Those Who Go Jihad Are Not Necessarily Poor nor Ignorant: Aussie-Trained Economist from ‘Modern’ ‘Moderate’ Muslim Indonesia Tried To Join Islamic State
He may have come from a poor background, but he had enjoyed all the benefits of a first-world education in a first-world country and was holding down a good job. Nevertheless, being a fully-instructed and devout practising Muslim, he chose to try to join the declared Caliphate of the Islamic State. And everyone is professing to be so very shocked and surprised. As reported by our Aussie ABC’s Indonesia correspondent, Adam Harvey.
‘Australian-Trained Economist Abandoned Job to Allegedly Join Islamic State, Sister Says’.
‘An Australian-trained economist, who allegedly tried to join the Islamic State group, kept his goals secret from his Indonesian family.
Really? They didn’t have the faintest idea? Mr Harvey, you should not unquestioningly swallow whatever it is you’re told by tearful (or sweetly smiling), voluble and oh-so-sincere Muslims who are doing their best to protect Islam and the Ummah from untoward Infidel scrutiny. – CM
‘Tiryono Utomo’s ister has spoken exclusively to the ABC, telling how he abandoned a normal life and a good job to take his family overseas.
To take his family to join the nascent Caliphate. – CM
‘Samsiyati wept as she told of her brother working hard to escape poverty in North Jakarta, and then suddenly abandoning the country last year.
He was, as we later learn, a devout Muslim. He was merely heeding the summons to wage Jihad. – CM
“He said, “Sister, I want to go overseas”. He was going to change job and move overseas. I told him not to, because our parents are old and sick”, she said.
‘Indonesian authorities said Triyono, his wife, and their three children left Jakarta for Bangkok, and then travelled to Turkey. Turkish counter-terror authorities arrested them in an Islamic State group safe house, last month, and deported them to Indonesia.
‘Samsiyati said she was confused when people started linking her brother to a radical group.
Really? – CM
“I was shocked, but I didn’t know about ISIS.
Again, really???? – CM
“I still don’t know about it now.
I don’t believe you. – CM
“But they say he’s related to ISIS, but I don’t understand what that is”, she said.
I don’t believe her. I really don’t believe her. Not in the age of the mobile phone and the internet. She is not living way out in the boondocks, she is living in Indonesia’s biggest city. If she has internet access – even via an internet cafe – she must surely know about ISIS. – CM
‘She is seven years older than her brother, and helped raise him in one of Jakarta’s poorest neighbourhoods.
‘Her home is just metres from a canal that regularly floods the district.
So? Poverty didn’t make him Go Jihad. Islam did that. It isn’t just poor boys who Go Jihad; Bin Laden’s family was simply swimming in money. – CM
‘Triyono escaped a life of poverty here. Samsiyati said he was always different from the other children in this poor area.
“Thank God he’s been a smart kid, he’s been on the top rank of the class since elementary school and junior high, also high school”, she said.
So it isn’t just the stupid ones that Go Jihad. “Lady Al Qaeda” studied neuroscience at Brandeis University. It didn’t stop her from being filled with would-be-mass-murderous hatred for the Infidels. – CM
‘She said Triyono was also a strong religious student, teaching the Koran to other students.
And bang goes the other common excuse, that Islamic State is not ‘real Islam’, that those who join it, those who run it, are those who are ignorant of Islam. This young man was steeped in Islam from childhood. One may assume he had a thorough knowledge of his belief system. And one must therefore assume he saw no incongruity between the Islam he learned from the Quran and the Islam practised by Islamic State. – CM
A local religious leader encouraged him to go to college.
‘But Samsiyati said that as a young man, he did not hold radical views.
Nah, just plain common-or-garden Islam . – CM
“I think it was all normal”.
Precisely… – CM
“I’ve seen him like that daily before, he’s been like that all the time since he was a kid. He taught at the Koran reading class. It was all normal”, she said.
Yes. Going Jihad is perfectly normal, for a devout mohammedan such as her bright, hard-working, well-educated younger brother, who knew his Quran from back to front. – CM
‘The bright student made the most of his education – he was hired as an economist with the Ministry of Finance, and won a scholarship to study for a Masters in Public Policy at Adelaide’s Flinders University.
‘His middle son was born in Australia while he was studying at Adelaide.
‘IS Attracting Poor, Uneducated’
What a peculiar caption to insert in the story of a young Muslim man who was not uneducated and had, in fact, used education to well-and-truly escape from poverty, before the Islam program, dinned into him from childhood, kicked in 100 percent and he ditched worldy affairs in order to attempt to Go Jihad. – CM
‘Samsiyati said her brother left Indonesia in the middle of last year.
“But suddenly he never showed up for weeks. We didn’t know where to locate him. There was no contact at all. He no longer had a cell phone.” she said.
Hmmm. One must assume that she has a cell phone. Which means that her pose of knowing nothing, nothing at all about Islamic State, is a little hard to sustain. She cannot have not heard about them. – CM
‘She has not seen him or his family for more than six months – now she wants her brother to come home.
‘She was not sure when that would happen – he is being held by Indonesian counter-terror police on suspicion of trying to join the Islamic State group.
‘The authorities want to know how the group managed to attract a smart Indonesian man (sic: a smart devoutly-Muslim Indonesian man – CM) with a good job and enough money to fly with his wife and three children to Turkey.
Really? The Muslims who run Indonesia don’t know why a devoutly-Muslim man, who taught Koran in his youth, would want to join Islamic State and Go Jihad? ROFLMAO. They know. They cannot not know. This is just damage control and denial, for the benefit of the stupid kuffar like our naive Adam Harvey. – CM
‘Hundreds of Indonesians (that is: ‘Hundreds of Muslims from Indonesia – CM) have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State group, but they have almost always (note that weasel word ‘almost’ – CM) been poor and uneducated – easy prey for radical (sic – revivalist – CM) clerics promising a higher cause and a better life.
Sir Winston Churchill, in one of his earliest books, “The Story of the Malakand Field Force”, an account of the British Raj and its encounters with Muslim jihadis on the north-west frontier, puts it superbly, in the first chapter, entitled, “The Theatre of War”: “That religion [i.e. Islam – CM] which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword – the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents produces fighting breeds of men – stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism...
“… the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness.
“In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside.
“The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons they become Ghazis – as dangerous and as sensible as wild dogs: fit only to be treated as such.
“While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder, and the joy of fighting.”
I don’t think Churchill would have been surprised that either impoverished Indonesian Muslims, or well-educated and intelligent and spiritually-inclined Indonesian Muslims, would heed the siren song of Jihad. This particular Mohammedan, in Indonesia, bright and well educated – western-educated – had also received, judging from what his sister says, a thorough steeping in Islam. He cast aside the fruits of patient toil and the prospects of a material prosperity gained by work in the Indonesian civil service, and followed the siren song of Islam: booty and terrorised sex slaves in this life, ‘paradise’ in the next. And so, back to the ABC’s Adam Harvey, who has surely not read Churchill on the subject of Islam, nor ever cracked open a Koran, and is scratching his head as to why a well-educated Indonesian Muslim, who had climbed out of poverty and attended a nice university in Infidel Australia, should want to go galloping off to join the Jihad in Syria. – CM
‘It is a coup for the group to attract someone who is educated and capable (really? – I understand that the upper echelons of ISIS are not composed of illiterate peons – CM) and a worrying sign for Indonesia, where recent terror attacks have failed because the attackers were incompetent.
It’s just a matter of time – CM
‘Community leader Ali Muhtadi said this part of Jakarta was not a radical area.
“People around here are pretty normal.
Precisely. The desire to wage Jihad is actually perfectly normal, for instructed and devout Muslims. The real surprise is that there are not more Triyono Utomos than there currently are. – CM
There’s no-one here with ISIS or radical Islam.
Oh, pull the other leg, mate, it’s got bells on. – CM
“No hardliners. They’re all regular here”, he said.
But one of your own Went Jihad. And more will probably do so, sooner or later. Because Jihad – constantly incited and glorified in the Quran, the Sira and the authoritative Hadiths – is the unofficial Sixth Pillar of Islam. – CM
‘If there is no evidence that Triyono fought with the Islamic State group, it is likely that he will be released back into the community.
“They can come here. Because we’re his family here, and he’s sold his house already”, Samsiyati said.’
And will he be readmitted to his previous position in the Indonesian civil service? And, at home in North Jakarta, what will he be teaching to his three children, and to others? – CM