One heated, racially-charged exchange on a busy Jakarta road, which was captured on a series of videos, caused quite a stir on social media in Indonesia recently. However, a resharing of the videos on Twitter along with an Islamophobic hashtag appears to have caused the whole thing to go viral.
The videos were originally posted on Facebook by a man who claimed that a woman recently scraped her car against his in front of Plaza Indonesia in Central Jakarta. The videos showed the woman screaming insults at the man and his family, calling them “bego” (stupid) and pointed out that their car was cheaper than her Lexus.
Though it wasn’t caught on camera, the man wrote in the caption of his post that the woman at one point said, “Damn Chinese, go home! Don’t live in Indonesia!”
After their quarrel held traffic around the area, the man and the woman agreed to park their cars to the side of the road but the woman reportedly drove away instead.
The videos went viral on Twitter yesterday morning after they were shared by user @cecempit, who copied most of the man’s Facebook caption but added the hashtag #muslimdodol (which roughly translates to “dumb Muslim”) on her posts, adding heat to what was already a simmering racial controversy.
“Does anyone know this woman? What happened was, our family was driving to Plaza Indonesia, at the traffic light this woman came from the rightmost lane and forced herself to go to the left lane so her car scraped ours. Then we got off the car with good intention to solve the matter peacefully,” @cecempit wrote in her first tweet in the thread, adding the Islamophobic hashtag at the end.
At the time of writing, the video has been watched more than 900,000 times and retweeted over 5,000 times.
While her tweets made it appear that she was part of the incident, in a reply to another user @cecempit explained that she decided to upload the videos because the people in it were her friends. She described herself as a “Muslim who was ashamed by the woman in the video.”
Netizens were quick to call out @cecempit, with many of them accusing her of creating an Islamophobic narrative by piggybacking on someone else’s quarrel.
The original uploader of the videos was later revealed to be a Facebook user who goes by the name Reza Gan. Reza has since written posts on Facebook to clarify that he never shared the videos on Twitter.
Reza added that he has no relationship with @cecempit at all, alluding that the latter might have reuploaded the videos without his permission in the first place. Obviously concerned with how the controversy is unfolding, Reza also highlighted that his original post on Facebook, which appears to have been taken down, did not include any hashtags.
@cecempit’s thread became such a huge controversy online that politicians have called for authorities to invoke Indonesia’s blasphemy law against her.
Akun2 seperti ini harus ditangkap, hastaq2 penuh kebencian sprt ini yg memecah belah kita. mhn pihak kepolisian dicari dan ditindak. terimakasih. @DivHumas_Polri https://t.co/Nlm28KrDQI
— Dahnil A Simanjuntak (@Dahnilanzar) December 30, 2019
“[People behind] accounts like this must be apprehended, hateful hashtags like this divide us. I implore the police to find and take [legal actions on the user]. Thank you,” Gerindra party spokesman Dahnil Anzar Simanjuntak tweeted yesterday.
@cecempit briefly locked her account earlier today, though some of the video clips are still accessible on Instagram, as they were shared by Reza’s wife, Felanny Kusuma.
Felanny also provided an update on Instagram today, saying that the couple has reported the woman driving the Lexus to the police for a hit and run.
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