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 “I was a little Jakarta street kid,” he said in a wide-ranging interview in with NY Times.

Jakarta — the city where President Obama grew up. Is it any wonder that Obama wanted us dead in Garland, Texas?  We were guilty of the same crime as this persecuted Christian governor — “blasphemy’ under Islam.

Indonesia, the country held up as the shining example of a moderate, modern Muslim country. And, by jove, it is.

It’s like the President of Turkey (who just today called on all Muslim to flood the holy city of Jerusalem), who said to then President Obama, “There is no moderate Islam. There is no extreme Islam. Islam is Islam.”

Jakarta’s Christian governor Ahok found guilty in Islam blasphemy trial

Photo: Ahok told the court he would appeal the verdict. (Reuters: Bay Ismoyo/Pool)

An Indonesian court has sentenced the minority Christian governor of Jakarta to two years in prison for blaspheming the Koran at a trial that undermined the country’s reputation for practicing a moderate form of Islam.

In a tense trial that was widely seen as a test of religious tolerance in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, also known as Ahok, was “found to have legitimately and convincingly conducted a criminal act of blasphemy, and because of that we have imposed two years of imprisonment”, head judge Dwiarso Budi Santiarto told the court.

Ahok was charged with blasphemy after he said clerics had used a Koranic verse to mislead voters by telling them that Muslims were not allowed to vote for a Christian.

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He has denied wrongdoing, and said he was not criticising the Koran, but rather the clerics’ interpretation of the verse.

The sentence was harsher than expected and will come as a shock to many of his supporters. TV news coverage of the scene outside the court showed some supporters weeping.