he lived in Lebanon.

My kampong [village] lies in the suburbs of Surabaya, the second biggest city in Indonesia. Densely packed in a narrow alley, it consists of more than forty houses, stacked like logs, with no gaps at all to sneak in between. A handful of residents work for the government or public schools; some run small household shops. Most residents are Muslim, except for three families who are Christian.

A handful of plants provide us with green, but just down the road scattered stores have been soaring: a big franchise department store, a gas station, banks with long rows of automatic teller machines and facilities that make us feel like a small part of growing Indonesia.

When we first moved here, it seemed ideal. There were only twelve families; they got together at events; we felt close. Communal meetings were held each month; the host would prepare snacks and even sometimes meals. If one of us were in the nearby hospital, we would usually drive together in groups to pay a visit after collecting small contributions to give the sick person. Only one lady, a convert to Islam, wore a headscarf; others only wore it when necessary: at public meetings, celebrations, or Independence Day, August 17.

Saturday nights were the long night. People sat outside on paving stones or rough and humble chairs, and discussed many matters, especially before elections. Indonesia was then under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a graduate of America’s Webster University.

Religious days were marked as moments of happiness and joy. People opened wide their hearts; heaven was coming down and moving us. We visited each other after Eid al Fitr‘s early morning prayer. Everyone said, “Minal Aidin Wal Fa Idzin” (“Many happy returns”) and “Mohon Maaf Lahir Batin” (“Please forgive my wrongdoings”). The long-held tradition of Megengan, when families exchange food or snacks — not just Muslims but Christians, Catholics, Hindus and Buddhists — always preceded Ramadan.

On Christmas, the three Christian families would welcome visitors. Visits to our house by our Muslim friends inspired us to see how great our nation was, and of course our religions. Our Muslim friends would say, “Merry Christmas”.

“Islam with a smiling face,” was what Newsweek called Indonesian Islam in 1996. The statement made us proud of our cultural hospitality (about 90% of Indonesians are Muslim): Everyone was kind; everyone was moderate; everyone respected humanistic values and a harmonious life.

But, along with the fall of Suharto after 32 years in power, a few Indonesian Muslims, who apparently share some worldwide dreams, began to try to realize this dream. Hardliner clerics, who had lived in exile under Suharto, returned. They made their way into the masses, into the power blocs supported by their networks and their donors. The dream, particularly among a handful of the educated elite, of establishing a Muslim state, or at least a Muslim society, began rushing to the surface.

There is no need for the innocent majority to have a “great idea”; their only needs are leaders and direction. The new leaders then disseminated their ideas: the greatness of Islam, the greatness of Muslims, the greatness of Islamic kinship. The doctrine, “all Muslims are your brothers and sisters,” was now everywhere.

Some hardliner clerics moved out from their traditional boarding schools and started climbing the political ladder. Some of them, including those clerics belonging to the Council of Indonesian Clerics (MUI) — the highest Islamic body in the country — and some of the descendants of Saudi or Yemeni clerics, bluntly displayed their new aroma of Islam: Middle East Islam. Community prayers, Friday prayers, newspapers and television programs started roaring the idea of Islamic supremacy.

Many changes took place. In 1980, under Suharto and his powerful, bureaucratic Golkar Party, women almost never wore a headscarf, let alone the monotonous hijab or niqab. Many women then were on the lookout for brand new colorful scarves and cosmetics. These women are lucky: new branded products, armed with halal certifications from our MUI, are on the rise in shops. Arabian-style dresses are on display in boutiques. Arab-style long coats with headscarves are commonplace. A sea of white dresses inundates the public squares, communal prayer meetings, mosques. A leading figure in Surabaya, who requested anonymity, said, “Nowadays Muslim women feel uncomfortable if they do not wear a headscarf. They might be considered unfaithful or not sufficiently devout.”

Men with long and loose beards, marked foreheads and Arabian-style dress hold a Muslim type of rosary; they chant various names of God as their lips move silently — are now common. At community prayer meetings, one often hears discussions on how to behave as Muslims. Seminars, conventions and newspapers, especially during Ramadan, discuss the greatness of Muslims and Islam.

Unfortunately, along with those developments, our happy moments are disappearing at high speed. Being Muslim, for some, means excluding others. A polarization happens; some people do not want to deal with people of another religion.

There are stories of raids on churches, Christian shrines and mosques run by the small Ahmadiya sect. Other religious days, especially Christmas, are now marked by those for and against them, thanks to fatwas.

MUI, Indonesia’s highest Islamic body, says it no longer wants Muslims to greet Christians during Christmas; it is considered a sin. Many people are afraid of being labeled unfaithful or blamed for being kind to Christians. We still can shake hands, but anything else is now forbidden. “Saying ‘Merry Christmas’ is against my religion,” a friend explained to me. “The greeting acknowledges Jesus Christ as Allah.”

Valentine’s Day is another of many concerns about the supposed “Christian influence.” Some department heads at educational agencies have issued circulars, banning students from celebrating it (here, here, here).

On March 12, King Salman of Saudi Arabia ended his visit to Indonesia; he boarded his royal airline and headed to Japan. Ash around the runway blew into the air. All memories of His Highness’s visit reside in our people’s mind, even while we were wishing His Majesty farewell.

After the oil boom, Iran’s Revolution and the 444 days of the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in Iran, Indonesian Muslims believed Muslim power was returning.

President Joko Widodo of Indonesia (foreground, left) meets with King Salman of Saudi Arabia (foreground, right), at Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in Indonesia. (Image source: Indonesian Presidential Palace)

Jacobus E. Lato, a writer, is based in Surabaya, Indonesia.