Leo for Peace!

Of all the people I have met in Indonesia, next to none of them have been to the United States. Unto itself, this is unremarkable, given the simple economic prerequisites for such a trip. Moreover, many of the people that you meet daily would not know what to do if dropped in the middle of Jakarta, let alone the United States. The truly stunning thing is how many students, professionals, artists, and intellectuals have been rejected outright, and literally told, ‘you do not have a good enough reason to come to America.’

In fact, to date, I have yet to meet a single Indonesian not married to an American national (I maintain that these do not count) who has actually set foot inside the United States. As one would expect this has mostly permeated popular consciousness: more often than not when I encourage people to come to America—to see the museums, the wide open sky, and especially the freeing nature of social plurality—they automatically indicate that they would rather save the time, seeing as how they could never get a visa anyways.

I often have to check my instincts, as this reponse sounds simplistic and largely indolent, but, to the contrary, they truly never could get a visa.

If rhetorical devices of the type were not fustian in their insouciance, one might be tempted (and many have so yielded) to point out that 9/11 was even more tragic in that its perpetrators not only lived in the United States beforehand but were able to exploit the freedoms which they sought to make war upon to carry on relatively unadulterated existences. How close we might have come to avoiding such tragedy seems heart wrenching impetus to redouble our guard.
Undoubtedly there are people who wish to injure Americans and for whom conventional deterrence does not exist. It is more than likely that some of such people are Indonesians. Jemiiah Islamyiah (JI) has proved to be an intractable force in Indonesian religious society and the utter inhumanity of the two Bali bombings congeals any doubts of their fanaticism and wholesale brutality.

In light of this however, it seems to me a bit shortsighted to impose a policy that results in the near complete denial of visas to the citizens of a country that represents not only the world’s largest Islamic country, but undoubtedly its largest citizenship of moderate Muslims as well. Indonesia’s Muslims, on the whole, are of a remarkably non-extremist faith. At a point when the United States not only desperately needs positive publicity within the Muslim world but Islamic cultural allies (or, short of that, dialogue participants) of any stripe, that we should forgo our most powerful tool of education about the authentic American ideals of pluralism and freedom—showing them to our guests—strikes me as a miscalculation. American isolationism is not and never has been the solution for what ails the world. Inevitably there are military and security trade-offs involved that have no easy answer. However, I think a reevaluation of this calculus makes sense. If not, people will continue to become experts on America through the less optimal avenues of Hulk Hogan’s reality TV show, Titanic, or, perhaps more dangerously, radical imams.