Amien Rais, the chairman of the Partai Amanat Nasional, PAN, says his party considers the porn issue to be an unimportant distraction. There are greater, nation defining issues at hand.

For a modern semi-religious party (which won 6.5% in the last election and has its roots in the Muhammadiyah organisation,), he says detik, there are more important problems:

We are committed to staying focused on handling important national problems rather than trivial things.

Let that issue [porn] be handled by other parties. We will debate the fundamental issues, those which can save the nation.

(Rais is a former leader of Muhammadiyah. The current leader, Din Syamsudin, however certainly does regard the public indecency and porn issue as vital and recently he urged antara the government to ban Playboy magazine.

The government has to be firm and use the law. It’s already been several days since the magazine came out and still there has been no action from the government.

)

And those fundamental issues are detik, for the foreigner-baiting Rais,:

They are the cases of Freeport in Papua, Exxon Mobil’s involvement in the Block Cepu oilfield, the Natuna Gas operations, among others.

Speaking at a conference of the PAN, National Mandate Party, at the Hotel Sahid Jaya, Jl Jenderal Soedirman, Jakarta, he identified three areas where the nation suffered a serious “deficit”, in aspirations, bravery, and self-belief.

He regards the lack in national aspirations or hopes as a clear thing needing little explanation. For the weakness in boldness he gives the example of the United States’ authorities failure to capture Osama Bin Laden and compares this to the dynamic work of the Indonesian police. The American police are stupid, he says:

It’s been a long time and they still haven’t caught bin Laden whereas it only took the Indonesian police one week to capture those responsible for the Bali bombing.

We should walk tall, stride the earth like titans, in contrast to the bumbling fools of America who should mope about in shame, he says, more or less.

For the lack of self belief he says Indonesia has a wealth of natural resources but lacks the confidence to make use of these and instead hands them over to foreigners.

Now we have to be careful because there are a number of groups who want to weaken or obfuscate the nation’s philosophy, they regard other nations as number one while their own nation is relegated to second.