Sadanand Dhume writes on the trial of Playboy in Indonesia:

THE latest round of the global culture war between Islamists and the West is being played out in a small courtroom in Jakarta. Erwin Arnada, the beleaguered editor of Playboy Indonesia, faces a two-year jail term for breaching the country’s indecency laws.

This month, about 100 belligerent Islamists, bearded and skull-capped, packed the courtroom shouting “hang him, hang him!” as prosecutors read out the charges against Arnada. Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation: the gaunt presence of Abu Bakar Bashir, alleged spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiah, the group associated with al-Qa’ida that was behind the 2002 Bali bombings and subsequent attacks on Jakarta’s J. W. Marriott hotel and the Australian embassy.

The Playboy affair captures the world’s most populous Muslim country’s steady slide towards intolerance. But you’ll be hard-pressed to find an NGO head or professional pundit eager to stand up for Playboy, or for that matter for Baywatch or Desperate Housewives. For the most part, such fare is seen as a provocation. Why give the permanently angry Muslim street another excuse to seethe?

In reality, the problem is not Playboy’s predilection for the scantily clad, but Islamists’ tendency to fly into a rage over a flash of thigh or a bare midriff. (There’s no nudity in the Indonesian edition.) American popular culture ought to be celebrated rather than derided. In its crass commercialism and blithe disregard for Islamist sensibilities lie the greatest hopes of bringing Muslim societies to terms with modernity.

 

Persuading young men to blow themselves up in order to claim 72 dark-eyed virgins in paradise is that much harder when the dark-eyed virgin next door can be found spread across a centrefold. It’s no coincidence that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a country where Starbucks isn’t allowed to use its mermaid logo lest it cause offence. If we’re lucky, the Indonesian court deciding on Arnada’s fate will see the larger issues at stake - the choice between an open society and a repressive one - and vote to acquit. If we’re luckier still, Indonesian Playboy will be joined one day by Baywatch Pakistan and Desperate Saudi Housewives.

If the watered down version of Playboy has caused Islamist groups to go crazy, wait till they get a load of Hustler.

When the tsunami wrecked Indonesia, Indonesian Islamists charged it was a divine act to punish Indonesia for allowing Western culture onto their lands.  Of course this argument is bunk considering if Allah was upset about the culture it would have been the United States, England, France, Italy, etc. that would have been ravaged, but the idea that what ticks off Islamists the most about the collective West is the openess of our culture is correct at least on face value.