Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #614

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Indonesian TikToker Jailed For Blasphemy For Telling Jesus To Get A Haircut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnPHALrHiiE
By Jack Guy, CNN
CNN-An Indonesian social media influ- encer who suggested Jesus should cut his hair has been sen- tenced to two years and 10 months in jail after being found guilty of spreading hate speech against Christianity.
Ratu Thalisa, a Muslim transgender woman who has nearly 450,000 fol- lowers on TikTok, was sentenced by a court in North Sumatra province over the comments made to an image of Christ, according to a statement from rights group Amnesty International and local media reports.
Thalisa, who is known online as
Ratu Entok, made the comments after a viewer said she should cut her hair to look like a man.
In a live broadcast on October 2, 2024, Thalisa held up a pic- ture of Jesus Christ and said: “You should not look like a woman. You should cut your hair so that you will look like his father.”
Five Christian groups filed complaints to Indonesian police alleging blasphemy, leading to Thalisa’s arrest on October 8.
In addition to jail time, the court ordered Thalisa to pay a fine of around $6,200.
She was sentenced under Indonesia’s
Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT) law after the court ruled that her com- ments could affect “public order” and “religious harmony.”
Amnesty International Indonesia’s Executive Director Usman Hamid said Monday that the “sentence is a shock- ing attack on Ratu Thalisa’s freedom of expression,” and that the EIT law should not be used to pun- ish people for social media comments.
“While Indonesia should prohibit the advocacy of religious hatred that consti- tutes incitement to discrimination, hostili- ty or violence, Ratu Thalisa’s speech act
does not reach that threshold,” Hamid said in a statement.
According to Amnesty, from 2019 to 2024 at least 560 people were charged with alleged viola- tions of the EIT Law under various offens- es, including defama- tion and hate speech.
“This sentence high- lights the increasingly arbitrary and repres- sive application of Indonesia’s EIT law to violate freedom of expression,” he added.
“The authorities must quash Ratu Thalisa’s conviction, ensure her immediate and unconditional release and repeal or make substantial revisions of problematic provi- sions in the EIT Law criminalizing “immorality,” defama- tion, and hate speech,” said Hamid.
Thalisa is one of a number of people convicted for blas- phemy in recent years, most of them for insults to Islam.
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation, where 231 million people, at least 93% of its adult population, identify as Muslim.
Religious conser- vatism has been on the rise in the coun- try in recent years and rights groups have warned
that blasphemy
laws are being “increasingly weaponized” against religious minorities and those deemed to have insulted Islam.
In September 2023, Muslim social media influencer Lina Lutfiawati, known as Lina Mukherjee on social media, was sentenced to two years in prison over a video she shared on TikTok which showed her reciting an Islamic prayer before trying pork.
One of Indonesia’s most high-profile blasphemy cases was that of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, an ethnic Chinese Indonesian politician widely known as Ahok who served as Jakarta’s first non- Muslim governor in 50 years.
He went on trial for blasphemy in 2017 after angering hard- line Muslims by refer- encing a verse from the Quran while cam- paigning for re-elec- tion in 2016. He was jailed for two years, despite making a public apology.
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