Call to ban clubs - Malaysiakini

JAKARTA - INDONESIAN Islamic hardliners have called for a ban on international organisations the Rotary Club and the Lions Club, saying they are part of a Zionist conspiracy, reports said on Monday.

The People's Ulema Forum (FUU) said the clubs were 'infidel' fronts for Freemasonry and the world Zionist movement and threatened Islam in the world's most populous Muslim country.

'They gather funds and give them to America and the Israeli Zionists,' FUU chairman Atian Ali Mohammad Da'i was quoted as saying in The Jakarta Globe daily.

'We urge all Muslims to renounce membership in the Rotary Club and the Lions Club. Otherwise they can consider themselves infidels.' He called on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to ban the groups.

Indonesian Muslims are overwhelmingly moderate but a vocal hardline fringe regularly succeeds in influencing policymakers despite opposition from secularists, civil society groups and religious minorities.

The FUU is an ultra-conservative group that has used force to stop Christian services and in 2002 issued a death fatwa (Islamic ruling) against a Muslim scholar who had criticised conservative Islam, the Globe reported.

Raja Juli Antony of the Maarif Institue, a moderate Islamic group, told The Jakarta Post there was no evidence that the Lions or Rotary clubs posed a threat to Islam.

He said they had made positive contributions to Indonesia's development through their charity works.

A senior member of the Indonesia Ulema Council, the country's highest religious body which last week issued a fatwa against certain forms of yoga, said it was not considering a ruling against the Lions or Rotary clubs.

The public service clubs - formed in the early 1900s and claiming some 2.5 million members around the world - were banned in Indonesia in 1962 for nationalist reasons but were allowed to reopen in 2000. -- AFP