Communications and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said Wednesday that the Indonesian government was not merely calling for Facebook to remove the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” group’s account, but also to prevent the appearance of other similar groups.

As of Wednesday evening, more than 41,300 people liked the group, and others  with similar purposes have been created, including “can a million people draw Mohammed before i’m killed for this group?” and “Draw the Prophet Muhammad Group!”

A number of groups have also been created against this.

“It will be of no use to remove the group if other parties create similar groups and send their postings; thus our conscience is also needed to prevent such material,” Tifatul was quoted as saying by Antara.

“And we ask the public not to be provoked by the account. We have to be cool in facing the issue.”
Tifatul added this sort of thing was the reason that his ministry drafted the ministerial regulation on multimedia content.

“The regulation will not harm press freedom but simply regulate negative aspects of the Internet, such as pornography, gambling, fraud, violence, as well as insults against religions, ethnic groups and races,” he said.

Ministry spokesman Gatot Dewa Broto said he was confident Facebook would fulfill the request of the ministry, given their huge potential market in Indonesia, the country with the most Muslims in the world.

“Similar things have been done with the Fitna movie in YouTube and cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in Wordpress. Then communications and information minister Muhammad Nuh asked YouTube and Wordpress to drop them, and they complied,” Gatot told The Jakarta Post.

Liberal Muslim scholar Ulil Abshar Abdalla said he agreed with the government’s move, as long as the letter was meant only as a protest and not a request to remove the group’s account.

“The government should not sound as if it intervenes with Facebook, especially as it is based in the US, not here,” he said.

Ulil, nevertheless, expressed regrets that the groups had to make the Prophet Muhammad cartoon posting, which evidently hurt the feelings of Muslims.

“This action will only prompt reactions from fundamentalists. Muslim fundamentalists will make it a justification that freedom of expression will only lead to such things.

“Their opponents will make the Muslim fundamentalists’ reaction as a justification of their case that Islam is a violent religion,” Ulil said.

Deputy chairman of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), Amidhan, hoped that the government would not stop at sending a letter to protest the “insulting” posting.

“Drawing Prophet Muhammad is forbidden in Islam even if it’s not insulting as these are. I suggest that the government develop and adopt a technology which can ban this sort sort of material.

“There is no such thing as absolute freedom of expression and opinion in Indonesia; the Constitution puts limitations on them,” Amidhan told the Post.

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