JAKARTA: The Indonesian government is looking to boost the country’s image as a halal tourism destination for Muslims from around the world.
The drive is part of the government’s efforts to boost state coffers and meet its 5.2 percent growth target this year. President Joko Widodo promised 7 percent economic growth rate on the campaign trail in 2014. The tourism sector contributed 4.23 percent of the country’s GDP in 2016.
The Muslim travel market is one of the fastest-growing segments in the global travel industry, according to the MasterCard-CrescentRating Global Muslim Travel Index (GMTI) 2017, which was released in May.
The GMTI predicted that the Muslim travel market will be worth $220 billion by 2020 and $300 billion by 2026, spurred by Muslim-friendly amenities and easy access to travel information.
Around 121 million Muslims traveled internationally during 2016 — an increase of 4 million from the previous year. It is estimated that figure will reach 156 million by 2020 — accounting for 10 percent of the global travel market.
According to the GMTI, Indonesia ranks third — after Malaysia and the UAE — out of member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
“We aim to be in the No. 1 spot by 2019,” Hafizuddin Ahmad, a member of the halal tourism acceleration team at the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism, told Arab News.
The government has assigned 10 destinations across the country for halal tourism, with Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara province, West Sumatra and Aceh as the Top 3.
“We assigned those destinations in accordance with the local culture and their readiness to adapt to the concept,” said Ahmad, who is part of a Shariah supervisory body for Sofyan Hotels, a local hotel chain that follows Shariah principles in its management.
Lombok Island has already made a name for itself as a halal destination, picking up World’s Best Halal Destination and World’s Best Halal Honeymoon Destination at the World Halal Travel Awards in 2015.
But Taufan Rahmadi, who oversees projects to accelerate the growth of the island’s Mandalika area as a tourism destination, stressed that it is not just Muslim tourists that Lombok wishes to attract.
“We do not apply special zones for halal or conventional tourism. Halal tourism should not override existing, conventional tourism,” he told Arab News. “We don’t want to scare the conventional tourists away.
“Our branding is in line with the culture and our local custom, as our competitive edge, compared to Bali,” Rahmadi continued, referring to Lombok’s more famous and popular neighbor, while pointing out that Muslims account for 95 percent of Lombok’s population. He also claimed to have “often heard” complaints from tourists who could not find halal services in Bali.
Lombok saw an increase in visitors from Middle Eastern countries last year, up to 240,989 from 182,143 the previous year. But Arista Atmadjati — a tourism lecturer from Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta — said the island is hindered in its quest to attract further Muslim tourists by the fact there are still no direct flights from the GCC to Lombok.
“We are working on it. We are also working to have the runway in Lombok airport extended so that wide-body aircrafts can land,” Ahmadi said.
“Improved connectivity is a must so that Lombok can be a primary tourism destination instead of getting spillover from Bali where the tourists may have spent their money,” Atmadjati said.
Indonesia seeks bigger share of global halal tourism
Indonesia seeks bigger share of global halal tourism
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
