Politician Gets Five-Month Sentence for Hate Speech for Tweet

The following is an unedited press release from International Christian Concern (ICC) regarding this travesty. Please check out their website at www.persecution.org for more on the persecution and genocide of Christians around the world.

Christian Politician Gets Five-Month Sentence for Hate Speech

04/20/2022 Indonesia (International Christian Concern) – On April 19, an Indonesian court convicted Ferdinand Hutahaean, a Protestant politician, with charges of hate speech for making insulting remarks about Islam on social media. He was sentenced to five months in jail.  

ICC reported previously that Hutahaean, who failed to win a national assembly seat in parliamentary elections in 2019, was arrested on Jan. 10 following an outcry over a comment on Twitter in which he allegedly taunted Muslims by calling their God “weak.” 

The tweet in question said: “Poor you, your God is evidently weak [and] must be defended. My God is amazing, [he] is everything. He is my defender, and my God does not need to be defended.” 

The five-month sentence given to Hutahaean was lower than the seven-month term suggested by prosecutors. 

“The defendant Ferdinand Hutahaean has been found guilty of intentionally spreading fake news causing a stir in society,” Suparman Nyompa, chairman of the judges’ council, said on April 19. 

Bonar Tigor Naipospos, deputy chairman of the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, said the punishment was lenient. 

“However, I agree with the court’s decision because the punishment for Hutahaean has a political aspect,” he told UCA News on April 19. He said it was a political ploy to use religion to attack Hutahaean. 

Hutahaean joins the list of other Christians recently arrested and detained for insulting Islam on social media, such as Joseph Suyardi and Muhammad Kace. In Muslim-majority Indonesia, non-Muslims are easily targeted and charged of blasphemy in Indonesia, while Muslims committing similar offenses hardly receive any punishment for their actions. 

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I recently bought the book Why Social Justice Is Not Biblical Justice: An Urgent Appeal to Fellow Christians in a Time of Social Crisis, by Scott David Allen. I want to recommend it to my readers, as it does an excellent job of explaining the difference between politically-correct "social justice" and true Biblical justice. Social justice has creeped in modern churches, which have become weak as they seek to embrace worldly acceptance. Sadly, most church-goers today don't understand enough about social justice (or Biblical justice for that matter) to see the dangerous distortions embedded in the social justice concept. 

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