He can’t renounce “radicalism,” because he believes it to be simply Islam. Despite many claims to the contrary, “moderate” Muslim spokesmen in the West have never shown the beliefs of “radicals” such as Abu Bakar Bashir to be un-Islamic.
“Cleric linked to Bali bombings ‘won’t renounce radicalism,'” Associated Press, January 19, 2019 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
JAKARTA: An Islamic cleric who was the ideological leader of the Bali bombers is being released early from a 15-year prison sentence after Indonesia’s president relented on a condition that he renounce radical beliefs, lawyers confirmed on Saturday.
Abu Bakar Bashir had previously been ineligible for parole because of his refusal to recognise the secular government’s authority. He insists he is answerable only to God and that Indonesia should be governed by Islamic law.
His planned release comes during campaigning for a presidential election due in April in which some opponents of President Joko Widodo have tried to discredit him as insufficiently Islamic.
Lawyer Yusril Ihza Mahendra, chairman of an Islamic political party and adviser to Widodo’s re-election campaign, said at a news conference on Saturday that he had brought the issue of Bashir’s imprisonment to the president, who was able to “respect” Bashir’s beliefs and ease the conditions of his release.
“The president put aside the ministerial regulations,” he said. “In terms of law, the ministerial regulation was a policy so that the president as the highest policy maker could override the ministerial regulation.”
Widodo announced on Friday that Bashir, who is 80 and in frail health, would be released on humanitarian grounds. The date of his release hasn’t been announced, but it is expected to happen within days.
The firebrand cleric was arrested almost immediately after the 2002 Bali bombings. Most of the 202 people killed in the bombings were foreigners, including dozens of Australians, leaving a deep scar on that country.
But prosecutors were unable to prove a string of terrorism-related allegations, and Bashir was instead sentenced to 18 months in prison for immigration violations.
In 2011, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for supporting a military-style training camp for Islamist militants. An Indonesian of Yemeni descent, he was also a founder of an Islamic boarding school in the central Javanese city of Solo that terrorism experts regarded as a factory for violent extremists….