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From: donn@utah-gr.UUCP (Donn Seeley)
Newsgroups: net.religion.jewish,net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: Tutu Makes a DooDoo
Message-ID: <1293@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 14-Jan-85 00:32:57 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1293
Posted: Mon Jan 14 00:32:57 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Jan-85 01:47:12 EST
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Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
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Xref: watmath net.religion.jewish:1239 net.politics:6747

[What is this discussion doing in net.religion.jewish???]

	From bill peter (wkp@lanl.ARPA):

	Martillo is definitely not singling out Arabs; Muslims in
	Indonesia and Malaysia are especially well-known for their
	brutality and inhumanity.  If you can find any ethnic Chinese
	left in these countries, just ask any one of them.

I seem to recall that there are more ethnic Chinese in Malaysia than
ethnic Malays...  (In fact the Malaysian Communist Party, a brutal
group of thugs if there ever was one, is almost exclusively a Chinese
movement.) The British encouraged the immigration of Chinese to
Malaysia to work in the tin mines and rubber plantations, and so many
came that they now form close to a majority of the population.  The
proportion of Chinese in the population of Indonesia is much smaller
but there are still millions of them.  The presupposition in Bill
Peter's paragraph is that these Chinese communities are somehow dying
out, which is simply not true.

The friction that does occur between 'bumiputras' (natives) and Chinese
is primarily political.  The economies of the two countries are
controlled by rich Chinese in collaboration with members of politically
important native families.  Local demagogues sometimes encourage
jobless natives to take their frustrations out on the poorer Chinese,
the ones who can't retaliate; the usual form which this takes is a
series of riots in which small Chinese-owned shops are looted or
burned.  This does not seem to have upset the dominant position of the
Chinese in the marketplace, needless to say.  Religion is not usually
an issue: power is.

When political tensions relax, the two groups get along reasonably
well.  There are communities in Indonesia which are called 'peranakan'
Chinese (from the Malay word for 'child') whose members have
assimilated so thoroughly that their language and culture are more
native than they are Chinese.  Other, more recent immigration has
produced communities of 'totok' Chinese who are culturally (and
politically) tied to China, and there has been some friction between
the two groups similar to the friction between radically Orthodox and
assimilated Jews.  I suppose Martillo would denigrate the unique
culture of the 'peranakans' because it is a distortion of a (somehow
better) 'pure' Chinese culture...

It's true that there are radical Muslim fundamentalists in both
countries but they are definitely in the minority.  They spend much
more time bickering with each other than oppressing Chinese or Jews (if
there are any of the latter).  The 'Islam' practiced by the bulk of the
population bears about as much resemblance to the real thing as modern
Christianity does to BenDavid's N'tzarim.  Read V S Naipaul's book
AMONG THE BELIEVERS if you want to get a feel for what the situation is
really like.  (In my opinion, the religious climate in Iran and
Pakistan is much scarier than it is elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Radical religious fundamentalism is most dangerous when practiced by
converts...)

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn@utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    decvax!utah-cs!donn