Thanks, But No Thanks

(Just Send Money)

Well, it’s official…“Christian groups and some other private relief agencies are being asked to halt their work in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh and leave the area by March 26, Indonesia's defense minister said yesterday.

The decision likely will target Western and smaller church groups as the government moves to tighten control over reconstruction work in Aceh, the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency.”

My first reaction to this story was to declare the Indonesian government ungrateful. This was my position when they started talking about asking the military to leave in January when I wrote Looking A Gift Horse In The Mouth. But then I thought about it a little and came to a quite different conclusion. Their actions actually fall under the category of defending their own borders AND protecting the safety of the relief workers.

I’m not about to start challenging Indonesia’s right to make decisions about what happens on their land contained within their borders, I just want our leaders and the people here in the US to make a mental note that it is OK to make hard decisions and toss “political correctness” concerns out the window when it comes to national security.

Indonesia’s actions are a perfect example. The Aceh provence’s “decades-old separatist insurgency” consisted primarily of kidnappings, murder, bombings of Muslim factions and Christians by other Muslim factions—little annoying things that conservative Americans would call “terrorism.” The PC police and the media insist on calling these actions “insurgency.” Using these standards, why isn’t last week’s Atlanta Courthouse shooter referred to as an insurgent African American inmate?

The two factions in Aceh, the Indonesian Government and separatist rebels, have basically called a cease-fire to allow the relief effort to operate, but now that most of the bodies have been recovered and an infrastructure has been re-established, there is a great risk that the relief workers might become targets for kidnapping or be killed in “insurgent” attacks.

I really would hate to see a busload of Southern Baptists blown to smithereens because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I say that we should be happy that the Indonesian officials have the foresight to see things as they are and that we should bring our people home ASAP, confident in the belief that the US did more than the rest of the world put together to relieve the suffering of the Tsunami victims.

Now if we could just learn the lesson of not allowing political correctness to get in the way of defending our own borders and population from acts of terrorism.

Of course, that won’t be happening any time in the near future.