JAKARTA, Indonesia – Scores of Islamic students staged protests outside Jakarta's parliament and in at least three other major Indonesian cities on Friday against President Barack Obama's upcoming visit to this predominantly Muslim country.

The students carried banners branding Obama as an enemy of Islam and an imperialist in downtown Jakarta as well as in the provincial capitals Padang, Yogyakarta and Surabaya.

They also threw shoes at large pictures of Obama's head. An Iraqi journalist was sentenced to a year in prison for throwing his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush during a news conference in Baghdad in 2008.

Protest organizer Ahmad Irhamul Fikri, spokesman for the Coordinating Board for Campus Proselytizing Institute, said bigger rallies will be staged next Friday in more Indonesian cities ahead of Obama's March 20-22 visit.

Such demonstrations of hostility toward Obama are rare in Indonesia, where he enjoys widespread popularity because he spend part of his childhood in Jakarta while his mother was married to his Indonesian stepfather.

Local government officials allowed business people to erect a statue of a 10-year-old Obama in a Jakarta park in December. But it was shifted last month to a nearby elementary school that he attended after more than 50,000 people supported a Facebook campaign against it and court action was threatened.

Obama is expected to sign the statue's pedestal while in Jakarta.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100305/ap_on_re_as/as_indonesia_obama

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This is just too damn ironic not to post here...  Obama=Bush confirmed?   Good times...

It's nice to know that you take religious fundamentalism and violence as a big joke.

@Montana: I take The One being labeled as an imperialist and having shoes thrown at his picture (and possibly him) less than 2 years after his inauguration as someone not like the "Evil" Bush as funny. Come on Montana, even you have to see this as ironic, even in the least.

but but but but

I thought Obama was a Muslim?

Wasn't he also born in Indonesia where he attended a radical Muslim Madrassa?

Haven't conservaties been claiming these things for a long time?

No. This probably has to do with his support for Israel, which is not something that he claimed to be above Bush on (regardless of stance). I also think it's odd that you find this funny, when you'd probably be condemning such behavior in another circumstance. 

@damkira: LOL! You forgot socialist, fascist, atheist, communist...

@Montana: I think you are reading to far into it. Obama's supportive of Israel b/c he has no other alternative and the demo goes D by like 75% anyway. I think that the shoe throwing part is just something that I would not have expected....

Visit? You mean he isn't staying there :(

No such luck...

Halogamer, all US presidents are protested everywhere they go big f'ing deal.
You are such an annoying dude!!!