Update (4:05 pm) : Ridwan Kamil apologized and changed the caption on the photo

Dapat salam dari artis Thailand. (maaf untuk posting sebelumnya, jika multi tafsir) A post shared by Ridwan Kamil (@ridwankamil) on Mar 12, 2017 at 7:03pm PDT

“Got this greeting from a Thai celebrity. Thank you to @punpun_sutatta (I beg apology for the previous post, if there were multiple interpretations)”

We sincerely appreciate and respect the mayor for retracting his previous comment and apologizing. It certainly gives us more confidence that he is sincere in spreading a message of tolerance and diversity in Bandung. We are leaving the rest of the article unchanged, not to embarrass him but to give the story its full context, so please keep that in mind when reading it.

As the mayor of one of Indonesia’s most popular places for tourists to visit, how do you respond when a foreigner praises your city online? Well if you’re Bandung Mayor Ridwan Kamil, and the foreigner is a woman from Thailand, this is how:

The message came from Thai actress and model Sutatta Udomsilp via the account of @andrie_by.a, who appears to be an Indonesian tour guide in Bangkok.

Journalist Yenni Kwok (H/T!) breaks down the different reason’s why the mayor’s joke would be considered offensive.

The vast majority of comments on Ridwan’s post found his joke hilarious, but there were a few exceptions.



“Bapak Ridwan Kamil makes a cheap joke, a governor (Editor’s note: Ridwan Kamil is actually a mayor, for now) but uses low humor like that.”

Ridwan, a former architect, has often been praised as a progressive leader for his work building up Bandung as a creative hub and a “smart city”. But he has also been criticized for allowing intolerance to grow in the West Java capital. During the LGBT panic that gripped much of Indonesia last year, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) was able to conduct raids on boarding houses in Bandung looking for LGBT couples and Ridwan said that defending LGBT rights on social media was wrong and could get you blocked.

To be fair, after an incident in Bandung last December in which Islamic hardliners forcefully shut down a Christmas worship service, Ridwan was praised for strongly condemning their actions and starting a Tolerance Task Force to protect religious tolerance in the city.

Value differences. Respect beliefs. Struggle for tolerance.

At the end of that video, he says “If we cannot be brothers and sisters in faith, let us be brothers and sisters in humanity.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment, but it is difficult to see how one can promote that message of tolerance while at the same time making a joke like the one at the top of this post.

Of course, Ridwan’s fans will say he was just trying to be funny and that anybody who is offended is just a politically-correct westernized liberal (or even worse, a SJW) who doesn’t understand humor.

Well, we’d ask them to imagine a woman from the Middle East, wearing a headscarf, sending Donald Trump a message on Instagram saying, “I love the USA” and Trump replying with his own joke:

“I hope she’s not a terrorist.”

Funny or not?

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