Survivors of the Houla massacre blamed pro-regime gunmen for at least some of the carnage as the killings reverberated inside Syria and beyond, further isolating Assad and embarrassing his few remaining allies.

“It’s very hard for me to describe what I saw, the images were incredibly disturbing,” a Houla resident who hid in his home during the massacre told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “Women, children without heads, their brains or stomachs spilling out.”

He said the pro-regime gunmen, known as shabiha, targeted the most vulnerable in the farming villages that make up Houla, a poor area in Homs province. “They went after the women, children and elderly,” he said, asking that his name not be used out of fear of reprisals.

Assad’s government often deploys fearsome militias that provide muscle for the regime and carry out military-style attacks. They frequently work closely with soldiers and security forces, but the regime never acknowledges their existence, allowing it to deny responsibility for their actions.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said there are strong suspicions that pro-Assad fighters were responsible for some of the killings, adding that he has seen no reason to believe that “third elements” — or outside forces — were involved, although he did not rule it out.

The Syrian regime has denied any role in the massacre, blaming the killings on “armed terrorists” who attacked army positions in the area and slaughtered innocent civilians. It has provided no evidence to support its narrative, nor has it given a death toll.

Following his meeting with Assad, Annan called on the government and “all government-backed militias” to stop military operations and show maximum restraint. He also called on the armed opposition to stop all violence.

“We are at a tipping point,” Annan told reporters in Damascus. “The Syrian people do not want the future to be one of bloodshed and division.”

Cranking up the pressure on Assad, the Obama administration gave Syria’s most senior envoy in Washington, the charge d’affaires at the Syrian Embassy, 72 hours to leave the United States. Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Bulgaria also expelled Syrian diplomats.

“We hold the Syrian government responsible for this slaughter of innocent lives,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in Washington. “This massacre is the most unambiguous indictment to date of the Syrian government’s flagrant violations of its U.N. Security Council obligations.”

The massacre in Houla could prove to be a watershed moment in the Syrian crisis, which began in March 2011 with peaceful protests inspired by the wave of uprisings sweeping the Arab world.

Nearly 15 months later, the country is in many ways unrecognizable from the days before the revolt. Assad, once considered a potential reformer in a region filled with aging dictators, is a global pariah. A country that once boasted it was the safest in the Middle East is riven with violence, some of it reminiscent of the worst days of the Iraq war. The economy is in tatters. Syrians are facing price increases for basic goods and endure regular power cuts.

And in some haunting cases, neighbors who have lived side by side for years are turning on each other, driven by sectarian hatred that so many months of violence is laying bare.

According to witnesses, the massacre, which began late Friday in an area about 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of the city of Homs, had dangerous sectarian overtones.

The victims lived in the Houla area’s Sunni Muslim villages. But the shabiha forces allegedly behind many of the killings came from an arc of nearby villages populated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Most shabiha fighters belong to the Alawite sect, to which the Assad family and the ruling elite also belong. This ensures the gunmen’s loyalty to the regime, built on fears they will be persecuted if the Sunni majority gains the upper hand.

Sunnis make up most of Syria’s 22 million people, as well as the backbone of the opposition. Even as much of the opposition insists the movement is entirely secular, disturbing reports from the ground suggest religious tensions are boiling over.

The volatile sectarian divide makes civil war one of the most dire scenarios.

Activists say as many as 13,000 people have been killed in the uprising. The U.N. put the toll at 9,000 as of March — one year into the revolt — but many hundreds more have died since.

On Tuesday, the U.N.’s human rights office said most of the 108 victims of the Houla massacre were shot at close range. The U.N. report indicated that most of the dead were killed execution-style, with fewer than 20 people cut down by regime shelling.

Deaths from heavy artillery can be blamed on regime forces with relative confidence because rebel fighters do not have such weapons. But it is more difficult to determine who is behind the close-range killings — particularly as Syria sharply restricts media access.

Still, the U.N. cited survivors and witnesses blaming the house-to-house killings on shabiha. Witnesses also told the AP that shabiha were behind the attacks.

“What is very clear is this was an absolutely abominable event that took place in Houla, and at least a substantial part of it was summary executions of civilians, women and children,” said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the U.N. High commissioner for Human Rights.

“At this point, it looks like entire families were shot in their houses,” he said.

It is not clear what touched off the convulsion of violence. Houla activists reached by Skype said government troops shelled the area after anti-government protests on Friday and clashed with local rebels. Later, shabiha from nearby villages swept through the area, stabbing residents and shooting them at close range.

Videos posted online by anti-regime activists show explosions in Houla and dismembered bodies in the streets, then row upon row of the dead laid out before being buried in a mass grave. Some videos showed dozens of dead children, some with gaping wounds.

According to the state-run news agency, SANA, Assad on Tuesday blamed terrorists and weapons smugglers for scuttling the peace plan, which called for a cease-fire and dialogue with the opposition. The regime denies there is any popular will behind the country’s uprising, saying foreign extremists and terrorists are driving the unrest.

Although Damascus has remained largely impervious to international condemnation over the course of the uprising, Tuesday’s diplomatic squeeze will increase pressure on Syria’s remaining allies, including Russia.

Russia has provided a key layer of protection for the Syrian government in the uprising. Russia and China have used their veto power to block U.N. resolutions against Assad. But Russia has grown increasingly critical of Damascus in recent months, and the Houla massacre has prompted some of the strongest condemnations yet from Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is traveling to Germany and France this week and is likely to come under even greater criticism for his support of the regime.

“We have to continue our work with the Russians,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said. “We will continue to discuss this with Russia. Russia has particular leverage on the regime and therefore has a particular role in this crisis.”

Despite some shift in Russia’s stance recently, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday the Houla massacre must not be a pretext to push for military intervention from outside. Instead, he urged all sides to focus on the Annan plan.

Hague said that the situation in Syria is more complicated than what international powers faced in Libya last year, when a U.N. resolution ushered in NATO military intervention against dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration remains opposed to military action, reasoning that it would lead only to more carnage. He said the U.S. will continue offering non-lethal assistance to the Syrian people and said Tuesday’s coordinated move to expel Syrian diplomats was a signal of the international community’s “absolute disgust” with Assad’s rule.

Assad still commands a strong army that has proven largely unwilling to turn on him. The entire structure of the state has been built to preserve Assad’s power, with the military, the police and security services — even the economy — tied up with the survival of his presidency.

But as the violence engulfs the country, many see Assad’s departure as the only way out.

Fawaz Zakri, a member of the opposition Syrian National Council, urged action by the U.N. Security Council, saying the world body “must do something to save the Syrian people’s souls.”

___

Associated Press writers Zeina Karam and Ben Hubbard in Beirut, Angela Charlton in Paris, Frank Jordans in Geneva, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, and Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Turkey, contributed reporting.

The incident drew international attention and became a turning point in the anti-bullying movement. Yet throughout it all, Ravi remained conspicuously silent. Even as he faced the possibility of deportation and 10 years in jail, even when the judge called his behavior “offensive and unconscionable,” he didn’t offer a mea culpa. When Clementi’s fellow victim in the webcam spying incident, the young man known to the court as “M.B.,” issued a statement that Ravi “has never apologized to me for what he did and said,” and that he does not “believe that he has taken responsibility for his conduct,” Ravi still made no attempts at amends.

But on Tuesday, the 20-year-old, who will begin serving his 30-day sentence this week, finally spoke out about the callous actions of his 18-year-old self. In a statement issued by his lawyer, Ravi declared, “I accept responsibility for and regret my thoughtless, insensitive, immature, stupid and childish choices that I made on Sept. 19, 2010, and Sept. 21, 2010. My behavior and actions, which at no time were motivated by hate, bigotry, prejudice or desire to hurt, humiliate or embarrass anyone, were nonetheless the wrong choices and decisions. I apologize to everyone affected by those choices.”

No one but Ravi can vouch for the sincerity of his words or for whether he believes that this gesture is truly “the only way I can go on with my life.” And Ravi doesn’t fully say what, if not bigotry or a desire to hurt, his motives were. He may not comprehend them himself. Few of us have committed acts as atrocious, as violating, as the ones Ravi did on September 19 and 21 of 2010. But anyone with a shred of humanity has known what it feels like to look back on his lowest moments, his worst transgressions, and wonder, why did I do that? How could I have?

Ravi has the next month to sit in a jail cell and ponder the answers to those questions. And though nothing he can ever come up with will undo the damage he caused or the horrible chain of events he set in motion, there is, within that first step toward atonement, the possibility that one more young life won’t be thrown away now. There is the hope that in accepting responsibility, Ravi, unable to rewrite his past, can at least have a future. Because while punishment comes when the judge hands down a sentence, forgiveness can only begin when the perpetrator apologizes. That’s why, after nearly two years locked in his own silence, Ravi’s liberation won’t come when he walks out of a New Jersey jail. It began the moment he said he was sorry.

That vision, however, is now under assault by both political parties in America. On the Republican side, the Washington Post reports Mitt Romney just unveiled “a pro-choice, pro-voucher, pro-states-rights education program that seems certain to hasten the privatization of the public education system” completely. On the other side, Wall Street titans in the Democratic Party with zero experience in education policy are marshaling tens of millions of dollars to do much of what Romney aims to do as president – and they often have a willing partner in President Barack “Race to the Top” Obama and various Democratic governors.

Funded by corporate interests who naturally despise organized labor, both sides have demonized teachers’ unions as the primary problem in education — somehow ignoring the fact that most of the best-performing public school systems in America and in the rest of the world are, in fact, unionized. (Are we never supposed to ask how, if unions are the primary problem, so many unionized schools in America and abroad do so well?) Not surprisingly, these politicians and activists insist they are driven solely by their regard for the nation’s children — and they expect us to ignore the massive amount of money their benefactors (and even the activists personally) stand to make by transforming public education into yet another private profit center. Worse, they ask us also to forget that in the last few years of aggressive “reform” (read: evisceration) of public education, the education gap has actually gotten far worse, with the most highly touted policies put in place now turning the schoolhouse into yet another catalyst of crushing inequality.

Here are the five most prominent of those policies — and how they threaten to make this country even more economically unequal and racially segregated than ever before.

1. Unequal Funding Formulas

A half-century of social science research confirms that factors outside the school — and specifically, poverty — are far more determinative in student achievement than anything that happens inside the school. This is why, as both New York University’s Diane Ravitch and Dissent magazine’s Joanne Barkan note, public schools in America’s wealthiest enclaves consistently rank among the highest achieving in the world.

Knowing that, it stands to reason that schools in the lowest-income areas should receive disproportionately more education funding than schools in high-income areas so that they can combat the systemic out-of-classroom factors that schools in wealthy neighborhoods don’t face. With this extra money, they might be able to fund the so-called “wraparound” services that even reformers like Geoffrey Canada admit are crucial to the success of public schools in high-poverty locales.

Yet, it’s the other way around. As a 2011 U.S. Department of Education report documented, “many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding” leaving “students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers.” This inequity is further exacerbated by local property-tax-based education funding formulas that often generate far more resources for wealthy high-property-value school districts than for destitute low-property-value enclaves. Inequality also is intensified by devious new taxpayer-subsidized scholarship programs that, according to the New York Times, “have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children” in traditional public schools.

Policy-wise, changing such funding formulas to make sure schools in poor areas get more funding than schools in wealthy neighborhoods is fairly straightforward. But, then, the commonsense idea threatens the gated-community ethos of the wealthy and powerful who control our politics. It also fundamentally challenges the core principles of a nation that still likens spreading the wealth to confiscatory socialism. Thus, the idea remains off the table — and consequently the increasingly unequal funding of education now effectively subsidizes a system that is cementing inequality for the long haul.

In practice, that means schools in low-income areas continue to receive comparatively less funding to recruit teachers, upgrade classrooms, reduce class sizes and sustain all the other basics of a good education.

2. Vouchers and Charter Schools

In national politics, private education profiteers and anti-government ideologues have successfully manufactured a debate over privately administered charter schools and private-school vouchers, insisting that, if created all over the nation, they will improve educational achievement. “Manufactured,” though, is the key word — because when it comes to results, there is no debate over what the data show.

Stanford University’s landmark study of charters found that while “17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts” — meaning that, in total, charters actually harm overall student achievement. (Those results were corroborated by the Education Department’s National Center on Education Statistics.) Likewise, data from the nation’s largest voucher system prove that voucher-subsidized students do not systemically outperform students in traditional public school systems.

These facts, unfortunately, have little — if any — impact on the political rhetoric about education. But, then, at least there’s an ongoing discussion about the academic effectiveness of charters and vouchers. The same cannot be said for how those charter and voucher programs threaten to severely exacerbate racial and socioeconomic inequality.

When it comes to charter schools, Businessweek’s headline says it best: “Segregated Charter Schools Evoke Separate But Equal Era in U.S.” Here’s what we know, as I recounted in a recent newspaper column:

According to a new report from the National Education Policy Center, however, charters “tend to be more racially segregated than traditional public schools” – and in lots of places, they seem to be openly hostile to children who are poor, who are from minority communities or who have special education needs.

A smattering of headlines from across the country tells that story. “Nashville Charter Schools Blasted Over Racial Imbalance,” blared a recent headline in the Tennessean. “Charter Schools Face Discrimination Complaints,” read The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “Colorado Charter Schools Enroll Fewer With Needs,” screamed the Denver Post. “Charter Schools Enrolling Low Number of Poor Students,” reported the Miami Herald. The list goes on and on.

When it comes to vouchers, we can expect much the same if current pro-voucher efforts and a new Romney Administration successfully expand the idea nationwide. We know we can expect this because that’s exactly what happened in the nation that most recently went to a voucher system.

As University of Texas researchers documented in their study of Chile’s national voucher program:

Private-voucher schools have not only not reduced educational inequality, but also … have increased segmentation of the educational system according to (socioeconomic status) of students. Thus, the low and medium-low classes attend public schools, medium and medium-high classes study in private-vouchers, and the elite are educated in private-paid schools.

Why do vouchers increase inequality? Because they typically do not fund the entire private-school tuition bill, nor do they typically force private schools to accept the voucher as the sum total tuition. Not surprisingly, then, the wealthy are able to fill in the tuition gap with their own disposable income, while lower-income families can’t. Consequently, the voucher becomes a taxpayer handout to already middle- and upper-class parents to subsidize their children’s private school education, leaving economically disadvantaged kids in a newly defunded public school. Indeed, as the Texas researchers say, “Chilean parents from medium and medium-high classes were able to pay the additional money required, whereas the poorest parents did not have this choice.”

This very dynamic is already prevalent in the crypto-voucher programs being pioneered in states throughout the country. As the New York Times recently documented, conservative lawmakers have set up scholarship programs that pretend to be charitable endeavors but instead are designed as a tax subsidy for wealthy parents to finance their kids’ private school education. Because poorer families can’t afford those tuitions, even with the tax subsidy, low-income kids often remain in public education systems. Thanks to the way the scholarships divert public money into private schools, those public education systems are further depleted of resources, thus creating yet more educational inequality.

3. The Fee-Based Public School

For public education to be the great social equalizer it is supposed to be, it must limit economic barriers to entry. It must, in other words, be as close to free as possible. That’s why the new move to fee-based public schools is so troubling — it further turns public education into yet another instrument of economic stratification.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, schools across the country are “imposing or boosting fees for everything from enrolling in honors English to riding the bus.”

The fees run the gamut. In Kansas, for instance, one school district has created a $90 across-the-board “participation fee” for all students in order to fund extracurricular activities. In Maryland, it’s special fees for Advanced Placement biology courses. And perhaps worst of all, in Colorado’s largest school district, administrators are throwing kids off school buses until their parents pay a stiff transportation fee.

The move to such regressive fees has been prompted by the conservative movement’s success in draining government revenues, anti-tax politicians’ unwillingness to embrace new levies, and communities’ refusal to embrace measures to make up for budget shortfalls. Left without resources, local school administrators have thus resorted to fees. As one Maryland school official put it: “The reality is that the money has to come from somewhere.”

In the process, the new system is creating a whole new meaning for educational inequality. No longer is the inequity only between poor and rich school districts, it’s now between poor and rich kids within individual schools, themselves. Indeed, if high-income parents can pay the fees, their kids can have access to basic educational services — but when low-income parents can’t pay those fees, their kids are denied those same services.

4. Higher-Education Tuition Increases

For much the same reason, K-12 school administrators are moving their schools to fee-based models, and public universities have been jacking up tuition rates at a pace that far outstrips inflation. In just the last year, for example, tuition at these institutions rose a whopping 8.3 percent as universities sought to make up for legislatures’ huge reductions in higher-education funding.

At the same time, the New York Times reports that both private and public college scholarships have been cut. Additionally, as both Mitt Romney’s Wall Street-centric student loan initiative and Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget prove, federal loans and grants would only become more anemic in a Republican-dominated Washington.

The aggregate result of all this is to make access to higher education even more driven by economic privilege than it has been in the past. If your parents are wealthy and can pay ever higher tuition, you will have access to higher education, which gives you a better chance of higher wages. But if your parents aren’t wealthy and therefore can’t follow Mitt Romney’s request to lend you money, you either can’t go to college and will miss out on those opportunities for career advancement, or you are forced to assume crushing student debt. (No doubt, free college in other industrialized nations is a big part of why those other nations have higher rates of social mobility and lower rates of economic inequality than the United States.)

While it’s certainly true that economic status has always played a role in higher education in America, the key difference today is that economic status now increasingly affects access to public universities, not just private ones. That’s a major shift because those public universities were set up specifically to expand access — and mitigate economic obstacles — to higher education. Now, with financial barriers so high, they are becoming just another instrument of inequality.

5. Differential Tuition Rates Based on Majors

In 21st century America, math, science and business majors often make more money in the job market than their peers in other majors. In that sense, majoring in such subjects can be a means of moving up the economic ladder.

Unfortunately, more and more public universities are instituting regressive fees on those students who want to pursue those majors. As USA Today recently reported:

A growing number of public universities are charging higher tuition for math, science and business programs …

More than 140 public universities now use “differential tuition” plans, up 19% since 2006, according to research from Cornell’s Higher Education Research Institute. That number is increasing as states cut higher-education spending and schools try to pay for expensive technical programs …

Some worry that higher tuition will put off low-income students.

“The fear in all of this is will it lead to people being rationed out of classes?” said Ronald Ehrenberg, the Cornell researcher behind the tuition study.

That fear is legitimate. Already facing high tuition and massive debt, lower-income students are naturally more sensitive to add-on fees than wealthy students. The fees, then, serve to create a powerful deterrent to low-income students to major in precisely the fields that typically generate higher post-college incomes.

Ultimately, just like K-12 fees transform economic inequality into a factor inside individual schools, so to do “differential tuition” rates. In this case, low-income students face not just barriers to a given set of more expensive private schools, they now face new economic barriers to particular studies within the schools they somehow manage to afford. And because of that, low-income students will have an even harder time than rich kids in getting a post-college job that pays a good wage.

The domestic drone market is still small. In 2012, the civil unmanned aviation vehicle (UAV) market will account for only 1.4 percent of the $7 billion-plus drone industry, according to a recent industry survey. This year 98.6 percent of all UAV spending will pay for military applications. But the burst of interest in funding the establishment of the UAV test sites indicates many businesses and elected officials expect that to change soon.

The scope of the states’ plans emerge from more than 200 public comments submitted to the FAA earlier this year.

The state of Florida said it “intends to build a UAS [unmanned aviation system] test and operational range … in partnership with civil and military government agencies, academia and industry.”

The Ohio Unmanned Aircraft Systems Initiative aims to make Ohio “the destination of choice for all UAS researchers, developers, manufacturers, suppliers, trainers and educators.”

The Colorado Unmanned Aviation Systems Team, a consortium of 35 companies and agencies, hopes to do drone testing for the FAA throughout the state’s airspace.

A host of major defense contractors submitted comments on the test sites, including Sikorsky, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell and Raytheon. And so did a number of universities, including University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Texas A&M, North Carolina State, Kansas State, and Embry Riddle Aeronautic University. Universities have taken the lead in getting FAA permission to fly drones in U.S. airspace.

But the most fully developed proposals for running the test sites are likely to come from state consortiums of industry, government and universities, which will put up the money to run the sites. The FAA is not providing any funding for the sites.

The U.S. armed forces are likely to play a role in the test sites, as several groups cited their collaboration with local military bases. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory,  headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base just outside of Dayton, Ohio, is a major partner in the Ohio initiative, which is perhaps the most ambitious in the country. Another serious initiative is the Mid-Atlantic Unmanned Aircraft Test System Team, a venture backed by Virginia and Maryland, which touts its work with Naval Air Warfare Center, Naval Surface Warfare Center and NASA’s Langley Research Center.

Stan Van Der Werf, a retired Air Force Colonel who heads the Colorado effort, says the economic potential of domestic drones is “enormous” but dependent on the regulations that the FAA is now writing.

“The more freedom of movement the FAA allows, the greater the private business will be,” Van Der Werf said in a phone interview. “If unmanned vehicles have access similar to that enjoyed by manned aircraft, I think the commercial business will be ten times larger than the Department of Defense business.”

Brian Zinke, a state senator from Montana and head of the Center for Remote Integration, foresees using domestic drones  for  wildfire control, wildlife and livestock management, and agriculture crop optimization.

Several commenters to the FAA expressed concern about privacy. One woman wrote

Drones of all sizes can easily be weaponized, can easily gather data on citizenry via use of biometrics, and conduct surveillance without a warrant. These capabilities are draconian enough for wartime – but even their use in ‘war’ has not been fully thought out. …. As a retired air traffic controller, I know we have plenty of MOAs [military operations areas] and other restricted airspace already, so if the military wants to test drone systems there, they can go right ahead. Mixing privately owned UAS with piloted aircraft, either commercial or general aviation, is hopefully a long way off.

In comments to the FAA, the Electronic Privacy Information Center called for privacy protections to be written into regulations. Applied Research Associates, an engineering firm based in San Diego, argued privacy protections would benefit the industry.

“UAS manufacturers and operators must consider the risk of litigation and the effect that legal rulings will have on their ability to utilize this technology,” wrote one company engineer. “Research data should be collected to establish standards that protect citizens’ privacy rights and establish ‘best practices’ for industry. Such research will prevent the chilling effect that undefined legal responsibility has on innovation.”

The future of drones in America is a work in progress. The FAA will issue its criteria for the test sites and start accepting formal proposals in July. The six sites will be selected by December and are supposed to become operational in 2013.

But while the pop star’s show was effectively banned from Indonesia, tens of thousands of young women here put on performances like Karisma’s every night. They shake and grind in smoky bars, ritzy nightclubs, at weddings, even circumcisions. In most cases the hosts say the sexier the better.

The apparent double standard highlights divisions between Indonesia’s largely tolerant majority and a vocal minority of Islamic hard-liners. The conservatives hold outsized influence in government, and have successfully picked high-profile battles like the Lady Gaga show, but they haven’t been able to stop dangdut, which has a long tradition here.

Karisma’s stage shows have gotten nearly a million hits on YouTube. Julia Perez, an actress and wannabe politician, is dubbed the “sex bomb” for her racy act. Another performer, Dewi Persik, is known for her powerful back-and-forth hip thrusting “saw move” and public acknowledgments that she had surgery to become “a born-again virgin” to please her future husband.

The up-and-coming “Trio Macan,” made up of three Gaga look-alikes, with dyed hair and catlike poses, often simulate sex with male customers on stage.

Members of the Anti Apostasy Movement, Indonesian Mujaheeds Council and the notoriously thuggish Islamic Defender’s Front, better known as FPI, are quick to say they go after provocative dangdut performances. From time to time their followers jump in vans and ransack dangdut bars and nightclubs in the capital, Jakarta, and its outskirts.

But they know this won’t get them the kind of attention they crave, said Andrew Weintraub, a professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the book “Dangdut Stories.”

“Lady Gaga is a big name,” he said. “It’s a big stage for conservative Muslim organizations to promote their own agenda. They’ll get a lot of attention internationally — which is also what makes the state nervous.”

All 52,000 tickets for the concert Lady Gaga planned to give June 3 sold out within days, but members of the FPI had vowed to meet her at the airport if she dared step off the plane. Others bought tickets to her show saying, if it went ahead, they’d wreak havoc from inside the packed stadium.

As the weekslong controversy raged, conservative politicians and members of more mainstream Muslim organizations piled onto the anti-Gaga wagon. And police — for the first time ever — denied a permit to one of the many Western stars passing through, citing security. Lady Gaga eventually pulled the plug.

“We hold huge concerts here all the time,” said Desi Anwar, a local television anchor, noting that crowd control is nothing new. “This is what happens when the government is perceived as weak and not consistent.”

Indonesia is often held up by U.S and others as a beacon of how Islam and democracy can coexist, and in many ways they are right. Most of the secular nation’s 210 million Muslims practice a moderate form of the faith and accept differences in others, with schoolgirls in headscarves regularly seen in shopping malls walking arm-in-arm with friends wearing tiny short shorts and T-shirts.

Sweeping reforms that followed the ouster of Gen. Suharto’s 32-year dictatorship in 1998 have allowed citizens to directly pick their own leaders, while vastly improving human rights, opening up the media and allowing artists freely express themselves for the first time in decades.

But a small extremist fringe has become more vocal in recent years, using its influence to push through controversial laws banning everything from kissing in public to showing too much skin. They’ve also become more violent, going after Christians and members of other religious minorities with batons and machetes, usually without paying any price.

More recently, mobs attacked Alex Aan, an atheist, now in jail for his beliefs, and rampaged a book discussion by visiting Canadian liberal Muslim activist, Irshad Manji.

That’s one reason hard-liners felt they could take on Gaga — the biggest international star in the world, said Sidney Jones, a Jakarta-based analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank. They were emboldened by a string of successes.

“These guys are on a roll,” she said, adding they have learned that by mobilizing various conservative groups and politicians, “they can set the agenda and underscore the importance of abiding by Islamic values.”

Critics say President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose government relies on the support of Islamic parties, is largely to blame for rising intolerance for remaining silent.

But the passivity of the majority also plays a role, staying out of the debate unless their own liberal lifestyles are at stake — as was the case with Lady Gaga.

Dangdut, which got its name from the rhythmic “dang” and “dut” of the drum, is an occasional target of conservatives, though Weintraub, the music professor, says most of its singers are not raunchy.

Introduced in the 1970s, the genre is partly derived from Malay, Arabic, and Hindu music. For many years, it was mostly the music that expressed the hopes and disappointments of the downtrodden, spilling into the streets and back alleys from bars and restaurants, taxis and public buses.

After Suharto’s downfall, when media restrictions were lifted, dangdut made the leap to commercial TV. Once male-dominated audiences expanded to include the middle- and upper-class women, many of whom felt empowered by overt expressions of sexuality.

From that emerged Inul Daratista, a village girl from East Java province who wowed fans nationwide with her rapid-fire, pelvic “drill dancing.”

Hard-liners were mortified, calling her lewd and a threat to national morals. They held protest rallies, forced her to cancel shows and dismantled a statue of her built near her home.

Within a few months, the then 24-year-old largely disappeared from the limelight, in part because of legislation proposed in response to her wiggling derriere that eventually led to the country’s controversial 2008 anti-pornography law.

The law has been applied arbitrarily since than, usually with hard-liners leading the charge.

It was used to jail the editor of Indonesia’s now-shuttered version of Playboy, even though there are many smuttier magazines on the streets. The lead singer of a local pop band, Peter Pan, also is behind bars after a homemade sex video of him and two girlfriends found its way on the Internet, even though several lawmakers caught in similar sex scandals are still sitting in Parliament.

Dangdut’s influences have changed over the years to include everything from American and British rock to salsa, house and remix, and styles of dance today are shaped by MTV and Western pop stars.

Hard-liners cite those outside influences as another reason they don’t like it.

Conservative opponents of dangdut don’t worry fans like Imam Siswanto, who says the genre is powerful because it often touches on issues that resonate with the masses: heartache, social inequality and, sometimes, faith.

He said that although critics sent Gaga packing, “I can firmly and confidently say that dangdut will never die.”

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Online:

Dangdut singer: http://bit.ly/j37Txf