Yahya ‘Abd al ‘Alim wrote:
> Do you have no shame Rowland? Must you bring religious affiliations into
> places where the consensus is that they are not appropriate? Should I say
> that the holocaust was a CHRISTIAN issue, because most Germans were/are
> christian? What about Vietnam? No, because neither has anything to do with
> religious demarcations. Neither does this, much as you would like to pretend
> it does.
>
> Thank you for reminding me how shallow, godless and without scruples you
> missionaries are.
>
> Fear God, Rowland!

I was not going to dignify this with a response, but I checked a few
things.

Another post on this newsgroup mentions Indonesian Muslims who have
declared all this a ‘holy war’ and have pledged to take on the United
Nations…

Checking around, the consensus is that about 90% of the Indonesian
troops in East Timor are Muslim…

I would be very surprised if there was not a ‘religious vendetta’
component in the killings by the Indonesian military, militias and
police: it will all come out in the wash…

But all that said, there is common agreement that 200,000 East Timorese
have been killed during the insurgency of the last twenty years: as a
proportion of the population, is there any genocide (since the slaughter
of Aborigines in Tasmania and the Holocaust) that matches this?

Rowland Croucher