Pence’s visit to Indonesia another strike in internal White House battle over Islam
Pence praised Indonesia’s ’moderate Islam’ as ’an inspiration to the world,’ but others in Trump’s administration still see all Muslims as a threat
Amir Tibon Apr 22, 2017
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Vice President Mike Pence became this week the first senior figure from the Trump White House to visit a Muslim country. As part of his tour in Southeast Asia, that was focused mostly on the crisis in the Korean peninsula, Pence stopped in Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, which is home to approximately 250 million people.
During his visit to Jakarta, the country’s capital, Pence made a statement that under previous U.S. administrations probably wouldn’t have been filed as more than a footnote, but in the Trump era, immediately made headlines and raised some eyebrows. “As the largest majority Muslim country, Indonesia’s tradition of moderate Islam, frankly, is an inspiration to the world,” Pence declared. He added that the United States commends Indonesia and its people “for the great inspiration that Indonesia provides to the world.”
Indonesia is indeed a Muslim country led by moderate and democratically elected leadership. Its president, Joko Widodo, was elected in 2014, and was presented in news reports at the time as an “Indonesian version” of Barack Obama. Indonesia is also an important trade partner for the United States and has the largest navy in Southeast Asia. All of these factors can explain why Pence found it important to flatter his hosts in Jakarta this week. But the fact that he chose to specifically speak about the importance of moderate Islam was what made it into the news reports.
The reason is obvious: during his election campaign last year, Pence’s boss, Donald Trump, made statements and promises that ignored any kind of differentiation between various movements and groups in the Muslim world. Trump talked about banning all Muslims from entering the United States, without exception, and in March 2016 he said in an interview to CNN that “Islam hates us. There is tremendous hate there.”
Trump also assembled around him a number of key advisers with strong anti-Muslim opinions. Michael Flynn, his first choice for the position of National Security Adviser, claimed that Islam wasn’t truly a religion, but rather a political ideology that must be defeated. He also said radical Islamism was like cancer “inside the body of 1.7 billion people” - suggesting that every Muslim person in the world was “infected” by it.