Habib Rizieq, the leader of the hardline Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), has been making new enemies and collecting new criminal complaints by the day recently. Yesterday, while leading thousands of FPI members in their demonstration to demand the removal of West Java Police Chief Anton Charliyan, Rizieq also made fiery pronouncements that he would be reporting a number of other government figures to the police, including former President Megawati Soekarnoputri.
Well, apparently Rizieq has rethought his legal attack on the PDI-P chairwoman, widely considered to be one of the most powerful politicians in the country. Today, Rizieq backed off of his threat to report Megawati for allegedly blaspheming Islam in a speech she gave during a PDI-P anniversary event earlier this month, saying that he’d now just like to have a mediation with her instead.
“I’ve watched the whole video of Megawati’s speech 10 times and I concluded that it included defamation of religion and ethnicity. But, I ask the police to mediate, we will refrain from reporting,” Rizieq said at the Parliament building in Senayan today as quoted by Detik.
Rizieq added, “If we are wrong, we ask for forgiveness, but if Ibu Mega is wrong then it should be clarified.”
We’re pretty sure that’s the first time that Rizieq has ever publicly admitted to even the possibility that he or FPI could be wrong about something – which is quite an admission since he supposedly watched the video of her speech 10 times.
The FPI leader also said he chose not to report Megawati as to avoid widespread conflict, something that has certainly not bothered him in the past.
Despite all that, Rizieq added, menacingly, “But if I am pushed to report [her], I can still report.”
Rizieq’s reluctance to report Megawati may be due to fear of antagonizing the former president, or it might be because he realized he’s completely wrong. His blasphemy charge seems to rest on a misunderstanding of the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” which Megawati used in her speech and which Rizieq apparently mistook to mean actual religious prophecy.
As PDI-P leader Andreas Hugo Pareira told Detik, “Ah, he did not understand the speech. He needs to study it first.”
Reader Interactions