LIBERTY

Did Hang Tuah ever lived? Was there a historical Jesus?

2012-01-23T02:00:00.000-08:00

The season inside the hollow of history remained. In another reversal of Malayan history Professor Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim, an emeritus of the subject, reportedly want removed from the textbooks the spirit (semangat) of the Malay warrior (satria) the indomitable Hang Tuah, saying he is nothing but a myth. The folk hero, however, long grown into a geist though he was not mentioned in the Ming records, is appearing like he refuses to go.

Hang Li Po was a Chinese princess Sultan Mansur of Melaka (Malacca) was said to have taken as a fifth wife. Nothing else about her was significant and hence, fact or fiction could not and cannot matter more than a dime. Prof Kay Kim wanted her out too.

But Hang Tuah is a folk spirit, a zeitgeist of the Malay, him declaring ‘Never shall the Malay disappear from the face of the earth,’ making the Melayu an eternal substance, i.e. if they can find themselves apart from the Arabic religion that has damned, in their own society, most things Malay as khurafat (superstition).

It’s a lasting confusion Malays face. The Malay Muslim has an obvious religious problem about accepting the pentacle in the Hindu epic, the Pandavas, which Hang Tuah and his four compatriots, Hang Jebat, Hang Lekir, Hang Lekiu and Hang Kasturi obviously reflect.

The same five is to be found in Prophet Mohammad with the four Khalifah Rashidun (Rightly Guided Caliphs), Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali mentioned every Friday in the mosques of Malaysia.

“Rightly Guided Caliphs”? Where’s the line between the fact and the fiction?

To be Malay or to be essentially Muslim had been and still is an existential choice the Malays must make to find self and the “I AM”.

When they finally made it they insisted constitutionally the Malay must be a Muslim and compressing that into power they refused themselves the freedom of religion. It’s sad.

Sadder still, Hang Tuah and his friends enjoyed their drinks (hic!) and thus became inadmissable to the hardening sinews of Islam in Malaysia. Islam damns alcoholic drinks as haram (forbidden). How do we appreciate Hang Tuah and his comrades who have been described occassionally drunk?

Yesus Kristos!

Yes. Yesus Kristos would pose a larger problem to Khoo Kay Kim. The wondrous Son of Man has hardly any documentary evidence to support the belief that he was indeed a person that had walked the earth, preached, taught, healed, is The Way to more than a billion Christians in the world and miraculously turned water into wine on one occassion before the heart warming stuff was forbidden centuries later by Muhammad. But it is evidently not a historical fact, making for a twain between history and religious belief and so Jesus may stand a chance in a Shariah Court.

Here in Malaysia you can go to jail drinking miraculously made wine, beer or stout if you are a Muslim. Therefore, choose!

Hang Tuah

Hang Tuah was a myth when this writer was in school. Growing up he found the mix of facts and fiction a common grace in the Malay Hikayat. It’s folk history but devised for good purposes, like the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah, which was about Muhammad Hanafiah who was a son of Ali and as real as you or me.

But the said Hikayat was mostly fictitious, used as a means to keep up the struggle of the Prophet’s family for Islam following the demise of Ali and his sons, Hasan and Husayn from Fatimah Zahrah al-Batul.

It became a description of heroism, of glorious fights and fighters, a little bit on the art of war and the excellence of Jihad the Malays themselves had required for a time.

Later they devised their own in the romances of Hang Tuah and of Jebat the alternate Ego. But the Malays were never able to decorate their own group of five as well as the Javanese had done with the Pandavas in the Kakawin.

No Vote

The good professor’s view isn’t going to affect a single vote in the awaited general elections and is therefore free of political perversion. It is unlikely the Ministry of Defence will rewrite the names of our frigates either, from KD Hang Tuah, KD Jebat and so on to Michelle Ma Belle or something like that.

As for the Ministry of Education wanting to remove the name of Hang Tuah from our history text books, this writer suggests we take a deep breath, count to ten and stay as we are. Hang Tuah was and is real.

Hang Tuah was Laksamana Bentan, once the capital of Johor-Riau-Lingga. Megat Seri Rama who krissed Sultan Mahmud of Johor was also Laksamana Bentan, himself from the island of the Orang Laut, once before written as Sea Gypsies but who must be billed as a great people who had led the other Malays through the thousands of islands and intervened decisively in Malay history time after time.

One of them, having had enough of the extravagance and the debauchery of the court in Jambi, stormed the palace and raped the queen before the eyes of her consort, the king, a fitting justice indeed for a ruler who had no control of his wives spendings and himself kept raising taxes till the taxes surpassed 30 per cent of trade items on top of port charges he levied at will.

And you would have read about Lapu Lapu, of course.

How do we treat the stories we read about the exploits of these great seafarers and warriors? Is there no place for a little romance for them like those we have in volumes about Alexander The Great?

“History must be based on empirical records. Historians must only accept written records,” Khoo Kay Kim was reported to have said, adding that empirical records available here were at best “scanty”.“There is no evidence in the Malaysian records,” he said. “These are stories. Early Malaysian history is based on stories.”

The “stories” Professor Khoo meant must be the Hikayat, a genre that is well-known to any and all students of our history. But the “written record” thingy has a kink in it. Because we are a story-telling community, we have to consider using oral recordings to augment the need for tangible evidence in the study and writing of history.

The Malaysian National Archives in 1972, led by Datuk Alwi Jantan and Datuk Zakiah Hanum, deliberated over the question of “oral history” and decided to keep oral recordings to provide for the gaps in the written documents.

This writer then worked on the Aziz Ishak Archives and after reading through the documents and letters in the former Minister’s files, the National Archives decided to have the points in them clarified and augmented in recorded interviews, starting what Professor Zainal Abidin Wahid of University of Malaya had termed “essential oral documentations”.

Since “History must be based on empirical records [and] Historians must only accept written records,” we have now to ask whether the National Archives had done wrong to allow for oral recordings?

We need to question that again. Do oral recordings of witnesses to an event betray the purity of history?

I had gone to Beruas, Perak, to interview a few living witnesses of the 1944 Sino-Malay clashes and especially when Sheikh Osman and his men had gone there to free the son of Panglima Hitam who had been taken captive.

Then, as the story went, when I followed a thread on Datuk Bahaman after some people had thought Tok Guru Peramu was the great warrior of Pahang, I found Hang Tuah still alive in some spiritual exercises in Pahang, which led me to trace the same in some Malay [and Orang Asli] villages along the Pahang, Bera and Serting rivers, involving members of the Semelai and Temuan tribes.

In short, in Hang Tuah we may be dealing with a Malay archetype, like Arjuna of the Mahabharata who was and still is to some Malays in Jawa a warrior archetype.

To the Malays (including Asli of course) Hang Tuah was born in Kampong Sungai Duyung, Melaka, to Hang Mahmud and Dang Merduwati. There are still families in the kampong who believe they are descendants of Hang Tuah.

There he grew up with his four comrades. Their teacher was Adi Putra. Many among the Asli of Serting and Bera said he had studied some silat from them too.

He learned to meditate and had his meditation cleft on the seaside of Cape Rachardo (Tanjung Tuan). That samadhi has since been demolished by the religious authorities because it was deemed as khurafat (superstition).

He had had a girlfriend or fiance in Melor, daughter of his Asli teacher in Ledang and of course there is a Hang Tuah mausoleum in Tanjung Kling, Melaka.

Are these notifications of the legendary figure real or are they merely incurred by the story-tellers for special effects?

But Hang Tuah is about blind loyalty. Why oh why do we need such a myth or an archetype of such an extraordinary loyalty?

There has been a lively debate about who ought to be the hero, Hang Tuah or Hang Jebat, a question raised by the Bugis, Raja Ali Haji, in the 19th century.

That question, raised in Tuhfat al-Nafis, still resounds in our classrooms and even across tables in coffee shops.

Why would such a debate be deemed unhealthy? Because it is about a myth?

As for Hang Tuah's terrible sense of loyalty, it is understood in Malay tradition as undivided loyalty to the Palembang House that founded the kingdom of Melaka, a matter that was to test Perak in later times when the Sultanate was contested by Tun Saban who had been Bendahara of Melaka, with his sister, Tok Temong, and the Temusai Nakhoda Kassim from Johor on his side. Perak was hitherto ruled by the Haluan, Tok Masuka(here) and not by a king (Raja) or Sultan. A contest against the Palembang House occurred in Johor as well.

It is essential to understand the context of the Hang Tuah romances before an opinion is structured, certainly. But we know little of our history because the research had been scanty, not because of scarcity of sources.

But other than the Hikayat, Babad, Kakawin, Teromba etc. which contain reflections of native histories, the written sources would be Ming records, some Indian inscriptions, colonial writings or sourced from the palaces. Can we then avoid oral sources

As long as we know the Hikayat, Kakawin or Teromba are a mix of history, ideological reflections and romances, do we really have a reason to hollow out Hang Tuah from the history textbooks? ----a. ghani ismail, 21 January, 2012

Mat Sabu and The Rubric of Umno’s Hilarity. Who is Traitor?

2011-09-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

It’s been somewhat of a Thrilla in Malaysia what followed Mat Sabu’s loose canonization of the “Muslim-Communist” leader, Mat Indera, into a folk hero. What hatched as a reaction is still cackling. That has become standard reaction of Umno and the Barisan Nasional. .

Mat Sabu, the new deputy president of Pas, had anticipated the ritual TV airing of Jin Samsuddin’s movie, Bukit Kepong, a film shown every year since it was made more than a decade before. It was to glorify the police force and condemn the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), its 4th Regiment led by the Malay-Muslim of Siak origin, Ahmad Indera.

Umno Press Corp moved into action immediately after Mat Sabu said what he said on August 27. It caused the polemical blitz and soon the polemics turned into a pugilistic stretch of relentless hounding of Mat Sabu.

He had poked his head into the hornets’ nest and the extraordinary transformation of the hornets into a cackling school of crows will not stop.

Umno and the government have been viewed as paranoid.

A group of six leaders of the Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) with 25 people, mostly from the estates, were recently detained under the Emergency Ordinance (EO), the six for 28 days before popular protests loosened the grip of the paranoia and they were charged in open court.

The reason for the amazingly zealous reaction was ostensibly the T-shirts the six had brought with them which had the portraits of Che Guevara and former CPM leaders printed on them. No weapons were found.

For the speech of Mat Sabu even former IGP, Tun Haniff Omar, was roped in from his perch at Genting Highlands Casino to draft Mat Sabu into a dangerous renegade who should be “investigated” for possible undesired connections.

It seemed, Mat Sabu is possibly guilty of “incitement”, and therefore, of sedition as well.

It is indeed surprising for Tun Haniff to have forgotten Lai Tak, the CPM Secretary-General at that time. He was a Police Special Branch implant!

Haniff Omar had been a meticulous person in his tenure as IGP. Has he forgotten too about who, or which forces, had been behind the Communists or PKI in Indonesia after the Second World War? Is he getting old?

Mat Sabu, often a loose cannon, had said Mat Indera was the “real hero” of the ill-fated Bukit Kepong police station the communist attacked and razed to the ground on 23 February 1950.

Did Mat Sabu know the police have reasons to worry over the possibility the CPM had insurrected not once but twice before and may rise again to destabilize the country for another shot for power?

He later placed Mat Indera, who was a hafiz, as equal in stature and in meaning with the popular folk heroes such as Tok Janggut of Kelantan, Mat Salleh of Sabah and Rosli Dobi of Sarawak.

They were fighters who were willing to die for the masses against the appetites and the tyranny of the colonialist and of the native elites in some cases.

After the Bukit Kepong Incident Mat Indera was betrayed by two or three of his comrades, drugged and dragged to the Balai Polis (police station), taken from prison to prison until finally he was hanged in Taiping Prison in 1953.

Then, in the hilarious polemics which Umno launched a scholar declared the British had never colonized Malaya and hence, it was futile to regard Mat Indera as an anti-colonial freedom fighter.

Who hanged Mat Indera then? Who had the power to execute? The Malay sultans?

That swung the debate away from Mat Sabu to Occidental diplomacy and imperialism, leaving the question gaping as to why we celebrate 31 August as Independence Day if Malaya had never been colonized. Had it all been a great hoax?

Why was the pre-independence generation made to listen to the British anthem and to stand and sing it in school and even in the cinemas? It was God Save The King, and later, the Queen.

Colony or Protectorate?

The truth can often become a divine comedy in the ensuing obscurantism of a Malaysia that has become Independent without ever having been subdued as a colony.

Former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir, also said Malaya was not colonized. Said he, the Malay sultans appealed to the British to become their advisors, which is not particularly correct nor is it absolutely untrue, a clever misuse of semantics Mahathir had mastered and successfully used to confuse both his supporters and his enemies.

It’s something like someone who dances on both sides of the street and gets himself hit by a truck in the middle.

Truth is, the Malays were no longer powerful by the time the Brits came.

Under Islamic rule the Malay Hindu-Buddhist empires had broken into petty states.

Once Malacca had fallen to the Portuguese the Malays had to rely on Aceh to regain the great port.

There were only about 200 Muslims in the court of Malacca when the Portuguese gained control over it, according to Portuguese sources. When Raja Melewar of Pagar Ruyong arrived in Rembau about 200 years after the fall of Malacca, there were only two Muslim families in Rembau according to records.

Islam had been an imperial religion and in the Malay world, after the Muslims had taken Majapahit, they divided the great empire. A similar dismemberment of Malacca had left the Malays belonging to petty kingdoms. .

An army of 10,000 Malays had been defeated by less than 400 Portuguese Sepoys in the attempt to retake Malacca. Later, in Kota Tinggi, Johor, 12,000 Malay fighters were defeated by about 400 Portuguese Sepoys.

Where went the Malay forces that defeated Kublai Khan's invasion of Singhasari in 1293? To a Hindu-Buddhist heaven and thence into voluntary oblivion? Kublai's forces were more than 12,000.

The serial defeat of the Johor Malay forces was in the early 16th century. There had been no recovery upto the British Intervention of 1874. There were the Bugis and Raja Kechik of Minangkabau but that was a different story. They did not engage the English or the Dutch.

The greatness of the Malays had been with Srivijaya and Majapahit.

In Malacca the greatness belonged to Tun Perak and to Hang Tuah.

Were they Muslims. How deeply were they Muslims? Did not Hang Tuah and his comrades enjoy their drink? Wasn’t his martial teacher an Asli (Aborigine) and so was his fiancé?

When in the 19th century the Malay sultans and nobles suddenly found themselves facing organized Chinese miners and the agents of British trade and government, they were warped in power struggles.

It was resource contests, Chinese and Malay miners fighting on both sides of the conflicts in Perak, Selangor and Sungai Ujung, with Malay royalties involved.

Hence, even if the Europeans were kafirs (infidels) and viewed by some as crusaders, the sultans were glad to enter into power-sharing with them and to enjoy the great wealth now available because of the demands of industrial Europe.

It did not work for everyone. Some fought after discovering the sultans had signed away their rights to impose and to collect taxes.

In the case of J.W.W. Birch who was killed in Pasir Salak in Perak in 1875, he also banned slavery, which was allowed by Islamic Law, the slave-trade a source of income in the Malay archipelago too.

The European colonization was not as simple as it could have been. The sultans and the nobility living in opulence under British or Dutch rule couldn’t be properly regarded as colonized, of course. They were paid pensions, rent and some owned estates, plantations and mines run by English or Dutch companies.

But for the masses, and the few who lost their rights to impose and to collect taxes, the Residential System was de facto colonization and for the masses it was oppressive.

The EIC and VOC

British and Dutch imperialism had come as mega corporations, the EIC and the VOC being the largest joint-stock corporations of the time.

These corporations were given royal charters enabling them to declare war, take captives and to execute them, meaning they represented the English and Dutch Crowns. "Protectorates" were relationships or occupations of native states conducted through the chartered companies.

Later, when they became defunct (1800 in the case of the VOC and the EIC in 1874), the “Interventions” and the “Protectorates” were directly or indirectly run by the respective colonial offices and their agents.

Native rulers were paid pensions and/or rent. Sometimes they sold parts of their territories, like in the case of Singapore.

They gave the powers to the Residents to administer their states, collect taxes and determine policies, ‘except in matters relating to Islam and Malay customs’.

That is a neat surrender to colonization, surely.

As for the ‘matters relating to Islam and Malay customs,’ the Selangor Religious Department (JAIS) exercised that power several weeks ago to charge two senior members of Pas for teaching or speaking on Islam without the letter of authority issued by it.

It means senior members of the Islamic party cannot freely speak on Islam.

It’s poetic justice, of course. It is the Islamic State acting against the advocates of the Islamic State. What better means is at the disposal of the divine jester to deal with these? It's like the duo were hit by boomerangs they had thrown themselves many years before. These swung around and.....Bingo!

That law the JAIS used is an Islamic law, making the statecraft complicated and confusing.

Complicated

In Sumatra in 1946, the same cultural and power complications led the people to rise against the sultans and they culled the royal families who did not support Indonesian Independence Sukarno and Hatta had declared on 17 August 1945.

Mat Indera was from Siak Sultanate in Sumatra. The Siak Sultanate supported the Republic of Indonesia under Sukarno and Hatta.

Top CPM leader, Abdullah C.D. was also from Siak. There the Muslims and the Nationalists had risen together with the Communist and Socialists in the Social Revolution.

Mat Sabu

The times have changed and Mat Sabu failed to respect the need for caution.

Communism has decayed but the CPM may rise again in insurrection as a proxy belligerent.

As for Mat Indera, history must insist his case be reviewed in the context of its ideological hinterland and of the times.

A lot of Malays had wanted Independence together with Indonesia following the Japanese Surrender in 1945.

After Sukarno and Hatta declared the independence of Indonesia on 17 August of that year without including Malaya, Malay nationalists were laden with a very serious choice to make.

The choice in Sumatra was simple – either join the Republik Indonesia that Sukarno had proclaimed or welcome back the Dutch.

It was this ideological contrast that determined the political behavior of the Malays across the Straits of Malacca at that time.

So where do we go from here with the Islamic laws, the ISA, the EO, the Printing Presses Act, the Sedition Act, the OSA, Police Act and so on and so forth? To prison?

Who are our heroes and who are the villains?

As for the votes in the general elections, this writer does not expect the issue to affect more than 0.2 percent either way. But the trophy belongs to Mat Sabu who has become immensely famous in a matter of three weeks. He may do it again if he wants to. ---a. ghani ismail, 13 September, 2011

Remarks in Ramadhan on a Matter of Regime Change

2011-08-23T03:21:00.000-07:00

Turmoil is now the key word in Malaysia. It is ideological, economic, social, cultural and religious conflicts from the turnings of the marionettes plaguing the nation into becoming yet another country in the world that’s stricken.

When cleavages occur in those five areas of society it is in the order of history to demand of such a society for liberty, equality, fraternity or let the nation die - ou la morte!

Old institutions have been replaced in the transition from the agricultural society to the industrial. New institutions have been mauled by power and corruption.

Islam Unbecoming

Islam had been stifling for ages in the Malay world. It kills ideas and initiatives. Books deemed disagreeable by the mullahs were and are still banned.

We were born a democracy with rights. But in the 54 years that have passed we have instead been laden by dozens of draconian laws in addition to the Islamic baggage, making the country more of a dictatorship by the ruling elite.

In the long playing contest for resources deduced by a couple of thinkers into a Clash of Civilizations, Malaysia has finally come to read positive after the Muslim authorities insist on passing more humiliating laws and regulations in recent years.

These demanded Muslims must attend one-day courses before they can marry, the course worth currently RM80 each. Those who have divorced must undergo a course for three-months and pass an examination on how to conduct a lasting matrimony before they would be allowed to marry again. But you are free to marry four wives at any one time. Try thinking.

Trouble is about shift-workers and the likes of lorry drivers who must lose job or income to attend the courses. When asked, religious administrators simply say as they do about the punitive laws of Islam, i.e. you don't have to worry if you don't break the law. So, don't divorce, ever! Try thinking!

The Malays who had built great empires in the Hindu-Buddhist period and reputed to have produced more than 70 percent of the world GDP in those times had been reduced to patented subjugates under an Islam that enriched the Arab and Gujerati traders.

Industrially, since the arrival of Islam, the Islamised Malays in the whole of the peninsular produced not much more than the rehal (Quran stand) and the tombstones. Do you need Islamic law and judiciary to protect and enhance that?

Why did the Malays faithfully subscribe to such an innane religious regime will remain a question few can claim to have half of an answer. Said Professor of Education, Isahak Haron, more than 90 pefcent of the Malays do not understand what they recite in their daily prayers which they do in Arabic.

But that does not answer the tolerance to abuse of such order.

People who stood up have been made to face wild allegations, like former Mufti of Perlis, Dr. Mohamed Asri, who was reported to the National Security Council as someone with links to terrorists. Is that enough to put the Malays down to the ground in an infirm obeisance forever?

In the meantime Malay society has transited into a gender roles reverse. Women account for about 70 percent of enrolments in colleges and universities suggesting Malay men should be getting ready to become house-husbands, something unthinkable to conservative Muslims

Christians are denied the right to distribute Malay translations of the Bible or the Gospels, the whole of which is available in the Internet in Indonesian, making it a lot of ado over actually nothing.

Christians are also legally forbidden from using an assortment of words including the Name of God, “Allah”, and the word “Qur’an”.

The Christian-Muslim clash has now become critical, coming in the guise of an interaction of forces gilded from the plebeian and leading to the making of religious corruption, conceit and deceit to sustain a rotting regime of crony capitalism and shared power.

It is a parody of the truth and of justice. This is an indictment, recalling Mukhtar Lubis in his Senja Di Kota Jakarta (Twilight Over Jakarta).

The result is distrust, distaste and disillusionment, a riot of strong colors that brings in alienation and a certain social breakdown.

In the ensuing anomie is a curious phenomenon. Youths, especially Malay youths, splash acid on people, blinding some and disfiguring the faces of many. It is a clear sign of social disintegration.

Some Malays had been in the habit of poisoning friends and strangers during the colonial era, like there was little other means to secure their self-esteem that has been dying under the colonial yoke. It was called santau and which began reappearing about a decade ago.

Then, year after year when the success had changed the skyline of
Kuala Lumpur and Umno delegates would be housed in the four and five-star hotels to attend the party general-assembly, these leading lights of the Malays would vandalize the rooms leaving behind carnage. It was obviously to inform how they feel about the opulence.

From 2004 Umno delegates in the party supreme council elections openly sold their votes.

The corruption in the party had gotten to its core.

The mischief had been afoot once again. These are behaviors of social disintegration we are talking about.

The Malays became divided and in a forum on 23 August 2011, the well-known Mufti of Perak, Tan Sri Harussani, straightforwardly said there were three reasons the Malays were divided, (i) Prime Minister Najib’s government is weak, (ii) the government is without integrity and (iii) the government is corrupt.

Financial Turmoil

In the face of the financial and economic turmoil that is expected to reach deeper than ever in 2012, nothing is there to guarantee Malaysia a safe passage through the turbulence.

The wakes of the American currency and financial crises and the European sovereign funds crises have started to impact. The morrow is in a very dark cloud.

A divided house as dreadful as this cannot, by any fluke, hold the house of cards before a gale. But what’s coming is a super typhoon.

Prime Minister Najib’s mega projects are now surrounded by high food prices, a property bubble that cannot last a year before it bursts and it litters the streets with instant bankrupts and the critical loss of confidence in the custodians of the law and of order.

In a Malaysian society that is divided into two sets of laws and judiciaries – the secular and the Islamic - it will, as a necessity of history, cause widespread confusion and needlessly enlarging the middle ground with the bewildered.

Alienation is not a new tune to hum. It was sang aloud in the social dances of numbers written down as The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fannon in about the middle of the 20th century and by Victor Hugo, as Les Miserable, a century earlier.

These books were necessary readings in the book-lists that issued from the desk of Prime Minister, Tun Abdul Razak Bin Hussain, who was architect of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the early 1970s.

The NEP aimed to eradicate poverty and to restructure society to make it possible for the diversity in Malaysia to finally blend into a single identity, a single people, sharing a common heritage and aiming for a common destiny.

But if in Hugo’s Les Miserable the financial crisis Louis XVI caused had turned French society into a simple parasitical state in which the Church, the Nobility and the Workmen made the rest of the people pay for their sustenance and expenses, the same parasitic syndrome of a house divided by an artificially constructed social stratification recurs right here in Malaysia in the 21st century.

The difference is in the fact that in the present phenomenon some make it outright brigandage and these blatantly loot.

It is not about the predatory of colonial regimes. It is a looting by the dint of a capricious alchemy of power and quick riches obtainable by the application of corruption, conceit and wanton abuses by the natives upon their own kinds.

More and more people do not and cannot see eye to eye with the Muslim authorities. In numbers we are easily more than 70 percent of the population. This will surely lead to a final breakdown of Malay and Malaysian societies.

In the constitutional, institutional, cultural, structural and religious conflicts values have and continue to grow upside down, beginning at the top and rotting at the core.

Politicians took over water catchments in the hills to build palatial holiday villas. Others of lesser quantities showed their privileges by having the authorities convert parts of playing fields or recreational reserves into plots for residential bungalows.

In banks the small persons will have to wait six months for a loan of RM 2,000 to be processed and approved knowing a single loan of RM400 million had been approved in a day and by a phone call from the politically weighty.

Unpaid, the RM400 million is mysteriously written off, the latest such maneuver amounting to RM 13 billion, a tidy sum, of course.

In the society it’s not what you know but who you know that counts. Meritocracy becomes blankly a wasting humor. The people feel themselves betrayed.

In that setting sun 85 percent of projects meant for the poorer among the Malays and the Bumiputeras (natives) leaked into the hands of non-Malay tycoons and entrepreneurs. Most Malay contractors and licencies simply sold off contracts and licences given to them.

In the meantime predominantly Malay bureaucracy had long been purchased and the policies of Tun Razak bent beyond breaking point, bastardized, as it were, into a mad mongrel.

Money did not flow downwards. Most of it kept going up, up and away, like the takeoff of Captain Marvel and then some of it may come back to go sideways.

In the industrial and cosmopolitan transition some young workers working away from home and living 20 to a small house became pregnant and threw newly born babies alive into rubbish bins or left them to die under bushes.

The Muslim community bore no compassion for the unmarried mothers. It was adultery conclusively proven by the delivery of the little lives and the mothers must be punished.

The fathers got away, adultery being a crime that must be seen by four immaculate male witnesses or no crime had taken place in Islamic law.

Monseigneur, thiz iz impozzibly wicked!

Senor, vive le difference! It is the way of Almighty God.

It iz clever of you not to menzion the name of Allah, Monseigneur.

I know my world Senor. Here in Malaysia I, as a servant of the Church, a servant of the people and of God, am forbidden by law to use the Name “Allah” and a host of other Islamic terms including “Qur’an”, “Jannat”, Hadith etc. etc..

Monseigneur, you are lucky. Elzewhere in the world you can get yourzelf a death penalty for menzioning the same words. They will charge and sentence you to death for blasphemy!

Senor, you have endangered yourself for to tell me that, and I am a Christian, you may be hanged for the same offence you warn me of.

It is Catch 22 and yet, in the frothing of the lark a Malay doctor having marital problems sent his children for safe-keeping to the Christians several days ago. He will not trust the Muslim half-way houses, if there are any, that is.

He can be put in jail for three years or fined RM5000 or be punished by both for doing what he did.

Christians

A Christian woman had been sentence to death in Pakistan for blasphemy. The Governor of Punjab, a Muslim who stood up for her, was shot dead by one of his bodyguards.

A Christian member of President Asif’s cabinet (Christians form the largest minority in Pakistan. They are 1.6% of the population or 2.8 million souls in 2008) had also been killed.

It has been a stretch of worldwide high and deadly emotions.

An attack on the Coptic Church in Alexandria killed 21 on the eve of the New Year (2011).

Four months before a church in Baghdad was the target. It is happening where Jews, Christians and Muslims share the same shrines of the Abrahamic religions and could be seen praying side-by-side and together even.

In Syria the writer had found himself praying side-by-side with a Nestorian (Suriani) woman at the sepulcher of Prophet Zakaria in Allepo (Halab). It’s the same Zakaria who was guardian and master of the occultation of Mary, Mother of Isa (Jesus).

At the mosque of Yunus (Jonah) in Nineveh (Mosul, Iraq) there would be Jews, Christians and Muslims praying under the same roof.

The Marionettes

But now the marionettes are dancing to a different tune in the game of numbers (see Deuteronomy). The reaches of the game had lanced Indonesia in Maluku, in Jakarta and in Poso (Sulawesi).

In Mindanao the fighting had started more than 300 years before, during the colonization by the Spaniards. It continued sporadically from that time and will not end given the scanty peace efforts and the new religious zeal.

The present stretch of religious violence worldwide had been triggered from the event of September 11 in New York.

Then, as it seemed possible that the torments and the lamentations of September 11 will soon disappear, the world was bloodied beyond the recognition of the mind by a Norwegian.

He said he belonged to the Knights Templars.

Salahuddin the Great routed them a little distance from Nazareth during the Crusades. One escaped.

Religions should have been, at least from the beginning of the 21st century, better equipped with the open-mind. But that has been rendered futile apparently. Only do not give up! We still have President Obama in the US as a moderator.

Les Morte

A nation and society cannot survive serious cleavages occurring in the fields of politics, economics, culture, demography and religion all at once.

If it is agreed Malaysia has gotten there, while the powerful would wish to suspend Parliament and use the Emergency Ordinances to rule by decree, the route out of it is to resume the revolutionary cry for Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, ou le morte (or death)!

Change will have to be prescribed urgently. The ruling Barisan Nasional will possibly lose all states in the peninsular other than Pahang, Johor and Melaka.

The rest depends on the peoples of Sabah (32 ethnic groups) and Sarawak (30 ethnicities), who have become more important than ever before.

Prepare to incubate the new Malaysia with every tribe and every occupational group represented as a beginning of proportional representation, a means to secure freedom and fairplay. This is a democracy with a Bill of Rights. Adios Amigo! --- a. ghani ismail, 23 August, 2011

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Getting a Mocking Bird to Raid a Church

2011-08-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

Silence in Islamic capture is required behavior. It is the insistence of subjugation,a clean surrender to the power vested by religious belief inside a primitive appetite of the mighty religious jurists in a state that is conceived as legally co-extensive with the whole of human life.

Islamic law rules even what you eat, the manner you eat, how you transact and where you turn in prayer.

When officers of the Selangor religious department raided the Methodist Church in Damansara Utama in the night of Wednesday August 3 where a charity thanksgiving dinner was being held, the primitivism was recalled making the raid an act to protect the religion and to stop Christians from proselytizing the Muslims.

Twelve was the number of Muslims attending the dinner. Probably all were members or associates of the NGO, Harapan Komuniti, which, we are told, had organized the dinner to collect funds to help AIDS victims.

The Harapan Kommuniti is a partner of the Malaysian AIDS Council.

In the distresses that followed the nocturnal action of the religious authority the people were once again dismayed while Muslims, even leaders of the Islamic party, Pas, were divided once more, a patent reaction that has repeated itself over and over again like in a pavlovian experiment.

Islam is holistic according to this line of thought and the Islamic State, said the great Pakistani scholar and founder of the Jemaat-i- Islami, Mawlana Maududi, is coextensive with all of life.

Hence, the rulers of Islam must, as of a necessity, become authoritarian and therefore, making it difficult for the people to draw the line between good and bad laws.

Had Maududi lived he would have to explain the social breakdown in his country which is torn to shreds by sectarian conflicts between Muslims.

The Muslims, in the evolution of the Islamic State for which Pakistan was born, are crapped by the diversification of the monotheistic religion as it evolved into becoming a mass of conflicting sects to make cohesion, coherence and comprehensibility nearly an empirical impossibility.

The Islamic State is ‘the very antithesis of secular western democracy’, someone remarked.

The State is assigned to administer the Divine Law and therefore no Non-Muslim can be parked into policy-making, nor can Non-Muslims proselytize, and as Dhimmis they must pay the capitation tax (Jizya) and be confined to a class of non-citizen residents who have no vote.

Decolonization

It could have been worth something as a decolonization strategy like in the ideological conceptions of Jean Paul Sartre and Franz Fannon when Western colonization was receding after World War II.

But the great minds of the Existentialists had obviously failed to address the emotions involved in religion the fact Fannon was a psychiatrist notwithstanding.

The Islamic resurgence that had begun in the 60s went several ways but as we have witnessed, the most successful had come from the city of Qom, the seat of fundamental Shi’ah Islam which provided us with the foundational approaches of Imam Khomenie upon whose understanding of Islam Iran now stands.

In the early days of the religion there was Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, son-in-law and the last republican caliph.

His attempt to steer Islam into a universal humanistic religion and to regard all his subjects as ‘brothers in faith and brothers in kind’ was overtaken by the Umayyad dynasty which imposed discrimination including over non-Arab Muslim subjects (here).

The ideal religion had been overrun by the Arabs themselves.

Islamic history took a turn that led into a bewildering mix of glorious conquests, of stupendous civilizations which flowed along tracks of copious literary and scientific achievements, but with legal and judicial confusions.

Now Muslims react to American, European and Zionist hegemony with suicidal terror to stand a chance in the asymmetrical wars. The Americans hardly accept Obama's reforms, which are good, like the healthcare insurance. Obama promised an independent Palestinian state and that too would be disagreeable to them.

Panic seemed to have been struck in the government of Malaysia to cause it to pass a series of constitutional amendments pertaining to Islam in both, the federal and state constitutions. This began in 1988.

These laws gave wide and sinister powers to the Muslim authorities.

They denied the rights of citizens to apply to the civil courts in prayers for civil and constitutional justice.

The bunch of enactments passed in 1988, I had been told, were suggested by the “dangerous” passages former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, had installed in his political networks which involved several NGOs in Indonesia, America and Europe.

It included the think-tank of the German Christian Democratic Union - the Konrad Adenaeur Stiftung (KAS).

Anwar’s think-tank, Institut Kajian Dasar (Institute for Policy Research) was funded by KAS, which was the same body to later fund the Malaysian Inter-Faith Network (MIN) which became quickly viewed as anti-Islam.

The bases for the blanket security options had been sown from before the 1987 leadership crisis Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir, had had to face.

In 1988 the tussle in Umno had brought the backbone of the ruling coalition to fall dead on the bench of Justice Harun Hashim.

Mahathir won in 1987 by the wisp of his whiskers he failed to shave. He won by 43 votes. The challenger was Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah.

Following the fateful contest 10 of Razaleigh’s sympathizers filed complaints in court to declare the contest null and void.

The reason was about some illegal party branches.

That caused the judge to conclude some of the delegates who voted were illegal while at the same time some of the party divisions had also been illegal.

In his mind it had to roll into an avalanche that swept and buried the party as a whole – a kind of roller-coaster legal effect that should be written in the annals of Law in orange, to make it neither this nor that.

Anwar had risen from Umno Youth chief to Umno Vice-President in the 1987 party elections.

Meantime he had become close to B.J. Habibie of Indonesia and thence to Paul Wolfowitz, the American Neo-Cons leader who became one of the architects of the Iraq War.

In 1985 Wolfowitz was US ambassador to Indonesia.

Thus developed Anwar’s power-romances, which became known in Umno as “Super-Politics”, suggesting the network Anwar knitted through the Institut Kajian Dasar (IKD), his Muslim Youth Movement (ABIM), the Asia-Pacific chapter of the World Assembly of Muslim Youths (WAMY), the ABIM frontline in the Pas and ICMI, Habibie’s Muslim intellectuals outfit in Indonesia, had grown into an intercontinental giant.

Putting into focus the Christian think-tank, KAS, and adding to it the spread of Paul Wolfowitz’s connections to the already big-bodied Anwar, it would be rather easy to imagine the nervousness seizing the mighty Mahathir, the ruler of all he sat on.

Mahathir, with his sidekick from Kedah, Abdul Hamid Othman, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department presiding over JAKIM (the Islamic affairs wing of the department)swung into action with the bunch of “Islamic laws” of 1988.

These took most people by surprise and in the surprise many observers cautioned against using legislations to curtail one or another political rival.

Like the Emergency Ordinances (EO) which were passed to contain the Communist Insurrection of 1948, these laws fail to fall into disuse after the challenge had passed.

The EO was applied twice in the past months. The Islamic laws were used several more times than twice in the same measure of time.

It had even threatened the former Mufti of Perlis, Dr. Asri and his successor, Dr. Juanda. Dr. Asri was reported as a "terrorist" to the National Security Council while Dr. Juanda was called a "Wahabi". It was senseless, making Islam a mockery.

Dr. Asri had vied for the top post in Jakim. It's about a contest for resources.

There is disquiet as a result. People regard these actions as signaling a strong possibility that it is exactly what the government wants to do – i.e. apply emergency rule and the “Islamic laws” to sustain the Barisan Nasional (BN) in power against popular distastes.

Anwar

Anwar is back in the dock.

He is on a repeat performance of a sodomy charge and also a repeat performance in bed, i.e. of someone that looks like him and a Chinese doll, said to have been shown in 1999, which can make it a classic.

Will there be changes made to the relevant Islamic enactments if he were to be found guilty and removed (for the last time possibly) from posing a political challenge?

Anwar is only a political rival, not a Christian crusader in disguise or a Jew merchant from Venice.

He must have learned from his days in WAMY, which was based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that the 22 Arab countries have to consult the US and the Europeans before they can decisively act in any significant matter of statecraft or diplomacy.

Europe lies merely across the Mediterranean from these states. The distance makes for fondness. Si, si!

There lies a critical difference in the political understandings and the political outlooks between Anwar and the remaining power contestants in Umno.

Razaleigh did not approve of using the Islamic enactments to act as political constraints to contain the Anwarites and the Pas.

But Razaleigh was already out of Umno in 1988.

Nothing stood in the way of the design.

Members of the BN in the legislatures voted for the enactments, like loyal disciples. So now we have to live with them.

New legislations were added to the basic body from time to time.

The passage cleared, the way power moves when the citizens cannot effectively protect themselves from government has always been to add claws and fangs to the simian.

We must listen to Maulana Maududi again and again. He wrote to say in an Islamic State no behavior can be regarded as personal and private.

The Tanzimat (Reform)

The Ottoman, which was the largest Muslim empire and lasting until 1925, came to confront industrial Europe that stumped its westward expansion after Budapest.

Admitting it was no match to the order and the power of the new industrial civilizations, the Ottoman, from 1835 to 1873, had conceived westernization and attempted serially to change its laws and legal system, reform its judiciary and its political system, following the French and German models.

The ulama rejected it.

That movement, known as Tanzimat (Reform), caught the interest of the sultan of Johor, Tunku Ibrahim Iskandar, who considered it in 1927. It would have made Malaysia a secular federation.

But it fizzled out. And so the story refuses to end.

In its stead on Aug. 3, 2011, a thanksgiving dinner held by an NGO administering to AIDS victims was raided on the suspicion the Christians were proselytizing.

The dinner was held in a Methodist church and it involved 12 Muslims in the gathering of more than 100.

What will happen to the 12?

How do unintelligible laws become useful in honoring a modern industrial nation….? Salaam! ----a.ghani ismail, 10, Aug. 2011

The Launch of Tengku Li's Amanah

2011-07-23T06:10:00.000-07:00

Whether it's a bygone quest or it’s the last straw, the Amanah (Trust), an NGO forged over months of painstaking study for the best bulk of the popular protest in the killing of the mocking bird, is looking good.

It was five minutes late in the launching by the noble man, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, on July 22. It was a Friday, a day of prayers for Muslims and a day of hope for all Malaysian brothers and sisters.

The Angkatan Amanah Merdeka launching left us gaping with the question about what it will be when it’s time for the good wolves to huff and to puff to bring the whole corrupt house down.

It’s not anymore an existential question, like it had been with Hamlet asking his conscience ‘To be or not to be?’ as he walked down the endless steps of becoming.

The question having been answered by Tengku Li and his associates now begs for a clear remark about whether or not Ku Li, as he is better known, will one day take the Amanah out of the Barisan Nasional (BN) and surface it as a yellow submarine into the frontline of the Pakatan.

It is possible that the Amanah would be required to helm the Pakatan if Anwar Ibrahim ends up in jail again.

Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, is biting his finger nail in deciding when he will dissolve parliament. Some in the BN may be thinking of avoiding the general elections by calling an Emergency.

Umno and the BN is being battered everyday. They are almost sunk after destroying as many cherished institutions as can be counted without tears.

Said a former minister at the launching of Amanah, the government is misgoverning the economy into a mess of super-costly projects, high and still rising prices of food, of housing and of essential items.

It’s a cipher for certain regime change.

Following the daring showdown of right against might in the Bersih 2.0 through the streets of Kuala Lumpur on July 9, the BN can hardly be expected to let the cross-party new organization Ku Li is leading to exist.

It can be counted to pull out the required number of votes and force through a regime change.

That nearly happened in the 8 March 2008 general elections.

The Opposition had taken 51 percent of the total votes but fell short in the count for a majority in Parliament.

Of state governments the Pakatan took five but quickly lost Perak in a blur of sexual trysts and a case of poor leadership which together counted as a very high price to pay for moral misconduct and general inexperience.

The Amanah at the top is sexually safe and secure as a sum of leaders who have mostly been clobbered into good shape and others as social idealists of note like Tan Sri Simon Sipaun, 70, who had risen from a wasting village and taken by the Lord into Oxford University and became State Secretary of Sabah. Then he became the No. 2of SUHAKAM, the Human Rights Commission.

There’s Daniel Tajem, in-out-in of SNAP in Sarawak, who’s still living in a village among the people he represents politically and as a lawyer.

Former MCA president, the inspiring Ong Tee Keat, obviously towers as a man of conscience. He too is a beacon, like Razaleigh.

Given the ready pool of the morally injured among the people, it’s hard to miss a win with the group of leaders of the Amanah – a line-up of moral and ethical beacons that can, with freedom of speech, expression and assembly, light a path to the freedom from corruption, from collusion and from cronyism.

Other than former Minister, Tan Sri Kadir Sheikh Fadzir, 72 (one of his brothers had risen to the helm of the Umno Youth), there are Dato Subramaniam, formerly MIC deputy president and Ragunath Kesavan, former Bar Council president, with Bujang Ulis, Dr. Patau Rubis, Wilfred Bumburing and even a guy who has climbed Mt. Kinabalu more than 50 times, making the group into Pegasus, the constellation the ancients identified as the messenger or postmaster of the gods.

Therefore the powers will want Amanah blacked out.

Tengku Li said in his speech, “This morning can just be another interesting social event in the Malaysian landscape or it could be the start of something unprecedented that it could alter the course of our country’s future and direction.”

The room to move is calculated. It is limited.

The Tengku is aware some in Anwar Ibrahim’s PKR had blamed him for the failure of the September 16 lunge for power Anwar made.

As a result Anwar slumped, only to mount again in the re-run of a sodony charge, this time with the famous and invincible rectum of Saiful Bukhari, one of his aides.

In the Pas some are dismayed by the series of losses in recent by-elections. Nik Aziz Nik Mat is aging. Some who are equally disturbed by the rise of Mat Sabu as deputy president want Anwar as president with Hadi Awang replacing Nik Aziz as the Murshid ul-Am (General Guide).

Mat Sabu is not a religious scholar. Mat Sabu, as a carpet-bagger without any political base, is an obvious risk.

It’s about a simple thought for the culture of power, meaning Tengku Razaleigh could prove to become a torn in the Pas’ stronghold of Kelantan, which is also the Tengku’s home-ground. But Tengku Li is aiming for the center, the federal power.

The start of Amanah is a bit tough and hence the launching of Amanah passed in the media, including in the cyber portals, as a monumental whimper of a consortium which included more than a hundred corporate leaders who had come dressed in suits, many armed with blackberries, cameras and tablets to ensure a memory in digital-space of a reasoning for peace, for sanity, for a correction of systematic errors and for a return to development for the people.

This is the difference in Tengku Razaleigh’s touch. He brought leaders in the corporate sector to ground zero and to walk alongside the NGOs, intellectuals, workers, farmers, fishermen and the people at large, a final refinement of the Opposition that can make the Pakatan become the arm that will nail the coffin.

Elite Rule

There is a certain rule in Malaysia of the super-elite. It had arisen in the evolution of the New Economic Policy into a systematic dictatorship and which bastardized the whole of the policy while the civil service had become more and more the Umno and Barisan Nasional (BN) cadre outfit.

Former Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, had said about 85 percent of projects meant for Bumiputras had been leaked and given to Non-Bumiputras, suggesting a system overwhelmed by graft and mutual gratifications.

After some high government officers had stunned the people by openly campaigning for the BN in recent by-elections, a broader-based participation became immensely necessary for the people to protect themselves from the power-elite.

‘The rich must help the poor and the successful must help the unfortunate,’ Tengku Razalegh recalled. It was what Tunku Abdul Rahman had said in his vision of a united and happy nation.

It’s not about nostalgia. It’s basic in the formula for peoples who must rise to protect themselves from the dementia affecting governments when power is assumed for the competitive accumulation of money and of wealth in the human search for grand opulence in the Order of Mammon.

Met Him? Know Him? Your fate and destiny are your simple choices. ----a. ghani ismail, 23 July, 2011

The Amanah website is at http://www.amanah.my/

Into the Dark After Power Becomes a Lark

2011-07-08T13:39:00.001-07:00

Just when the general elections was said to be “around the corner”, in a sudden exclamation of terror 31 members of the revived Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) were intercepted and remanded on the mainland in Penang. The spaces of shock it caused were soon replaced with bewilderment.

Most of the 31 were poor Indians from the estates. There was a boy of 14 and a woman of 64. The party was taking a ride on the BERSIH 2.0 campaign for free and fair elections.

The only crime the group could have committed was about having with them T-shirts printed with images of outlawed former Communist leaders of Malaya – Chin Peng, Rashid Maidin, Abdullah C.D. and his wife, Suriani.

Power became a lark when these were alleged on June 26 to have been a band out to collect men and weapons to wage war against His Majesty, the King.

Seven days later police released six leaders of the band and immediately rearrested them under the Emergency Ordinance (EO). Police power became widely seen as a toy.

It was pre-elections noise, a ritual in Malaysia, this time grossly an over abuse of authority.

It was all about BERSIH 2.0, a loose coalition of 62 NGO’s that planned a rally for free and fair elections on July 9, which is today.

A Fairy Tale

Like in a fairy tale of ancient British tyrannical regimes, the Minister of Home Affairs, Hishamuddin Hussain, outlawed yellow attire and the people laughed, no longer worried the country was under serious threat.

With senior Cabinet Ministers and the Prime Minister himself acting out a poorly scripted game of deceit, the King decided to intervene on July 4 with an unprecedented royal edict.

For the people that settled the staged storm and BERSIH 2.0 leader, S. Ambiga, said she would call off the rally if that’s what the King wanted and the storm clouds parted to let through a wonderful ray of hope.

But His Majesty merely cautioned against BERSIH walking in the streets. The rally could be held in a stadium.

The King is the Sovereign and Sovereigns are the spirits of nations, so there was joy beaming in the faces of the people.

Yet the Minister of Home Affairs reminded the next day he had declared BERSIH outlaw on July 1, meaning the King, the symbol of the nation’s sovereignty, had acted in error – a disruption of the realm’s protocol and of a Royal edict, which was a certain disregard of the national virtues invested in the person of the King, His Royal Highness The Yang Di Pertuan Agong.

People were in gloom, like the affront was an omen of bad days to come. But what called for the vainglory?

It was mainly the prices in the bread and butter spread and of property, the latter a bubble that is knocking out a chunk of the middle class from the BN’s captive voters the ruling coalition cannot endure.

Then it is about sustainable corruption or of unimaginable high costs that continue to grow in the BN, the latest flair being that of the Minister of Tourism, Ng Yen Yen, who approved RM1.8 million for six Facebook pages of promotional writings.

Given the bulk of the overburden the Prime Minister has had to carry and his reluctance to remove the driftwoods from his Cabinet, it became popular to believe the ruling coalition, the BN, is going under in the 13th general elections scheduled for August or September.

But for panic there was no need. It’s a snap election the Prime Minister can choose to delay for a year or so.

And there are serious snags in the Opposition the people can clearly see.

After the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) has all but lost its registration through dirty play in the party elections and the mad internal struggles continue unabated, people have been suggesting Najib invite either the Pas or the DAP to join the BN and be done with the tensions and the uncertainties.

PM Najib teased the Islamic party, Pas, but he had made no offer.

As a result the Pas president, Haji Hadi Awang, flung the idea into a cesspool in his policy speech at the recent party general assembly and remarked afterwards the country under the BN is headed for bankruptcy and with a debt luggage that’s already 54 percent of the GDP she will be mistaken for Greece in a matter of months.

The BN is in big trouble for failing to manage the prices of food, fuel and every other essential item.

The prices of fish and meat have reached the unthinkable. Beef is now about RM22 per kilo, from RM10 about a year ago.

Cheese slices costing RM2.50 two years before is now more than RM9.

That’s the immediate challenge Najib should have sorted out but is failing. It is eroding the value of the Ringgit and eating into the people’s earnings and savings at one and the same time.

This is the “terror” in Malaysia.

Since more than 70 percent of workers in the country earn RM1500 or less per month, unless immediately checked and by using an emergency ordinance (EO) for it, the result of an extended hike of food prices as it is now will cause a massive pressure driving more and more people against the BN by the day.

The EO should have been recalled for this problem and not for the detention of the MP for Sungai Siput, Dr. Michael Jayakumar, and five other members of the almost defunct PSM that’s merely trying to remain extant, in the dark and the damp of rubber and oil palm estates.

Now it is the BN that’s a lark which is seen as frantic for having missed the cuckoo’s nest in the strange mix of cross-ardor rising from a poorly managed rapture of Saiful’s underside in Anwar Ibrahim’s second sodomy trial.

This had been followed against all counsel to the contrary by a video showing a man of remarkable likeness to Anwar enjoying a sumptuous Chinese cuisine, the man with a pot-belly belying the tale of betrayal between old friends.

The attempts to kill the Opposition Leader’s character frothed and failed again, a case of blameless sustained ineptitude since the money flowed, nevertheless.

It is likely it is the serial failures that’s forcing the BN to the corner and to continue with the comic strips and abuse of power, making it lose the favor of more and more people at each turning and tossing of the misconducts and misgovernment.

BERSIH 2.0 should be in rally today. The BN is rapidly losing the people’s faith each passing day of this sad episode in the noisy heats before the 13th general elections will be finally called.

Think of sunshine. To find joy, think of sunshine on the other end of the elections when we will have a Bill of Rights in Malaysia. When there’s the will the way will come. But who will promise us the Bill of Rights? Will you? ---a. ghani ismail, 9 July, 2011

A Springtide Into A Democracy of Faith?

2011-06-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

Is it a springtide what happened at the Pas’ 57th general assembly and party supreme council elections?

Party president, Abdul Hadi Awang, after he summarily cast the suggested Unity Government with the Barisan Nasional (BN) into the cesspool in his policy speech on Friday June 3, he was greeted by a major change of the guards, leaving him and his ulama leadership substantially injured.

When observers pressed home the point that it had been a sweep of the progressive (“Erdogan”) grouping in the party which had the ulama (religious scholars) pressed against the wall, Hadi feebly resisted the popular perception.

He said all of the elected guards belonged to party supremo, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, and to himself, the duo held as the highlights of the ulama leaderhip that sprung the coup which ousted Asri Haji Muda from power in 1982 and is now quite clearly being wished out.

How shall the inroad of the progressives express itself in the party is a question that is already disturbing the Malay psyche that’s needing a point to regain coherence, cohesion and a collective perception of the recall in the Sino- and Indo-Malay stresses in this prodigal plural society British imperialism made as a lasting testimony of divide-and-rule.

Did Hadi Awang produce an answer to the racial and religious tensions that have already combusted twice in the past several years and causing the tensions to stretch stiff like hide dried in the sun?

Hadi had this time gone to great lengths to appease the DAP and other non-Muslims in his experimental tahaful siyasi (political alliance), reciting this verse from the Holy Qur’an,

"…those who have been driven from their homelands for no other reason than their saying. “Our Sustainer is God!” For, if God had not enabled people to defend themselves against one another, [all] monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques - in [all of] which Gods name is abundantly extolled - would surely have been destroyed [before now]…" – Q. 22:40

It’s a well-chosen verse, of course.

But when he said this showed Islam acknowledges the plural society and provides for the freedom of beliefs, the scholar-president tripped on his toob and would not have been able to keep his posture if he had been confronted with his wanting different laws and separate judiciaries for the Muslims and for the others.

He wanted different taxes for the Muslims and for the non-Muslims as well.

Hadi had not the guts to wire his Islam to an all-inclusive party, nation and world-vision, something the younger among the progressives have grown into and are ready to live by.

While in neighboring Indonesia the Islamic Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) had openly dropped the Islamic State and become inclusive, the Pas under Hadi and Nik Aziz has merely provided non-Muslim members with a wing worth a handful of votes in the general assembly.

This could be a wracking experience in the Malay psyche, a disjointed remark in the historical evolution of a people that had been serially colonized and living within a political, economic and social compute they had no hand in its making.

Are the progressives in the party ready to take the high road into a cultural revolution of the kind that has made a quest for universal Islam in the sprawling island archipelago of Muslims, Hindus, Hindu-Buddhist, Christians, Taoists and animists?

It’s a sprawling archipelago much larger than Europe and keeping to a Unity in Diversity cast upon an idea of Tantular, the poet-saint of Jawa, a visionary of the distant past whose heritage it has been the life-blood and the breathing of this Indonesia, this marvel of island clusters of the Gods.

If Hadi has a problem with that, it should do him good to remind himself the Filipinos are mostly Christians but are all Malays, among whom was Sandokan, the swashbuckling buccaneer who is a legend in South America Kabir Bedi cast himself into on the wide screen several decades before.

How are we to resolve the division of a family by language, color and culture by the sectarian partitioning of a legalistic religion?

This legalism had divided the world into the Abode of Islam (Darul Islam) and the Abode of War (Darul Harb) while it maintained in its books that society must be seen stratified by gender, with men first and women a step below and followed by the slaves captured, bought and sold, and sometimes prostituted for a gain in the glitter of the gold on the dinar.

Is that at all Islam for this time?

Is that a recall of the human primeval condition fashioned by a God Who is Mercy and Compassion?

This is a statement of human ill, a medieval exposure to the nature of the wicked and the oppressive.

This warranted remark of the differences in time, of outlooks and values, of civilizations, is in the minds of the generations long liberated from the captivity of the religious mind, long severed from the writings on the papyri and long distanced from the superstitions imposed by clerics of one nature or of another, of the breeding by a mentality rendered null by substantial progresses of civilization.

Having failed to stump the progress of women, who are now in the Pas an array of blatantly successful professionals (how unbecoming!!), will you not consider to tolerate for the rest of us a simple confession of freedom of conscience, and not beat about the bush like in a medieval orgy of people in the lusty sensualism of satyrs and nymphs some Umno couples want to become?

There is an injurious growth in the Malay psyche, perhaps an abscess of faith issued from a standard refusal to admit Islam itself is an imperial system that has, since the 17th century, become the lordship in six extant monarchies in Riau-Lingga and the Malay Peninsular.

What these conjure is a simple but critical conflict in the Malay psyche.

The Malays, as Hindu-Buddhists, had developed among the largest empires in the world, leaving monumental structures like the Borobudur, Angkor Wat and Muara Takus.

The Muslims ruled over trading-states instead, like Malacca, or Brunei, and after many centuries they left as monumental structures and histories…..what?

What did they leave behind that were self-made, self-built, that were of self from self around which can be developed the pride and the historical mission for the existential sense to adhere by and become adhesive leading to a certain and formidable destiny?

How does Islam in the Malay world compare with Fatimid Egypt, or Ummayad Spain, or with Mughal India? Could the monumental have been the ulama? Like Nik Aziz and Abdul Hadi Awang?

And therefore, starting a new page of history, there was and is the revolt in Pas on June 3 that has caused an exuberant sense of hope and once again shall live in high expectation on the road to a new Malaysia. Will the progressives have the guts to do it, I wonder.

And with a 21 votes majority, how long can Mat Sabu withstand the backlash of the ulama when they decide to whip him and to boycott him is the question to ask.

What is happening in Pas is clearly another reflection of the Malays in social disintegration. Like Muhammad, the Prophet of the Arabs, going back to the root of the Semites in Abraham, the Malays have to do the same to regain the sense of social identity. It will mean going back to the Malay Way (here)or it would have to be going to an altogether new ideology, which will take time.

Islam, which is here no more than a rites of passage, is obviously ill-equipped to suggest a solution for the Malays and for Malaysia in this glorious geopolitical remaking of the world and the repeat contest of the Occident and the Orient.

Malaysia was Majapahit II, centered in Kelantan. This was about the most coherent ideological point of the Malay genesis. It was also the confluence of Malay culture and Islam. Will the Kelantan prince,Tengku Razaleigh, then step in to help?-----a. ghani ismail, 8 June, 2011

Ps. On June 8 the older ulama, Nik Aziz Nik Mat,was widely reported to boom again, this time saying it was Dr. Mahathir Mohamad and not Karpal Singh who ruined his attempt to apply the hudud laws in Kelantan and therefore, make the state he heads as Menteri Besar (Chief Minister) an Islamic State.

There goes the brief hope that Abdul Hadi Awang had meant to relief us of the hudud laws in his policy speech a few days ago. It's predictable, you see.

Changing Monsoons - Will Pas join BN?

2011-05-24T02:33:00.000-07:00

Wrenched from the dreamscape of the old man into the stark reality of a streak of losses in the recent series of by-elections beginning with Galas in Kelantan and ending in Merlimau in Melaka, the Islamic party, Pas, must decide now whether to continue with the malfunctioning PKR and the DAP with its new outlook, or join the Barisan Nasional (BN) before the 13th General Elections.

The venerated Nik Aziz Nik Mat, after his foiled attempt to hoist his son-in-law, Ariffahmi, into the heights of Kelantan to succeed him as Menteri Besar (Chief Minister), confused party members everywhere.

Morale in the party buckled in misery.

It was behavior unbecoming of a stoic puritanical, his charisma, though only slightly injured because of his age (78), nevertheless cast him into the shadow of doubt, the injury generally reasoned as sourced in senility.

The man has been handsomely clean. The person is otherwise loaded with graceful sense of humor and political wit that have made him a rustic legend.

Until he skidded on the crest of power and his willful political ambition bloated and burst into the open last year, Nik Aziz has been an international figurine of the patriarch who had successfully mixed the traditional Islamic ideology with an astuteness that kept the Pas alive in a pact with the Democratic Action Party (DAP) that has recently taken to making it up with the Christian Right.

But now there is an intruder in the tested equation, an instant put-together vehicle of Anwar Ibrahim.

But the 11 year-old Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) has become some wonder.

After winning 31 seats in parliament in March 2008 it soon lost five of its lawmakers who jumped boat, citing as the reasons their disability to work with and to have faith in the party leadership, meaning Anwar and his lieutenant, Azmin Ali, formerly his confidential secretary.

Gross malpractices were alleged in the recent party elections.

Of the listed membership, which was supposed to have been more than 400,000, only about 40,000 cast their ballots, a record vanishing act the super illusionist, David Copperfield, should attempt to outdo to retain his stature in the world of magic.

In the wake of the frantic comedy a few top leaders of the Pas had agreed to talk it over with the Umno, no doubt as a safety measure to ensure the Malays will not lose all in what can be a political wind of change that may blow nobody any good.

It was something the old man, Nik Aziz, found critically adverse and he baulked publicly, then he let fly against the party president, the deputy president, the chief of the party’s council of scholars (ulama) of which he is a member, and the secretary-general to boot.

He had publicly bashed the highest echelon of the party’s policy-makers, declaring himself as the “ship’s captain”. He is the general guide (murshidul am) of the party.

When the comic tempest subsided, the combustible captain found he had grounded his ship.

But there was no mutiny.

The stoic who has been going in and out of intensive care has quite apparently become senile but was still needed for the Pas to keep Kelantan.

The Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, who had denied him the state’s oil royalty worth more than RM 120 million annually, obviously fueled the fire in the belly of the sage, prompting the wonderful displays of his tremendous temper.

In the wracking tensions inside the Pas, suddenly His Majesty, the Yang Dipertuan Agong (King) hosted a dinner bringing the leaders of the Pas and the Umno into the amicable ambience of the palace on 24 Dec 2010.

Mahameru (Mount Olympus) had taken notice and the winds were meant to change henceforth.

Even if nobody in the Pas or the Umno had been willing to tell what, in fact, had transpired in the august chamber of royal diplomacy, Malaysians, as a common display of political erudition, generally expected great shifts of the political bulks to happen at any time.

The options are a matter of simple arithmetic, like if the DAP with the solid Chinese support were to win 50 parliamentary seats in the next general elections, the PKR, which is left with 26 and the Pas with 23, cannot dream of outdoing the presently Christian-friendly social democrats to provide for a Muslim Prime Minister.

The winning number in parliament is 112. You can add on the numbers above for the Pas and PKR where you believe it can happen and then see if the equation will fit a formula for sustained stability in Malaysia.

Can the Pas become like the PKS (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera) of Indonesia and open its doors to everyone regardless of race and religion while pursuing Islam without the Shariah (Religous Law)?

It will probably become the largest political organization in Malaysia if it does that. But will it do it?

DAP

The DAP, which succeeded Singapore’s PAP, cannot be believed to have completely cut the umbilical.

When the PAP government in Singapore said Anwar was guilty of what he was charged in the sodomy trial, it raised doubt and caused a lot of people to demand Anwar deny the allegation by oath.

Singapore said Anwar had known it was a trap but chose to walk straight into it anyway, which was damning.

Yesterday the Pas’ council of scholars’ chief, Harun Taib, asked Anwar to dispel the doubt by oath.

The monsoon has swung around. It is clear the party is once again thinking of the options before it and the likelihood is it will sit in conference with Umno and decide to change the equations.

Has the stoical sage been tamed? Or has he himself finally given in to the doubt caused by the Singapore condemnation Anwar has not dispelled?

Anwar is obliged to take the oath. But it is entirely up to him.

Someone has written to say the denial by oath is all there is between him and power in Putrajaya.

While that may be an exaggerated view of the equation at present, Najib’s failure to arrest the bread-and-butter price-hikes and to moderate the property bubble will finally bring the regime change in a rush.

There will be a storm soon accompanying a world currency breakdown and the accompanying economic and political turmoil. If the economic mismanagement is allowed to run uncontrolled in Malaysia, all state governments can be expected to become bankrupt in 2012, including solvent Selangor and Penang.

It is up to Anwar to bring change. The other messiah, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah (with Muhyiddin Yassin in a duo) is still in need of a little time to ready himself.

All Anwar is expected to utter in the Saiful Bukhari sodomy case is “By God (Wa’l-Lah), I did not do it.”

In the Eskay blue video allegation, it is simply “By God (Wa’l-Lah), the man in the sex-video is not me.”

Prostitution is allowed in the Holy Qur’an (Q.24:33) some Muslims argue and hence, this grand mastery of sex video-making by Eskay can be a source of lucrative income for those of such ilk.

The sex video, therefore, is not dynamite. But alas, indelible doubt over the Saiful sodomy event persists after Singapore successfully raised it by deliberate political and diplomatic deliverances.

So, will Anwar take the oath? He can simply do it before the Press at his residence, and be done.

Doubt, in cases such as this, must be eliminated and no matter what Maulana Yusof Qaradhawi may have said or may have to say to Anwar on this matter, the venerable scholar will agree the resident traditional ideology cannot be dispelled even by the peerless such as him.

Take the oath or it would be best for the Pas to decide joining the BN and avoid the confusion of a leader whose character and integrity violate the residing ideological nuances.

Who is Anwar playing the game for? What will be the naked reality in the next chapter of the Anwar Saga and what shall be the dream unchecked?

The Pas will be in its annual general meeting and electing a new crop of leaders in the first week of June. Then, pending Anwar's choice of action or inaction, the deliberations will settle in the Pas and in the Umno a decision in the reaches of the Malay collective conscience. ----a. ghani ismail, 24 May, 2011

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After Najib Is the two party system

2011-05-07T03:43:00.000-07:00

The way of Prime Minister, Najib Tun Abdul Razak, forked following the grand slam of his nemesis, Anwar Ibrahim, in the forefront of Paradise Lost of Sarawak.

Only the DAP struck gold in the April 16 state–election, winning 12 from 15 seats the party contested. The Pas came home empty handed and the PKR won three from 49 contested.

But after Najib had chosen to invest in a bolder-than-stupid sex-video showing a make-belief Anwar whoop-whapping a Chinese belle in the bed of a cheap room of a spa, Najib’s forked path had nowhere to take him other than into a steep fall.

The resentment is overwhelming. He is unlikely to survive.

The stunning sex-show of a man who was cosmetically a close resemblance of Anwar and apparently event-managed and paid for by Datuk Shazryl Eskay Abdullah (Eskay) now wraps Najib in a gossamer that is bursting into a fury of the Malay and Malaysian traditional values like it happened in 1998-1999.

That extended event surrounded Dr M, the Jekyll with the special Hyde, after he saddled the society with an assortment of Anwar images on videos as a sodomite and in a dozen sexual embraces with women.

For that plunge into the bucket and his own display of hysterical comedy against Anwar he wanted the people to hate, Dr Mahathir and the Barisan Nasional (BN) lost 70percent of the Malay votes in the 1999 general elections.

Najib is repeating the 1998-1999 phenomena, only this time about 80 percent of the Chinese and 50 percent of the Indians are also certain to reject the BN for reasons of their own.

That will bring the BN to heel in a slosh of the hyper-privileged elite’s mega corruption the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) cannot otherwise reach, a case in point would well surround the One Malaysia [Free?] Email Najib suddenly rushed into the rump of the ETP or another of his alphabetical contrivances.

It’s about yet another crony company’s sumptuous dinner, people say.

As for Eskay, the physiotherapist, some say he could have a clutch of federal and state ministers compromised in bed as he had claimed he had led Anwar into. It could be a twist in the turnings of an extortionist the police should have investigated first.

But this Anwar sex-video he showed at the expensive Carcosa and which was finally scooped into a four-part triumphant display on YouTube, was of a male that nobody this writer knows or read has believed was Anwar Ibrahim.

The exceptions are a handful of Umno propagandists writing in a couple of mainstream “newspapers” and the dirty dozen of Umno bloggers whose job it is to convince their readers the fellow in the video, which was said to have been first shown in 1998, was, indeed, the foxy Anwar.

To make matters worse, some members of the police force have been reported to have publicly confirmed the dumb and naked figure of sexual transparency in the video is Anwar.

How come?

How can the lightly pot-bellied fellow with the sloppy chest of a couch-potato pass as Anwar?

Anwar was in 1998 the Deputy Prime Minister Mahathir did not want. Now he is the Opposition leader Najib and his wife, Rosmah, want undone.

He has been in the news for ages and people know him by his images. The man in the sex-video is not Anwar, they insist.

People say not even after a cosmetic surgery probably done on his face for fiteen tousand Malaysian dolaars at a downtown surgery in Bangkok can that man be Anwar Ibrahim.

Miiister, you want to remove bellicosity of fats round stomach and puppet booosum, can be done. Plus solders and fats over the ribs only fitty tousand Malaysian dolaars and discount five percent, also can.

That chap who contracted the job (Eskay?) did not spend the extra Malaysian dolaars and hence the “bellicosity of fats” (adipose fats) was clearly shown on YouTube - cuts of middle-aging beef that can hardly belong to the slim body of the fox whose stomach is too flat for him to tuck in without laboring his breathing.

The result is patently clear. It’s the return of the 1998-1999 phenomena Dr M has consistently denied as having been caused by him.

He repeatedly said the 70 percent skid of the Malay votes in 1999 had been caused by the Black Eye, meaning the terrible beating Anwar had endured in police custody in 1998, leaving a blackened eye that stayed on him until he was produced in court weeks later.

That was done by the former Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Tan Sri Rahim Noor, an abuse at the very height of the custodians of the law and of security, the event a chilling memory sending thousands to the streets to demand civil liberties in Malaysia, which is an early fragrance of Jasmine.

The Black Eye added to the total Opposition votes in 1999 but the bulk of the Malay votes that the Umno and BN lost in that election had been caused by the failed attempt to discredit and to humiliate Anwar, by Mahathir.

Jumanji

Now it is Jumanji, the supernatural game of the jungle that would bring to appear wild imaginations with every move you make.

With Najib at the helm and him failing to control the price rise of food and essential items while he dumps upon society a One Malaysia and a New Economic Model that have gone out of control like badly plotted novels, the way forward is forked and leading to his fall, making a repeat of the 1998-1999 reactions the only referent for social behavior of the sort in Malaysia.

Does that mean Umno and the BN will probably lose when Najib rings in the 13th general elections?

The answer is simple and it is positive.

No matter the fact the Pakatan is new and fumbling, the fact Najib, Rosmah, Hishamuddin, Mahathir and the Police are now incredible, and resented, will repeat the 1999 elections syndrome, this time causing the BN to finally lose.

Unless the members of the Pakatan were to spoil the progress of historical forces by sudden seizures to betray their friends and betray society as well for a handsome consideration or by sheer madness, the conclusion above is the only one to make.

However, BN fixed deposits in Sabah, Sarawak and some West Malaysian constituencies still remain, meaning the margin will be hairline.

As for the fear of the Chinese overwhelming the Malays because of the ethnic solidarity, them cannot gain a simple majority by themselves even if every Chinese majority were to fall to the DAP.

Nor can they gain a two-third majority in Parliament to change the constitution.

In other words, Malaysia is now poised to follow through the making of a two-party system, a chance nobody should miss. That is an essential part of needed progress. --- a. ghani ismail, 7 May, 2011.

Tinkerbell and Anwar's tendril - a story of uprightness that may be a lie

2011-04-06T04:56:00.001-07:00

It’s the watch, mademoiselle, which would have scuttled the tale of the video-man, Eskey, and not the shape of the actor’s body, which are merely lumps of doubt like the sorts that get stuck in the throats of writers and journos in this kind of Malaysian gutter madness with a sex-video to show, yet again.

It’s the watch, mademoiselle, ‘watch’ as in chronograph, not like in ‘watching’ over and over again a blue video that, as it turns out now, could have been a professional take from a seedy joint on Phaholyothin Road in the anything-can-do shades of Bangkok.

Meester, you want cheap money? Malaysian dolaars … tirty Baht for Fitty Ringgit? Amerikan dolaars?....... You want Malaysian Paspor?

Written in a strip across a sneak teaser of the Anwar Video posted on YouTube on April 4 was the address of the probable source of the Eskay tape. It said ‘Phaholyothin Road Bangkok, Thailand 10400, Copyright 2011.’ The tape was not taken in a spa in Kuala Lumpur on March 20 or thereabouts as we were earlier told. It was instead taken from somewhere along ‘Phaholyothin Road Bangkok, Thailand 10400.’

With “the only available copy” surrendered to the police, the sneak show-time on YouTube forced the IGP, Ismail Omar, to quickly say the police did not upload the teaser on YouTube.

Who is playing who out then?

But does it matter that the police is not responsible?

In the rush of popular reactions over the sex-video caper that’s going from bad to worse by the day, people who make surveys have reported the majority of Malaysians blame the Umno and the Barisan Nasional (BN) for the lewd and filthy sex-politicking.

It’s a sure kindling of the people’s temper that will become converted into People’s Power yet again in an environment that has been on the boil over dictators, authoritarian regimes, bad governments and corrupt elites.

The thrust of the combat is now about moral legitimacy and not the cut-and-dry eventual vote-count by the force of “purchasing power parity”, which, in the stalled, immobile and tropically humidized social memories, the sensitization of crisp legal tenders slipped from hand to mouth can resuscitate the worst political garbage from natural rot to be recycled in a dump-yard of politics and diplomacy.

Anwar’s wife, Datuk Seri Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, also reacted.

Looking drawn in the interview she gave at her home on April 5, a day before nominations in the Sarawak state elections, she could have stumped the agony of this filthy Umno politicking by producing the gold Omega watch Eskey said he retrieved from the prostitute who had taken it after fulfilling her role in the video.

Someone had asked Wan Azizah about the watch. She replied it is in her keeping. But why she did not produce it is somewhat of a let-down since that watch, if it is materialized, will trap Eskay.

Still the noose appears to be a living reality that’s haunting the threesome in the menage that may finally bring the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) to its ruin.

Does this mean the writer is convinced the stud in the Bangkok opera is not Anwar Ibrahim?

Someone said Eskey appeared like he was playing the role of a director of the show and it seemed to have been based on a clear sight of the movements in the video clip.

Others have said the actor was a carefully chosen Anwar-double but was simply too vigorous for the Opposition Leader who had a spinal injury.

The man in the video had a slight stomach spread and his chest was sloppy. People can hardly think of Anwar being like that.

Others noticed the prostitute patted her hair to be sure she sustained the hair-do, before the camera she knows is rolling.

Eskey is the central member of the trio, Datuk TKO, who screened the sex-video featuring a man with the likeness of Opposition Leader, Anwar Ibrahim, to a select group of journos in the costly Carcosa on March 21. This we already know.

The other two are former Malacca Chief Minister, Rahim Thamby Chik, and the Treasurer of Malay rights group, Perkasa, Shuib Lazim, who is also the Member of Parliament for Sungai Petani, Kedah. We already know this too.

But were the trio together in the joint along Phaholyothin Road in Bangkok and did they enjoy a snack in a klong, of salted wide-eyed Chinese-carp with the woman who could be a pretty ipoh-mali fish-monger, we would need police investigation to tell.

The caper is getting to be a lark. It’s the same as it was in 1998-1999 when the antagonist kept the allegations going on and on in the belief as Herr Goebel had, which is to keep repeating a lie until people believe it is true.

As the moral distresses warp the clime in Sarawak today (April 6), which is Nomination Day, Malaysian web-portals and some newspapers wrenched the people into another twist to the Anwar-Video rub-a-dub-dub following the tell-all press conference Wan Azizah held.

In a sentence, the meaning of all that she said is he, Anwar, needs Tinkerbell’s magic to put his tendril upright.

He has been disabled the past one year, she said. He has been going with his children for exercises and for therapy.

That means the “Anwar” in the video is not Anwar since that fellow had a different body shape and the real Anwar had not been able to perform sexually for about one year.

That’s a bombshell, of course.

But in an arena as evil as the one in which this combat is being fought, it will need the testimony of several medical specialists before it can explode and crush the rude and crude political quest to demolish the character of the rival by the practiced exertion of simple filth.

Is that planned as a follow-up?

It’s like the crap allegation against Anwar made by Saiful Bukhari in June, 2008.

The tough-looking young man who alleged Anwar Ibrahim forced him into a passive partnership in bed has been found to have had five DNA specimens in his rectum. It’s a miracle!

It is getting clearer by the day that this sort of sex-caper that has become a fetish of the Umno and BN is undermining the ruling coalition and depriving it of the moral legitimacy that is required to inspire the people to want to retain it as the governing party.

The BN is likely to lose in the 13th general elections. ----a. ghani ismail, 6 April, 2011

Anwar's Sex Video – An Overkill Bringing Back A Mocking Bird

2011-03-26T06:47:00.001-07:00

The penny is in the mouth of the “Datuk TKO”, the trio with a blue video of the rub-a-dub-dub three men in the tub type. Two from the three have an axe to grind against beleaguered Opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim. It’s a game move not many people will want to accept either as politically valid or as factual.

Anwar is in court once again on a sodomy charge. His sperm was found swimming with three or four others in the anus of the “passive” Saiful Bukhari, so we were told. He may or may not be the man in the video show too.

People the writer contacted said it is unlikely for any person in Anwar’s position to expose himself to such a degree of risk.

The video stunt is an overkill, the overkill causing PM Najib Tun Razak and the Barisan Nasional (BN) to need a recess against the growing excesses of a police state, a marred judiciary with judges ruling against themselves and an Umno that is once again becoming filth in the eyes of a lot of Malays and Malaysians.

Democratic Revolutions

The environment is serious.

As the “democratic revolutions” rise in the Mena countries with Nato having to take the lead in the invasion of Libya by “the world”, it doesn’t take anyone clever to guess that Asean is designed to return to the Southeast Asian turmoil of the sixties and seventies.

That was a time of fractious regional frivolity of big power geo-political interplay. It followed World War II and it dined at Pork Chop Hill in Korea and then at My Lai in Vietnam.

Pakistan is thoroughly a failed state and in hell. That is South Asia.

Now in Indonesia, after the ouster of Suharto in 1998 via the American Enterprise’s Reformasi which took Anwar’s friend, B.J.Habibie, to the top from number two, religious conflicts threaten to wrack the experimental democracy and the open market economy that can reach one trillion in less than four years if all goes well.

That is the largest nation and economy in Southeast Asia, a sitting duck in the spread of the hegemonic design, now disturbingly colored in Yellow and Red in Thailand, bordering trouble with Kampucea and with Muslims in the south, and in Myanmar a dreadful military stranglehold to nearly complete the jest of ruins in Southeast Asia once again.

In the Philippines, a bankrupt individual, the struggles with the Muslims and the remnants of Communist insurgents can drag the nation down into the slough of despondence.

It’s the sort of turmoil that kills aspirations and that represses the people with police states or military governments.

In Malaysia the powers-that-be kill the freedom of conscience and the rights of religious minorities, this time taking the Christians too, after thousands of Bibles in the national language were impounded for reasons known to the government and decidedly disagreed by the popular hosts, paving the way to the fire next time, to catch James Baldwin's book of that title before the twilight turns dark and the moon stands still over a burning Malaysia.

Small Town

In a taxi from a small town to another a few weeks before, the driver said to me the present day is no longer like it was when the people were uneducated and dependent on the largesse of the government.

We are different now, he said. People who were afraid before will now stand and walk for their rights.

That is, of course, correct. The BN has been slow but fairly successful.

The urban population is now 63 percent, when it was 62 percent rural the day of the racial riots of 13 May 1969.

Today in the rural are teachers, nurses and an assortment of government extension workers, ex-army and police personnel plus students of fully residential schools and colleges, many far better informed than the members of the disinherited urban groupies who become politically branded as opposition because of their drug and sex video-strips lifestyles.

It’s a patchwork population, quite unlike the 60s to 80s generations who willfully sank in with the rich and mighty in search for money and a social standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the titled members of the super-privileged elite.

The elite replaced the superior colonial whiteness with a paintwork of cultural blandness and a big nose that can and do become inefficient or swiftly filthy, which is the main bases of the widespread rejection.

The video overkill of Anwar Ibrahim occurs in such an environmental disuse of the political leadership. It almost lost traction in a day, as it did in 1998.

Prominent people and journos simply said they have seen the tapes and the hero was not Anwar.

It’s not about any love for Anwar. It is simply hate of the filth stuck somewhere in the ruling herd.

In the course of the Anwar Saga since Mahathir unleashed his fury against his unwashed deputy and rival in 1998, the judiciary which was once before respected and cherished bent with the wind like it was doing obeisance to the gods on Mahameru.

Years later, after Mahathir had retired and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi became premier, the judges swayed and one declared Anwar had been the victim of a conspiracy at the highest level of government and society.

Punch & Judy

Everything seemed to have come back, like in a replay of Punch and Judy. In this segment of the saga a bunch of DNA was found residing in the victim’s (Saiful) rectum.

Meantime that fellow, Saiful Bukhari, was seduced and bonked by a DPP, Farah, a member of the Attorney-General’s “esteemed” team.

What’s left of the credibility of the case and of the allegation is anybody’s guess.

Is that why the blue video surfaced on the eve of the Sarawak elections?

The PKR was already routed and the Pas was punch-drunk following the risqué bickering at the very top of the party. It led to a series of knockdowns in bye-elections the Pas sustained, votes receding like the foreheads of the human from the Homo sapien to the Neanderthal.

Now they have a rallying point, the dying horse whipped back into vigorous aggression by a do-it-yourself CCTV blue-job.

Will a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) help convince the public it’s really Anwar who romped in bed in the video?

Have you ever heard of a RCI that was convened for a purpose like that?

Drop it friend! It’s a lost cause. It's a repeat of 1998-1999, only this time not less than 70 percent of the Chinese will oppose the BN and the Indians are split in two. In 1999 about 70 percent of the Malays turned against Mahathir's leadership.

Just let the police investigate, decide and be done. ---a.ghani ismail, 26, March, 2011

Tan Sri Robert Phang Goes Round and Round Again

2011-03-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

At Killiney Kopitiam on the evening of Thursday 17 March, 2011, barely two days away from the UNSC-endorsed military intervention in Libya the world knows as “no fly zone”, about 50 persons listened to the good Tan Sri Robert Phang, the contrast to the bad guy Attorney-General (AG), Gani Patail, in the sock-it-to-me fight over Tajuddin Ramli’s Mas-Kebab swop.

Tajuddin, Executive Chairman of the Malaysian Flag-Carrier, Mas, from 1994 to 2001, was said to have caused the company to lose about RM 8 billion. Though said to have been recommended to be charged in court by the former head of the Commercial Crime Division, the AG hasn’t acted on it yet.

As this saga began to unfold its new chapter in 2009 when well-known blogger, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, ran a series of 10 installments on the Tajuddin’s Mas story, few would have expected the recount of Tajuddin’s embarrassment would light a fire that combusted in the MACC, causing two advisors to burn.

That was the subject of a “Kopitiam Discussion” my old friend, Baha Zain, organized through his outfit, Malaysian Digest, at Killiney Kopitiam on Thursday, a topic few Malaysians followed because of the bad journalism it drew, the bulk of writings on it showing the writers’ emotions and flaunting the what, when, where, who and why that are basic to reporting.

Raja Petra and a few others are exceptions, the former better described as exceptionally gifted.

The discussion at the Kopitiam was not a curtain-raiser. It served instead as a discussion with Tan Sri Robert Phang, and enabling us to see the woods from the trees pertaining to the new chapter of the Tajuddin Saga the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) would want us to believe was intimately interwoven with the selective prosecution of the senior police officer who had recommended that Tajuddin be charged.

Ours is a troubled environment. Trouble has been brewing all over the Muslim world, the new sets in the Mena countries stemming from complaints about police states, dysfunctional institutions, ethnic, religious and gender discriminations, income inequalities and rising prices of food and essential items, all of which are residing in this country too.

Closer to home, in Indonesia, where Muslim extremism has been clobbering the Ahmadiyya and Christian minorities over and over again, someone sent parcel bombs to “moderate Muslims” several days before, taking the country into Takfirism which may lead her into the kind of purgatory Pakistan has become.

There the moderate Muslim Governor of Punjab and a Christian Minister had been killed.

It is turmoil.

The Killiney Kopitiam session with Robert Phang on Thursday, which was somewhat of a jumble because of the varying foci, should have been finally about these – the rotting images of our institutions, beginning with the Police Force which we have been given to believe is divided into factions and a part of which is corrupt or is corruptible.

Then the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has been soured by the death of political assistant, Teoh Beng Hock, in its custody.

Several big fishes the Commission charged failed to be secured by a guilty verdict in court. That brings us to the disappointment with the Attorney-General (AG), Gani Patail.

The AG, Gani Patail, and the former Inspector-General (IGP), Musa Hassan, were implicated in Anwar Ibrahim’s Black Eye Incident in 1998 by the testimony of a senior police officer.

This rounds up why Anwar’s outfit wants the AG and the former IGP dissolved in vitriol, but says nothing about why the MCA big shot, Robert Phang, would want to ride on the fame and flames Raja Petra stands for, first in the making of the Free Anwar Campaign and now in gunning for the people who were believed to have conspired to reduce Anwar to political ashes.

Robert Phang, a big operator in the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and an advisor to the MACC, walked straight into the amazing swirl of terribly sensitive political events the Anwar outfit had been conjuring, causing a question mark to arise like a zombie in Haiti.

He is a social activist. He continued to crusade until after he had resigned in a huff in January 2011 following a blog accusation he had tried to corrupt a high government official involving a business deal.

He is a big man, a rag-to-riches story that may have once been the president of Magnum and is still the publisher of The Star.

Why did such a big guy take issue against the AG following the writings of the blogger, Raja Petra Kamaruddin? Is he in the outgoing camp in MCA? Or is it about putting the pressure on the government for action to be taken?

Gani, having gone to Mecca for the Hajj last year with Shahidan Shafie, allegedly Tajuddin Ramli’s proxy, was suspected to have become obliged to the businessman who was once a police officer.

But Robert Phang should have been well-disposed to know Raja Petra and his friends in the blog merely suggested Shahidan must have paid for the trip involving Gani and his family.

They had no supporting evidence.

They were again guessing when saying Shahidan had meant to persuade Gani not to prosecute Tajuddin Ramli.

But while Gani Patail had obviously attracted suspicion for the pilgrimage with Shahidan and family, he quickly reacted to a call from the MACC and attended a tell-all meeting on 4 January.

He submitted the receipts collected in his Mecca trip to show he paid for his family from his own pocket.

More than a decade ago the then Chief Justice, Eusoff Chin, had gotten into a crap for his family tour of New Zealand together with Berjaya Corporation lawyer, V.K. Lingam.

It was clear the events were good meat for the PKR spinners and if Phang chose to stay his ground he would be drawing the kind of flak Muammar Gadhafi would not want to think about in Libya.

But he did just that. No matter the fact that Gani Patail had submitted evidences to show he was clean concerning the trip to Mecca, and said he was willing to cooperate should he be investigated, Robert Phang and one other of the attendees were apparently not satisfied.

Chairman of the MACC Corruption Prevention Panel, Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam, issued a statement to the effect that the MACC members who attended this meeting were satisfied with Abdul Gani’s explanation.

There were 30 attendees of 42 invited. As far as this writer is aware, only two persons, i.e. Robert and one other, had protested the statement Ramon made on 4 January after the meeting.

The statement came close to exonerating Gani. Ramon said there was no need to investigate the allegations of Abdul Gani’s connection with former MAS Chairman, Tan Sri Tajuddin’s proxy, En Shahidan Shafie.

Robert Phang blew his top.

But was Ramon’s statement conclusive? Did Ramon carry such weight as to enable him to open or close an MACC enquiry?

Robert Phang was a member of the MACC panel Ramon chaired. He should know the limits of Ramon’s power. Still he acted quickly to reply on 5 January. His statement is given in full below.

I regret Ramon’s statement that - “ MACC members were satisfied
with Abdul Gani’s explanation and found that there was no need to investigate
the allegations”. I also resent Tan Sri Ramon’s statement that - “We found that
there was no case at all to accuse him of being linked to Tajuddin just because
of this Haj trip. It was irresponsible to allege that he was in any way linked.”

I consider Ramon’s statement to be a direct attack on me as I had
earlier called on Abdul Gani to clear the air over public allegations of his
relationship with Shahidan and the Mecca Haj pilgrimage. I was concerned that
Abdul Gani’s silence would fuel deeper suspicions and confusion. (Italics mine)

Ramon can speak for himself but he has no mandate from me or the
other panel members to make that statement on our behalf. That was not how I
perceived the meeting. What was certain was that my esteemed colleagues who
attended the meeting did not want to humiliate Abdul Gani any further. It was
not our intention to humble the Top Lawyer of the country.

It is therefore imperative for Abdul Gani to dispel any suspicion
surrounding his conduct of consorting with Shahidan Shafie and [sic] the Mecca Haj
pilgrimage. The public needs to be satisfied as to why Abdul Gani had not acted
on the recommendations of the then Director of Commercial Crimes Department,
Dato’ Ramli Yusuff, that Tajudin should be prosecuted. Inevitable [sic] the public
already perceived that the AG’s decision to prosecute Dato’ Ramli as an attempt
to cover up the MAS scandal. (italics mine)

Robert Phang invited the fires of hell to be flung at him. It was Raja Petra and several others in Anwar’s outfit who “ …perceived that the AG’s decision to prosecute Dato’ Ramli as an attempt to cover up the MAS scandal,’ but certainly not “the public”.

A friend had earlier asked what could be the connection between Raja Petra and Robert Phang, which he described as “confusing”. That was a member of the MCA.

In the corridors of the BN the episodes were viewed somewhat more seriously.

Phang was alleged in a blog to have tried to bribe a senior government official. The allegation was followed by another blog saying he had donated RM50,000 to the MCA’s nemesis, the DAP, which has been the choice of about 80 percent of Chinese voters in the general elections of 8 March 2008.

At Killiney Kopitiam on Thursday he was not asked for the basis of his allegation that the Director of the (Police) Commercial Crimes Department, Dato’ Ramli Yusuff, had indeed been prosecuted for recommending Tajuddin to be charged in court.

What was Robert Phang repeating the allegation for? Even if Ramli Yusuff had come clean in court, no evidence was offered to prove he had been a victim of selective prosecution.

To members of the BN Robert had joined a chorus in the Opposition in a straight and easy jaunt that must embarrass the MCA.

It needs to be asked is he a member of an outgoing faction in the party whose days are numbered under the new president, Chua Soi Lek?

Robert is 69 and he wouldn't be bothered about that.

To people who had followed the development, Robert will appear as having been affected by Raja Petra’s 10 installments on Tajuddin Ramli’s Mas episode in Malaysia Today posted in 2009, and he recalled it also following Raja Petra’s expose on the Gani Patail-Shahidan Shafie Hajj trip at the end of 2010.

Robert Phang has become a curiosity. Why is he doing this when it is already a glaring fact that the PKR and the Pas have lost credibility and are deemed popularly as no longer fit to lead.

While PKR suffered lawmakers who frogged to the BN, both parties have had their share of leadership crises, the PKR now quite emasculated since Syed Husin Ali retired, Sivarasa lost in the party divisional election and many have chosen to fall quiet before the new and untested leadership line-up.

The Pas has also been severely damaged after serially losing in recent bye-elections, meaning Robert Phang isn’t about to go places outside of the spaces marked “Down” or “Out”.

He called Gani Patail a rogue. Robert should have ridden on a moral movement.---a. ghani ismail, 22 March, 2011

A Selection Of History – The Malay Amazons

2011-03-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

History is selective, Marina Mahathir of the Sisters of Islam probably wanted to say. It is the reason why we learn in school about the emancipist, Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879-1904) but nothing about the great Malay queens and warriors who predated her from centuries earlier and those who came after her, the Amazons. These are the Malay Shikandi or Sri Kandi of the Mahabharata, the character who had been a woman, Amba, who then attained manhood by prayers and fought alongside Arjuna and the Pandavas in the epic Battle of Kurushetra.

In Aceh they are simply the Inong Balee or widow warriors. They are widows who took over the helm following their husbands fall in battle, some becoming admirals, others guerilla leaders and tens of thousands more as soldiers and guerilla fighters.

But was it Hindu influence that had turned the Malay women into the Amazons we removed from our history books in school?

That isn’t altogether clear. There’s the Farsi (Persian) connection in the Malay genesis. There’s also the possibility it was all in the Malay nature.

Malays have fallen since from being the only people in the world who had dared to insult Kublai Khan and then gave the great Khan a beating in East Jawa in 1292.

The great Mongol sent more than 12,000 soldiers to teach Kertanegara a lesson in the art of might he had himself to bitterly learn.

Kublai would have become blind if he were to see them now – a motley of colonizeables drowned in orthodox and patriarchal Islam making them all screwed up over deviant teachings, interfaith, beer and women liberation movements for the want of the right to polygamy and to marry a child of eight or nine because their 7th century Arab Messenger of God had done so, may peace be upon him.

To observe the Malays of Nusantara fall into a subsidence of such historical magnitude from the high watermark to become a people as colonizable as they are today is to touch a note of history of a corruptible, power-debauched and mentally captive society.

So we learn about Raden Ajeng Kartini and touch nothing about Laksamana Keumala Hayati, or of Cut Nyak Din or of Cut Meutia in Aceh, or of the Ratu-Ratu of Pattani, one of whom could have taken Ayuthia by force but turned back upon seeing the king of Siam under attack from Burma.

And in Kelantan there was Urdugu Wijaya Malasingha, or Cik Siti Wan Kembang ibn Batuta visited. She led her own all-women cavalry.

Because Kartini was “relevant” to our Occidental history, we and our children are taught about her in school.

She is one among the Indonesian national heroes. She is displayed on a denomination of the Rupiah.

Kartini (1879-1904) had been relieved of Dutch education half way in a Dutch colonial school and then, at age 24, was married to a man twice as old and as his fourth wife, a seasoning of women under Islam that she salted into her letters to Dutch friends in Holland and thus became an emancipist.

Backed by Dutch Liberalists the letters burned into Indonesian history and Kartini Day was born when the Indonesian state constitution declared the genders in Indonesia as equal. Kartini Day is April 21.

But that’s merely a whiff about the historical roles of the Malay women in determining the destinies of their countries and of the region as a whole.

Presidents Aquino, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Arroyo Macapagal are recalls of this historical role.

Historical Distortion

History had become distorted by the selection of facts, leaving the bulk falling into disuse because the pages of time had been turned by the grand artifices of imperialism, Islamic and Western.

The natives must retrieve their own reality and rebuild it or the “truth” will be dead.

It is like this:

It was found after the dust had settled in many a battle during the War of Dipo Negoro (1825-1830), that among the corpses were women dressed in silat (martial) attire with their breasts fastened tightly to their chests.

It is documented history. But the Dutch did not want to awaken the fact and later many Islamist, fearing what those facts would do to the integrity of gender bias in Islamic Law, rejected them as well.

Dipo Negoro, as it is popularly known, traced his ancestry to Prophet Muhammad and so it was best to let the Malay women’s role in the war rest in oblivion, ignorance in cases of this sort being a heavenly bliss.

The Malay had no sense of gender bias. Malays did not adopt Hinduism or Islam without tampering with the basics. They “brought” Mahameru, which is the Hindu Mountain of the Gods, to Sumatera and Jawa. These are the two Gunung Sumeru.

In a similar insistence of this sovereign cultural nativity, the Malays had and have their concept of Adam as in the several Babab Jawa, tracing from him the lineage of the Javanese Raja.

Among the Malay Rajas of the Peninsular and Andalas (Sumatra), this lineage is traced to Gayomart, the Persian Adam, which Wilkinson recorded in his Malay Papers.

The Malay heritage isn’t a squared bundle of joy taken from the scripted prose of the Arabs and deposited into a round hole of history as a rude awakening to imperial reality that sprung from Hadramaut or Mecca.

While a sprinkle of Islamic laws were observed for a number of centuries, the Malays had never imposed the whole of the Shariat (Islamic Law) on their communities.

The 99 laws of Perak and of Pahang were not based on the Shariat. They were native Malay laws with a bit of mix-up.

Malays led their lives according to their own values, not along the rude demands of the Malay Arabic-educated intelligentsia, some mentally warped by the mesmeric trance-culture summed as rites and traditions into becoming an excessive appetite for power and for abuse.

When these flakes of the moribund are removed and Malay history is seen clearer, what rises above the historical scams is a sensational history of empires being built by men and women together, without the slightest nuance of gender bias.

President Obama, who lived as a child in school in Jakarta for some years, would have read about this, him a keen student of history too. He is someone close to us.

First Woman

The first woman known to have been an Admiral was Laksamana Keumala Hayati of 17th century Acheh. She had an armada of more than 400 ships and drove off, among others, Cornelis de Houtman.

She had built an efficient intelligence network and secured John Lancaster from a Dutch planned attack on his ship in Aceh harbor.

Keumala Hayati was succeeded by another woman. Her navy, of course, consisted of men and women.

And it had been the practice in Aceh from the time of Iskandar Muda to use women as the king’s bodyguards, not unlike what Gadhafi introduced in Libya.

There were also the palace guards, more than 500 of an all-women commando unit which, on every Friday, would accompany the sultan and his elephants to the mosque in Banda Aceh for the weekly prayers.

We are talking about the 16th century and when Aceh was recognized as the leader of the eastern chapter of the Islamic world and a partner of the great Ottoman Empire in the face of Western expansion.

It was a time of Jihad to protect the territories of Islam.

Do you believe they, the members of the all-women Aceh commando palace guards, would have covered their faces or their hair? Would these Malay troopers have covered the aurat parts of their arms?

It could never be fitted into Islamic Law, surely. But in today’s Malaysia is a mix-up of the tightening of Islamic law against military and police forces that have women jogging up sharp hills to keep fit, wearing short-sleeves and ass-tight pants, or flying faster than the speed of sound in a fighter jet we have yet to manufacture ourselves.

You’d need to somehow override the confusion, which means you will have to let the Malays enjoy the freedom of conscience and choose not to remain Muslims of the 7th century AD and somehow adjust to the new millennium.

Keumala Hayati was succeeded as the Admiral by a woman, whose deputy was also a woman.

When the Dutch finally captured Aceh and the national forces had to fight from the mountains, women took the leadership from their fallen husbands, as Cut Nyak Dien and Cut Meutia had done, two from thousands of liberation fighters.

Change

The Malay cultural scenario had begun to change drastically in the early 19th century, with the outbreak of the Padri Wars (1815-1830). Padris were Malay Wahabis.

It wasn’t the Dutch or the English who were the main cultural contestants. It was the Padris.

They fought a war of attrition in Minangkabau to break the matriarchal stranglehold.

Pagaruyung, the tip of the Malay pantheon, was surrendered to the Dutch, the raja becoming the regent and settling himself in Batu Sangkar a few kilometers away.

Malay-Islam was never the same since. Even after their defeat in 1830 (by the Dutch) the Padris spread.

In Langkat, Sumatra, where the largest spiritual school in the region (Tareqah Naqshabandiah) was settled, the political struggles for power over the highly influential bodies of followers consequently became more observant of the Arab Shariat.

The contrasts between Arab and Malay Islam were reaching to a head. Malay religious teachers of the new breed never seized to attack Minangkabau traditions or the Adat Pepateh until Umno predominated and took the lead in the 70s under Tun Razak.

But the tenor had been set. The religious orthodoxy had made itself the custodian and arbiter of religion, the miniscule Vicegerents of God on the good earth.

These attacked Islamic religious minorities as they still do in a crystallization of the mental warp in heads bundled in towels in the tropical heat and humidity.

The brains can enjoy seminal splendor but are often unable to appreciate abstractions, making the word of the law overwhelming to the remains of the mind.

Who said Gadhafi has at all been a nuisance? When a Libyan had come to complain to me about Gadhafi’s unorthodox Islam in 1976, I remember telling him that Gadhafi’s Islam is very much like Malay Islam and I suspected, I said, he had learned something from the Malays.

The Libyan religious man never came back. He failed to see the light.

We are Malays and we have to be of our own nature and not ape into the heavens a tribal Arab spiritual awakening of the 7th century that has, to many of us, exhausted itself and fallen into sectarian distresses Pakistan and Iraq are displaying everyday since the War of Mr. Bush and of Dick Cheney.

We are Malays. We are a composite community that had never had any gender bias.

When Aceh was ruled by queens in a row, they were not called sultanah (feminine for sultan). They were in their own rights, sultans and were referred to as such.

The last of them was deposed on the fatwa (religious ruling) of the Sheriff of Mecca.

Quo Vadis Melayu? Into bewilderment?---a. ghani ismail, 17 March, 2011

ISLAM AND THE NEW WOLDY ORDER - DRUNKEN PRAWNS IN VODKA

2011-03-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

As the European powers were deliberating in Brussels about the means to bring Gadhafi to yield in Libya and hope for the Arab revolutionary is hanging by a thin thread, the Arab League on its own came to a unanimous resolution for a no-fly zone over the fellow Arab state.

The Arabs apparently eat themselves.

Unless a new body of people embraces Islam, the religion can never again become a contestant for universal power and resources.

Can the no-fly zone resolution be about Amir Mousa who wants to leapfrog from Arab League secretary-general to position number one in Egypt, replacing Hosni Mubarak as the ultra Israel and American ally?

The question arises since President Obama and the Nato members have not decided yet the course of actions to take against the revolutionary hero.

The answer to the question will have to wait.

What is assumed about the Arab League is none from among its members can decide without consulting allies from the European front or from the USA. In short, the resolution was probably orchestrated from outside.

Gadhafi may be the exception to the rule. But even if we remember Lockerbie, Gadhafi’s only “crime” now appears to be about staying in power for 41 years, as some surviving Arab monarchs may do.

Gadhafi may have no peer. He is the soul of Libya who does not hold any official office or title. But Libya nonetheless complied with the IMF.

The oil producer has hefty deposits in European and American banks that are now frozen - hundreds of billions of Euros in Germany alone.

While many in the world and especially the Latin Americans socialists are backing Gadhafi, the Arab League jumped the gun for the no-fly zone.

It means the Arab League has voted for military intervention into the affairs of a sovereign Arab state. That runs against the UN Charter and should run against Islamic ethics as well.

What have the Arab nations done for their people that Gadhafi hasn’t done?

He modernized Libya, provided for her sustainable growth spending billions to bring water thousands of kilometers through the desert from the Upper Nile and miraculously greening Tripoli’s sandy hinterland.

It was a great Arab romance, the ideas and achievements of the revolutionary soldier spilling the world in places he spawned and sponsored socialist(ic) revolutions.

To many who were born to rise into the heights of the Afro-Asian revolutions, he was the other side of Lawrence of Arabia. But many Libyans from as long ago as the 70s regarded Gadhafi’s emancipation of women and his brand of socialism as Islamically antithetical.

He was one more Afro-Asian who had stood for the freedoms from wants, from fear and from tyranny, a formula of freedoms that had come from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and which, as it was understood by the generation of Bandung 55, had meant it took first call while the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of conscience and freedom of assembly which are the new frontiers, would come later.

Now once again to the peoples of that spirit all over Africa and Asia, plus the brothers and sisters in Latin America, another Arab leader, another Arab people’s socialist state, is being dispelled by the Arabs and Muslims and is being readied for the storming, once again by the West, like it had been with Iraq, and then, Afghanistan.

Present orthodox Islam, set against the principle of peace by the benefit of the other in the Treaty of Westphalia,1648,has been like crap ravings.

Having no magisterium to moderate between the different sects (mazhab) and the cults in Islam, Muslims in most Islamic countries and in the world cannot unite.

Iraq after the American invasion and Pakistan by contagion of the war in Afghanistan, are great examples of the Muslim sectarian blood-lettings, the disintegration of pan-Islam as run-offs of the social disintegration that attended the transitions from the colonized world to the world of decolonized natives Franz Fannon and Jean Paul-Sartre had dreamed for the newly independent Afro-Asians.

Everywhere in the Muslim world most of the intelligentsia cannot communicate with the religious scholars and their captives. It’s a separate reality that’s the wall of the divide, the exceptions to be found in the Al-Qaeda operatives, many of whom have become martyrs in suicide bombings.

Then, in a widening crescent of the sublime religion, followers of their holinesses attack Christian minorities, which brings us to the lark in Malaysia where, by a regulation passed in 1986, the Christian minority was and is denied their Bible in the national language, Bahasa Malaysia.

It makes no sense other than merely as one of the many regulations in the feudal form of social control and of coercion carried into independent and contemporary Malaysia.

It is an absurdity of statecraft, of governance in a plural society, of modernization and of diplomacy in the new millennium.

Yet it is universal in the Islamic resurgence the world over.

Yet a part of the professional and scientific communities of Muslims have volunteered to die in the on-going mission to battle against Western and Christian oppressions and atrocities.

The confusion cuts deep into the sinews of the Islamic societies.

This isn’t about the “bewildered.” This is a new set of references in the Islamic consciousness the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had secured, something the Japanese had done in the War.

Malaysia did not see a freedom revolution. In Malaysia Islam is mainly about a rites of passage and the Law, or something of a quest for Islamic integrity and supremacy that is as wild as Sylvester d’ Pussycat can get in his quest to fry the little birdie, which would be barbaric, of course, but celluloid.

Muslims in Malaysia may be fined Ringgit 5,000, imprisoned for two years and whipped six times for drinking in a public place a glass of beer, or for being in “close proximity” with the other gender outside the muhrim ( close relatives), or if suspected of deviant Islam, can be detained without trial for as long as it does not matter to society. Isn’t that nice!

Caught in a trap of conflicting civilizations that colonization, modernization and development brought, Muslims face dysfunctional families and social disintegration they cannot manage in the given cast of religious emotions.

The religious bodies are bent on preserving the wonderment of a Way of Life God Himself revealed through angels, prophets and messengers, in a set of Books and preserved by ustaz and ustazah (male and female religious teachers) who believe of themselves as custodians of the religion.

It’s about the same with the other Abrahamic sisters – Judaism and Christianity. These two may or may not have gotten out of the legalistic jumble a lot earlier, depending on cultic preferences and the political mission they must undertake as “fishers of men”, no less.

How do we believe these aged systems of faiths and laws can draw for us a compound of ideas that may relief us of all or of some of the challenges in a world that’s already seven billion and facing a painful climatic revolt that is bringing back the fluvial age?

Can we believe it is possible to stop by prayers the melting icecaps and the glaciers on the third polar region?

Or do the religions have, in their cache of mercy, compassion and agape, the means to at least extend favorably a way of cooperation between the nations?

If Islam, or Christianity or Judaism fails to suggest to the world anything equal to the principles of the Treaty of Westphalia, they should, at the very least, let the rest of humanity be free to attempt tearing down the walls and build bridges and an ark of friendship and respectful coexistence.

But that may amount to innocent simplicity. The world isn’t as simple anymore. China is reported to have agreed with the Americans over Libya, for instance, causing the former socialist bloc to hold its breath for what can transpire in the UNSC should the forces of America, Europe and the Arab League decide to bring Libya to the UN.

Within the context of such an excess of geopolitical realities, Malaysian Muslim authorities and some NGOs are insisting the Christians must not be allowed to extend their missions using a Malay translation of the Bible.

In fact, the non-Muslim citizens in Malaysia cannot use the Name, Allah, nor can they say Allahu Akbar, Great God!

What happens if the injured take their savings and investments elsewhere? Will the financially powerful Arabs bring their dirhams and dinars here?

Hush babe, the truth about all of that is surely coming this way soon! Surely.--- a. ghani ismail, 13 March, 2011

Mahathir’s Memoir - Being A Haunting of Old Buddies, Jekyll and Hyde

2011-03-11T00:47:00.001-08:00

Mahathir opened Pandora’s Box upon himself. Seeking to have his last say no matter what, the ex-premier, riding on a wave of a popularity-comeback, the man, in his 800-pages plus memoir, is shown in the early reactions to the book as nasty.

It’s only been three days since he launched the great book and 5,000 copies had flown off the shelves.

Early reactions are making the monumental work like it’s entitled, A Doctor in a Haunted House - Memoirs of a Jekyll seeking for a place to Hyde.

He asked for it. From the reactions, Mahathir Mohamed, the doctor and long time premier (he stayed all of 22 years at the helm), apparently wants to be best remembered as a pugilist, squeezing into history a wondrous storm to batter him so the adrenaline will keep flowing in his twilight days. He is 86.

He wrote into his memoirs a series of nasty remarks and accounts of persons he had undone and those he crossed swords with to provide for him a clean bill of health.

Hundreds have not agreed with the one-eyed. The numbers will pile into the thousands within a month.

It’s the view of the personality from his lofty perch, his nest, that’s now being bombarded, the bombardment stretching into a force of willful destruction of Mahathir’s version by a popular force that wants history to reflect the people’s perceptions.

While Mahathir spent 20 pages of his book on his decision to sack and clobber Anwar Ibrahim on the basis of the dubious allegations of Umi Hafilda, most of the people simply saw Anwar as one of his rivals he clobbered to stay on as premier.

Anwar, he had written in his memoir, had asked four women for sex, two of whom said ‘no’ while the other two undressed.

That was according to Umi Hafilda, the sister of Anwar’s former confidential secretary who is now number two in the wracked Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).

Umi Hafilda was featured in the recent twin by-elections, in Merlimau and Kerdau.

She was reported to have attracted large crowds, which she can, dragging sibling-rivalry sensationally through the mud and revealing succulent sexual stories about Anwar Ibrahim.

But that’s where Umi comes and goes, herself not a likely candidate for any virtue.

Anwar fumed. Still in court in a second leg of the sodomy charges, he combusted in Banting last night (10 March) and reached for Mahathir’s throat in an exchange of libelous and sub judicial remarks for a slanderous tirade, like Alladin’s bargain of the old lamp for new.

The storm has begun. The opposition pact requires unification, uniformity and unity. Now it can embark on a recall of the Free Anwar Campaign.

In court the last prosecution witness, a senior police officer, divulged the surprising detail that Saiful Bukhari, who is the man Anwar was alleged to have sodomized, had run to Najib’s wife first, and not directly to the Prime Minister as we have been made to believe before.

It’s a very small detail for the pact to ride on.

Saiful, it appeared, had had the DNA of several men in his anus. A scientist had speculated in court that it could have happened when the man sat on a toilet bowl. Take care!

Reactions to the earth-shaking memoir and the trial in court are happening as the world is going upside down, making Malaysia politically dicey.

China suddenly sprung a USD 7.3 billion trade deficit in February, said to be caused by the volatile prices of oil because of the “democratic revolts” in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena).

That revolt has become a civil war in Libya and in Bahrain Sunnis battle Shiahs on the streets.

The regional revolution is scheduled to happen in Saudi Arabia today (11 March). It’s the largest oil producer.

In Egypt the revolution has wound its way into Muslim-Christian unrest. Some 2.4 million barrels of oil run through the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline per day.

If China can fall into a trade deficit following a simmering oil threat, what will happen should oil prices surge to frightening heights will certainly be the Chinese economic crisis that’s predicted to happen in four years time.

Muslim violence against minorities has spread from Nigeria, Somalia and Egypt to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and to Indonesia.

The environment could not have been more exciting for Mahathir to launch his exorcism.

People are waiting for the reactions of Razaleigh and Musa, the duo that teamed to challenge Mahathir for the leadership of Umno in 1987 and lost by 43 votes.

Of Razaleigh, the affable prince from Kelantan, Mahathir had said he sploshed more than Ringgit 20 million of his own money into the 1987 contest, an allegation most people in Umno can hardly believe.

In fact, about a couple of weeks before the contest, Marina Yusof and the writer together told Razaleigh to quit, seeing he would lose by a count of 26 votes at that point of time.

Votes are countables and we can know from the bundle of reports that had come in. Ibrahim Ali was the director of Razaleigh’s campaign for the 1987 contest. He too said Razaleigh would lose by such a slim margin.

Later some Umno members suggested to Razaleigh to purchase the required votes and he flatly refused.

Razaleigh and Musa are not the end of the complainants. Mahathir has asked for a tsunami to engulf him. The raving reviews are merely a preface.

In the given circumstances people he rubbed would throttle the godfather for a joyride that can be politically profitable.

If the forces are strong enough, the guards will change and heads may be made to roll at high speed, like in pinball. Najib, as premier, will have to keep himself at a safe distance. --- a. ghani ismail, 11 March 2011

WITHER THE PAS? TO HEAVEN OR TO HOSPITAL?

2011-03-07T11:49:00.001-08:00

In the unfolding democratic revolutions of the Arab world the Pas’ stream of losses in by-elections in recent months is telling of the democratic distresses in Islam and it can prove to be terminal for the party.

While it is clearly indicated the Islamic party has lost the popular support it gained in the March 8, 2008 general elections, the fact the party is not equipped to overcome its constitutional, democratic and leadership crises forces the conclusion that the disease that had struck the Pas is a killer.

Who is really the leader in Pas? Is it the party president, Datuk Seri Haji Abdul Hadi Awang, 63, or does the power actually reside in the claimant to the throne, the stoic Datuk Haji Nik Aziz Nik Mat, the older Tuan Guru (Teacher), who, at 78and despite being in and out of hospital, has displayed a singularly beautiful temper that burst out repeatedly against the whole party leadership in the last couple of years.

The troubles that brewed first over the president’s inclination to discuss a “Unity Government” with Umno and the Barisan Nasional (BN) then turned into a nasty personal spat between Nik Aziz and the president’s deputy, Nasharudin Isa, that dragged the stoical Nik Aziz into a waste of nepotism.

He had been believed to have planned to appoint his son-in-law, Arriffahmi, as his successor, and his protégé, Husam Musa, the brightest spark in the Pas government in Kelantan, he had wanted to kick upstairs in the party's hierarchy and shunted to Kuala Lumpur.

Nik Aziz is the general guide (mursyidul Am) and elected by the council of scholars (Dewan Ulama) consisting of 15 members, all of whom are elected by the party representatives to the general assembly.

Hadi Awang, as president, is elected by the party representatives to the general assembly held once in three years.

Memories of party members do not admit of such a conflict between the mursyidul am and the president.

But this is a conflict of power that has made history and its expression as a serial burst of temper that began in 2009 and has not shown any sign of relief is best kept in a space capsule.

The party has had to pay heavily in losses of voters’ support. It has so far trailed through four by-elections in which the party lost and one more that reduced the winning votes from a full basket to a handful.

At the same time it’s a mess of constitutional, leadership and personal conflicts that visited the Pas after 19 years of Nik Aziz at the helm of the state government and as state party chief.

Following the differences between him and the president’s men over the proposed “Unity Government” discussions with Umno, the old man was reported on 16 July to suddenly lash out at the party deputy president, Nasharudin Isa, who had retained his position in the party’s supreme council election 10 days before.

Nasharudin, a mild-mannered scholar and among the best there is in the party was contested by Husam Musa from Kelantan and Mat Sabu from Penang on 6 June 2009.

It became clear from the ramblings of the party’s general guide he had wanted Nasharudin to make way for his protégé, Husam Musa, whom he wanted out of Kelantan to open the way for his son-in-law he had earlier appointed as CEO of the state’s commercial arm.

Husam garnered 281 votes against Nasharuddin’s 480 in the contest. The third candidate, Mat Sabu, won 261 votes.

On 16 June 2009 the old man thundered against Nasharudin ‘for not losing the contest to Husam Musa’.

He asked Nasharudin to vacate the Bachok parliamentary constituency the man represented and get out of Kelantan – a hit to the prostrate followed by a kick on the ass of the party deputy president.

The party, reeling in an agony of faith and of morale, never recovered.

It’s an infection of a super ego that has become day-by-day a sickness.

Nasharudin who apparently swooped himself into meditation mode for more than a year, remained silent in obvious political pain.

In the enfoldment of the violent schisms in Islam and the recent surge for democratic rights and of freedoms in the Arab world, how can the erudite gentleman explain the maladies that have struck Islam in his home turf now becomes mysterious.

Is this where we can find the element of uniformity in Islam? Is the egophiliac the final construction of Iqbal’s Secret of the Self or has there been a gross misreading of his Asrar-i-Khudi, with the magic of the “I AM” finally becoming a sub-equation of the wild over-empowerment of the political ego that is corruptible, and is corruptible absolutely in self-structured absolutism?

It did not take long for Nik Aziz and the Pas to face the consequence of his irascibility when a Kelantan state constituency, Manek Urai, fell vacant.

In the by-election of 14 July 2009 the Pas majority of 1352 votes won in March 2008 had been reduced to a meager 65.

Nasharudin visited the constituency during the by-election. But he remained silent in the lush speculation whether he would or would not speak.

The Pas was hit hard. Had it been generally clear at that time that the aged general guide had succumbed to senility and had wanted to also oust his protégé, Husam Musa, from Kelantan to make way for his son-in-law to succeed him, the party could have fallen straightaway into the slough of despond.

But most in the party did not know. Nik Aziz’s daughter, Nik Amalina, was to write in the net about the alleged nepotism later.

In the contrasts between the chief minister/general guide with the president and the deputy president, Nik Aziz, likening the Pas as a ship, claimed to be the “captain”, while Hadi and Nasarudin were merely the “anchorman” and the “oarsman”.

That’s a serious constitutional matter the party leaders should have found occasion to officially discuss and determined who, indeed, is “captain of the ship”.

But while the “ship” was floundering in troubled waters and the old general guide had been summoning the party leaders to his office in Kelantan to be told, the president, his deputy, the chief of the council of scholars and the secretary-general jointly and severally opted to remain silent like the whole caper had been a non-issue.

Party members panicked. The party was not stable and the constitutional integrity of the Islamic party is fictional.

Under pressure the Pas could have disintegrated at that point.

Nik Aziz Nik Mat is not a trifle. The charismatic religious scholar is well-known throughout the region and in the Islamic world. But his charm in Malaysia is certainly on the wane. He lost Galas, Kelantan on 4 Nov. 2010 by 1190 votes to Umno. Pas had won Galas in March 2008.

Then the party fell in Tenang, Johor by 3707 votes on 30 Jan. 2011. Tenang was won by the BN but with a smaller majority in 2008.

On 6 March 2011, two days before the third anniversary of the Pas’ big win on 8 March 2008, the party lost by larger majorities in Merlimau, Melaka (3643 votes) and in Kerdau, Pahang (2724 votes).

The old scholar was reported to be ranting against Malays for not supporting his party in Tenang, a certain sign of fatigue and weariness of one who had served with diligence from 1967 and who should have retired.

Without change, the Pas is likely to lose Kedah in the next general elections. It may also lose Kelantan. --- a. ghani ismail, 8 March, 2011

Bottoms Up! Revolutions On The Bitumen Of KL and Putrajaya?

2011-02-28T22:16:00.001-08:00

It’s crunch-time. Now that Putrajaya has gone beyond the reach of Pakatan Rakyat following the serial losses sustained by PKR and the Pas since Bagan Pinang in Oct. 2009, are we to believe it is a chapter of the Jasmine Revolution that will finally unseat PM Najib Tun Razak and install Anwar Ibrahim on the throne with Lim Kit Siang and Azmin Ali as his deputies?

The Jasmine Revolution which startled the world in December 2010 in Tunisia has now phased itself into war over Libya. It’s American-led intervention once again, this time to force Muammar Ghaddafi out after 41 years at the helm. The next target will be Iran.

Will the same happen in Malaysia should Najib and the BN government refuse to surrender to Anwar, backed by his college of powerful friends the former US Ambassador to Malaysia, John R. Mallot, had reminded us in an attention-grabbing article he had written before?

The people need to know. People are asking is the Jasmine Revolution a fantasy of forces organized to actually remove kings, despots, tyrants and authoritarians from all over the Islamic world who refused to kowtow?

Is the “people’s revolution” we are witnessing really a powerful sweep of imperialism, as President Hugo Chavez said, ‘…for the oil.’

It would be the control of the Straits of Malacca in the case of Malaysia, the strategic waterway once said to hold Venice by the neck when Malacca was in ascendance in the 15th century.

Then it is about the containment of China. Indeed it is first and last about the containment of China whence once before, the beautiful Malaysian author, Han Su Yin (Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing), had been ambassador extraordinaire in the 60s to explain to the Western world China was not barbarian before Nixon’s visit in 1972.

It is like an old lamp traded for new. We are simply watching re-colonization unfold in the Middle East and North Africa branded as People’s Liberation Movements for a wider consumer market and that can be custom-tailored on order, like say for Malaysia and the remaining parts of Asean required to tail into the containment of China.

Prerequisites would include a divided house from which the military forces can be plucked from their barracks to reach the streets as prophylactics to protect from infections demonstrators who are raped by the police.

Or like it was in Indonesia in 1965, to move in a set of maneuvers nobody in the armed forces actually knew about.

Then, like puppets in a Punch and Judy show, they clobbered “the opposition” under a little known Col. Untung only to find General Suharto in command soon after.

He neatly performed a coup and he ruled Indonesia for 33 years thereafter.

But that was, of course, a military coup which was ostensibly triggered by the will to protect the Indonesian President (Sukarno) from being overwhelmed by the Communists who, we were later told, had also planned a coup.

Slaughtered in that historical event were more than a million before the blood-lust was finally spent and prayers reached the heavens for appeasing the lost souls in the blood-letting mayapada.

What shall be the picturesque history that shall be enacted in Malaysia after the Pakatan fail in its quest for power to rule over the Federation when PM Najib dissolves Parliament and call for the general elections?

And then, what will happen after the Pakatan fails in the power-grab?

In this near-successful quest for sea change that followed Anwar Ibrahim’s incarceration in 1998 and the Opposition came whiskers away from power in 2008, issues raised shifted from the seriousness of the police state and sustained detention without trial to the macabre sudden deaths of hundreds in police lockups to the heart-stopping death of a political aide, Teoh Beng Hock, at the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission building.

PM Najib Tun Razak’s leadersip is responsive. But those matters of public concern he has not dealt with as yet.

There is also economic inequity, no minimum wage and social security net worth the thumbs-up.

Still, despite the high prices of food and the bad behaviors among the super-privileged elite, we have to ask is Najib Tun Razak a king, or despot, tyrant or authoritarian?

Has his wife, Rosmah, said to spend lavishly, bought the Big Ben or the London Bridge in a swing of splendorous waste to prove she is rich beyond compare?

Trivia of some sorts can excite pleasure in politics, but in throwing stones the Opposition should have been careful to observe whether or not it is in a glass house.

After the serial defeats in by-elections from Bagan Pinang on Oct. 11, 2009 to Tenang on 30 Jan 2011, the Pakatan, looking more like a ménage a trios that’s gone wrong, is nearly altogether done.

The Pakatan has dwarfed itself. The PKR, with Anwar Ibrahim as de facto leader and his wife as president, and with his former secretary, Azmin Ali, as her deputy, is like a sodden whore nobody wants other than by desperation of sheer lust for power shift.

After some law-makers left the party in huffs for failing to work with Anwar or with Azmin or with both, the party that boasted of a registered membership numbering more than 400,000 has been shown to have merely the whereabouts of 40,000 members – not enough to fill the seating capacity of the Shah Alam Stadium.

In the other wing of the Pakatan, the Islamic Pas General Guide (Mursyid ul-Am), Datuk Haji Nik Aziz Nik Mat, 78, publicly ranted against his party leaders sending the whole of the Pas into political stupor.

He made the Pas unfit to lead and even less fit to rule, and as a result the party almost lost its seat in the Manik Urai by-election in July 2009, then lost in Galas which is also in Kelantan where he presides as Menteri Besar (Chief Minister). It lost again in Tenang, a Johor state seat.

The Pas, set to lose once more in the March 6 Merlimau and Kerdau by-elections, cannot any more be taken seriously as politically a challenge that can unseat Umno.

Several days before 1,800 members of the party in Pasir Puteh, Kelantan, walked out to join the Umno in a certain turning away from the failing reason of the twilight leadership.

In that sort of slide it is only logical for people to ask whether or not a street power named Desire will be invoked to wrestle against the BN to wrest control of the nation sometime in September.

When thinking about a possible street revolution against Najib Tun Razak and the BN, say beginning September 16, it will have to be noted again that Malaysia is not a dictatorship.

Once more the regret is about the police state, about detention without trial, corruption which comes with super-privileges, and inequitable distribution of income which, with rising prices of food and transport, is lowering the quality of life for most.

There are also Malaysians who are non-Malays that have long deserved a fairer deal.

The question before us is about how these will be redressed. Will we opt to do it by the vote and other manners of leverages or by power that can be blistering in the streets? --- a ghani ismail, March 1, 2011

From Jasmine Revolt To Armageddon

2011-02-23T05:27:00.000-08:00

Inside the dank of dictatorships, authoritarian regimes and monarchs that have spun class miseries by a serial lark of severe unemployment and high food prices in an oil-rich region, a spreading waft of refined jasmine has inspired the world into believing a new culture will settle over the world.

What began with the self-immolation of an educated unemployed youth in Tunisia on 17 Dec. 2010 has spread across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), taking in Iran and the Ivory Coast as well.

President Zine El Abidin Ben Ali of Tunisia lost his foothold and slipped away to Saudi Arabia, a fallen star that was soon to be followed by Egypt’s long time president, Hosni Mubarak, said to have amassed a fortune estimated to be between 40 and 70 billion USD.

Today, after the fragrance has floated into Libya, the Jasmine Revolution, as it has been called because members of the Tunisian chapter had worn the flower behind their ears, has reached a crest that is likely to become a turning point.

In Libya it is civil war. From European reports it is clearly seen the “protesters” were armed. More than one third of those killed in the first several days were policemen, precisely 111 from about 300 dead as this is written.

Someone has apparently played out President Obama, now hard-pressed to intervene in Libya.

Muammar Ghadafi, the Arab revolutionary of a unique plumage, now under pressure inside that regional stress that is read as the making of the New Middle East and Greater Israel, has vowed to die as a martyr rather than slip out of the dank like a cur.

It may be naïve to say the Jasmine Revolution need not be about the New Middle East or Greater Israel. But it is a fact that the street uprisings are primarily about gross unemployment, averaging nearly 20 percent in the region and food prices that have gone out of reach for a lot of literate and lower-middle class families. Egyptian workers were also involved in the Libyan protests.

Still it settles the matter neatly as the making of an underclass from people who are often highly educated against a backdrop of heaven-reaching illiteracy that may be 40 percent of the adult population, in Egypt.

It is, in short, serious inequity, the power sustained by the police state, like it was under Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran.

In Iran, where the unexpected turn of events has been said to be expected, street-showings of an assortment of citizens demanding basic freedoms and rights were quickly squashed.

But for whatever niceties Iran have stood for in the eyes of the religious, the Islamic Republic cannot escape global scrutiny for the incarceration of Jafar Panahi.

Jafar Panahi, 50, is the film-maker who drew on celluloid the tongue-in-cheek, Offside, which has been widely publicized.

Panahi made a movie showing a group of Iranian women who dressed as men to gain entry into a stadium to see a football match featuring their favorite team.

The good man was sentenced to six years in jail for that and banned from film-making for 20 years, a senseless reaction of paranoia over what is clearly a simple protest against cultural constraints stemming from patriarchal ridicule of simple freedoms for women, and against the social critics.

This is the difficulty about religion, and especially about Islam. It has little tolerance for the social critics and it is often a killer of ideas too.

Malays, influenced by the Farsi, had Amazons, women who were admirals, soldiers and into the 20th century, leaders of guerilla forces who fought against Dutch colonialism, and Ministers. In Indonesia and the Philippines women were presidents.

Iran is Shi’ah. The Shi’ah, still in sectarian combat against the Sunni school of Islam in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, numbers 70 percent of Bahrain, which is a Sunni monarchy.

While Bahrain is also street-bound in the Jasmine Revolution and which can disrupt the flow of oil in the Gulf, the greater danger to regional stability issuing from the Sunni-Shiah contrast in the Gulf is the lurking Shiah community of Saudi Arabia.

They are between 12 to 15 percent of the oil giant, a number larger than what is required to stage a successful revolution of the kind that is rolling through the region.

Egypt’s revolution that ended the reign of Hosni Mubarak was performed, at its peak, by less than 2.5 percent of the whole population of 80 million.

But are we now reaching the turning point of the movement for rights and for equity?

In Libya Muammar Ghadafi reportedly ordered his country’s oil-plants to be closed, a clear address to the world that the Arab (and Iranian) reactions are on the way. Oil price surged as a result, and markets slid all over the world. Libya produces 1.6 million barrels per day.

Iran sent two naval ships through the Suez Canal en-route to Syria. About 2.4 million barrels of oil move through the Suez and the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline per day.

The threats are real, the warnings ominous. This is, after all, not merely an exercise for regional reformation but an existential conflict to the given cultures, some of which remain tribal and unaccustomed to the demands of open and democratic society.

These demands, for freedom of speech and expression, freedom of conscience, and the freedom of assembly, are anathema to many of the surviving tribal communities in the region.

While they are human essentials and for them we must cut across the boundaries of national sovereignty, making it our business to reach for democracy throughout the world, this view would be inadmissible in the monarchical Arab states or in the tribal reaches of Libyan society as well as with many communities in Iran and Iraq.

This is the underlying sensibilities in the Jasmine Revolution, an under-layer of sensibilities that may be diverse from our own and which can, in the given conflict of values, recoil as an intense and intimate conflict that is existential, and not merely a conflict of cultures.

In other words, it is clearly favorable to the making of Armageddon.

The movement for a free world will have to face the threats----a. ghani ismail, 23 February, 2011

IT LOOKS DONE – MALAYSIA A FAILED STATE

2010-10-20T04:03:00.000-07:00

Little hope is left for Malaysia to avoid a regime change or a failed state after the serial rebuke of Prime Minister Najib Razak’s maiden New Economic Model (NEM) Budget he read on Friday 15 October. It was read to a nation that was still reeling from the aftershocks of the Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) Minister Idris Jala revealed weeks earlier.

It confirmed a business plan for selected companies to harvest super-mega projects mainly focused in Greater Kuala Lumpur ostensibly to overcome the declining foreign and domestic investments in 2009 and to revive a climate of growth.

Each costing tens of billions, the MRT alone running into RM40 billion and dwarfing all the previous mega-projects together, sunk all hopes that Najib had ever meant to deal by open tender.

The laissez faire of the NEM had with it a twist that could mean giving the Prime Minister and his select group of crony companies the right to be left alone to take as they please the cake, the cream, the cherry and the tables as well.

In every other way the Budget is an election budget.

Former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, was prompted to prophecy after the budget reading that the Barisan Nasional (BN) will not get the two-third majority in the 13th General Elections it heralded.

This writer, long an observer and commentator of elections in the country, reads Dr. M’s remark as directly meaning the BN will lose to the Pakatan Rakyat (PR), plus a sundry line-up of small parties and Independents that are expected to crown the extended rebuke of the BN’s leadership.

The BN was saved in 2008 by Sabah and Sarawak.

It could be different this time, the Budget and the Economic Transformation Program (ETP) providing too little to the Sabahans and Sarawakians. There had been extensive corruption in the two states.

The NEAC (National Economic Advisory Council) mentioned a slur of concern for the 40 percent of Malaysian households that earn RM 1500 per month or less, fearing most of these would not make it through in the conjugations of the high income society the NEM is about.

Truth is, households in Malaysia cannot make ends meet with less that RM 2000 a month and at least 70 per cent of Malaysian households earn RM 2000 or less, the bulk of these are Bumiputras with the larger numbers of households in the two states falling in the category.

The minimum household income in the urban centers would be RM 3000.

In the case of Malaysian workers, the Human Resources Ministry stated in August 2010 that the National Employment Return study of 2009 found that 34 per cent of the country’s workforce earned less than RM700 a month which was below the poverty line (RM720 per mensem).

Another 37% earned between RM700 to RM1500, giving 71 percent of the labor force earning RM 1500 or less of more than 11 million in a total population of 28 million, which also brings us to the question about where the consumption will come from in the super-spending of the New Economic Model (NEM) that will involve RM1.4 trillion of investments in 10 years to 2020.

In the fragile domestic and world economies, a high investment profiling of crony capitalism as imposed by the Budget and the ETP will certainly add to the inflation that is already severe.

It is easy to see the Najibian Economics will leave him a bread-and-butter villain to the larger number of households in the urban as well as the rural, meaning he will be voted out.

Looking at the Bank Negara (Central Bank) numbers about money will show the money supply had risen substantially between 2009 and 2010, suggesting a means to reduce the domestic debt. This adds to the inflation as do the reduction or withdrawal of subsidies for food and essential items.

Much more money will soon enter the market. With the super-mega projects the ETP has proclaimed, the tip of more than RM 110 billion for the first six opening salvos of the ETP [ahem!] will add a whopper to the money supply.

More monies will enter the market in the enhanced fluidity, making it pertinent to ask aloud how Najib will ensure that overall production will go up and stay up through the nine years to 2020 to avoid hyperinflation or even a Depression.

Should the supply of money show a steep upward curve because more money was printed and the same applies to the financial curve either because money is made cheap and/or it is made easily available, we will get hyperinflation if the production curve is stable. If the production curve goes down, the result is Depression. It’s plain and simple.

But who determines the level of production in Malaysia?

With that load of investments negotiated behind close-doors plus a larger-than-usual Operating Expenditure, and a smaller-than-otherwise Development Expenditure of less that RM 50 billion, plus monies that will flow into the market for the bubbly property market and the KLSE Casino Royale, it is hard to believe Najib’s game to draw Chinese votes will pull through even if we are calculating on a six-month run for the general elections.

He seems to be betting on large numbers, i.e. monies that are large enough to keep flowing and keep voters happy even if the markets shrink.

But what if the markets go down in a tailspin should the World Bank fail to convince the Europeans from applying austerity and them as well as others from devaluating their currencies?

The world economy is teetering on the edge of peril. Why do we deny that? What could be the reason or reasons for such a desperate lunge for the quick fix of an ailing economy and a disreputable party and coalition that should have undergone surgery but did not?

As the rebukes continue and observers sing the confusion in an endless chorus, it does look Najib is unlikely to bring the BN safely through the coming general elections even if Anwar’s PKR is a failing party.

Anwar’s repeat incarceration plus Teoh Beng Hock’s untimely and mysterious death will bring the tom-toms to a higher pitch than ever before. This time, whether or not Saiful was true that Anwar had not worn condoms and had done it in naked truth, he (Anwar, not Saiful) is Opposition leader.

It is done. What needs a close look is how Malaysia is to avoid becoming a failed state and/or fall under the micro-management of the UN global-mongers or of a colonial power. The Reformasi has lost its appeal. ----a. ghani ismail, 20 October, 2010

VISION 2020 BETTER THAN NEM

2010-10-12T00:17:00.000-07:00

Is Prime Minister Najib Razak being openly sabotaged by Level Four? The question arises after it became clear ‘his’ New Economic Model (NEM) and the recently unveiled Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) are based on very big bucks for super-mega projects to run the country into a high income economy by 2020.

The ETP costs about RM 1.4 trillion from 2010 to 2020 without a minimum wage for workers, with no subsidies and affirmative actions allowed that can or may distort the operations of the market economy and which will also see many of the Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) privatized.

In short, it is a promised Laissez-faire Shangrila seeded at a time when the leading capitalist nation (USA) is slapping tariff protection on a large number of Chinese goods and while the USD and the Euro are likely to collapse at any time, the PIIGS in the EU having become bankrupt and Greenland recently busted too, giving a sum of 17 countries unable to service their external debts so far.

People with money are hedging themselves against the impending Depression and currencies collapses. They pushed gold price above USD 1,360. Yet some in Malaysia wanted to trade the Ringgit in the money market. What for?

There’s a currency war going on. Some say it is due to the cheap Yuan. But that is clearly only one of numerous reasons - money printing on hitherto unknown scales in a few countries is another.

We know when too much money is printed and flushed into the market and lots of loans are given to trail huge stimulus packages, the ensuing inflation will become a depression should production fall.

Now we are told the 33 industrialized (OECD) countries have collectively run a 0.1 percent negative growth in August 2010.

A world depression follows should that become a trend.

Truth is, economic experts have all been saying that depression is already a swinger in the neighborhood and should claim a space on your bed the next time you blink.

Hence, we need to ask what is Najib’s RM 1.4 trillion 10-year injection to bring in high income about in a world economy that is already going down once again?

He is an economist and he must himself know the NEM with its ETP (Economic Transformation Plan, or whatever) is seriously a threat, not merely to the 40 percent of households in Malaysia that earn RM1500 or less per month but to the reality of households that cannot make ends meet earning twice that amount because of (present) rising prices. More than 70 percent of these are Bumiputras.

Was there anything in the ETP or the NEAC’s NEM that suggested the price spiral of essential items can or will be contained?

There are plans for FELDA to produce food and for some pharmaceutical industries to produce an assortment of drugs. But will that contain the inflation that is rising on the back of stimulus packages, money printing, unwinding of subsidies and bubble-making like in the case of housing where prices suddenly leapt 35 percent in the space of three months?

Neat packets of projects have already been given out in principle to the country’s mega companies, the Gamuda-MMC rapid-transit trains alone said to be worth more than RM43 billion, much of the money to be raised by issuing bonds.

YTL will be building a high-speed (280 kmph) train from Penang to Singapore, a much needed facility no doubt but most of that money must be quickly mopped or it will add on to the burdensome inflation.

MMC, which is reported to be already super-geared, want to develop some pieces of government land for some tens of billions while it also wishes to buy out UEM, which owns the lucrative cash-cow, PLUS, that built, maintains and runs the North-South Highway with the right to raise the toll every few years, and it does that.

This is assets sale. It is rumored MMC along with a few other companies are also interested in buying over PNB, the largest Bumiputra trust company.

We are now running into “super-mega projects” to raise the per capita income to more than US15,000, projects that make the RM12 billion KLIA and the RM19 billion Putrajaya look like penny buns.

The seven entry-point projects of the ETP alone, which are earmarked for takeoff before the year ends, cost RM118 billion, you see. It does not include the 10th Malaysia Plan spendings.

People, therefore, find the NEM and ETP a big threat. Until now this writer has not read a single positive acceptance of both anywhere in the pages of Internet discussions. Even economists writing to the government-inclined mainstream media have been highly skeptical.

What’s up then? Can it be true Najib is stuck with a Level Four that’s making him look like a super-dreamer compared to his predecessor and find himself knotted into a rot in less than a year or is Najib so aloof he believes he can stand above the impact of another world depression?

The world is certainly going into a Depression again. Is the ETP and the NEM really some kind of a solution to that? Is the Laissez-Faire economy magic?

Every critical writer on the subject has decided the NEM and the ETP are threats to the larger body of Malaysians and this writer joins the chorus. It will fail. Vision 2020 was far better.--- a. ghani ismail, 12 September, 2010.

IN THE REACHES OF A MALAYSIAN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS - CAN WE OVERCOME?

2010-09-20T09:08:00.001-07:00

While in high places serious questions are being asked about whether Singapore is deciding Malaysian policies in the midst of Lee Kuan Yew’s renewed comments on Malaysia, at ground level the distress is over continuously rising prices.

The compound is a serious erosion of Najib’s credibility, him being deliberately reduced to a compare with his predecessor, former Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Pak Lah), who was seen, among other things, to have been a Singapore dependent.

Taking over from Pak Lah without causing scarcely a ripple in the transition of power, Najib is unclear about his foreign policy, leaving him without an underscore to emphasize a difference of policy or of approach and hence, making him appear vulnerable to the recent protests in Indonesia staged by Bendera.

Some people here say his contestant, Anwar Ibrahim, may have a hand in the protests that were staged in Jakarta and somewhere in Sumatra, a speculation that could simply be meant to show Anwar as the larger regional and international personality between the two.

Najib must acknowledge he is under strong pressure. A lot of people are ready to quit on the Barisan Nasional (BN) and bring in a new regime.

He ought also to accept it as a fact that it is not merely the New Economic Policy that had been bastardized but the BN, and especially Umno, have been monsterized as well, making the coalition no longer feasible as an efficient conveyance of any development policy without “cost abundance” due to unrelenting corruption.

Umno has become overwhelmingly materialistic, led now at the divisional level by a posse of the super-privileged elite of millionaires, many of whom contractors and businessmen with the least interest in political ideology or of social policy. They simply buy power and pay for lucrative contracts.

Since corruption plus arrogance is a compound known to cause the disintegration of societies and bring empires (and nations) to a dead end, what we face is clearly an existential crisis – a final existential halt, or the breakdown and breakup of Umno, BN and Malaysia.

There must be a quick move to reinvent Umno and the BN. It is not possible to believe the coalition can deliver without a thorough structural and ideological change.

Corruption and indiscipline in the BN are, indeed, the root causes of the monumental administrative and developmental dysfunctions that have been causing the widespread despair.

Unless Umno, the backbone of the BN, which is patron-ridden and corrupt at the core, is quickly intercepted by a Golkar-like compact of workers-professionals NGOs (without the participation of the armed-forces), it does look likely that Najib Tun Razak will fail to gain the confidence and credibility he badly needs to make his One Malaysia and New Economic Model (NEM) into a winning number in the 13th general elections.

There is no other way that can be seen or theorized as a means to overcome the Malaysian ethnic-bondage that is back on a Hate-Malays campaign, a simple and sure way of undermining One Malaysia.

This Hate Malays syndrome is a fixed behavior in the Malaysian plurality. It has been there from even before the British Intervention of 1874, the Intervention being Chinese-secured following Chinese secret societies feuds with Malay warlords and rajas taking sides.

Racial conflicts exploded in 1942-46. In Malay perception it then blew into a long-drawn contest for power and resources in the form of the Communist Insurrection from 1948 to 1960 and then again in 1968-80.

The 1969 racial riots which followed a glorious “Sweep Out The Malays” victory parade after the elections in May 1969 had actually a trailer in 1967 in Penang.

Four Malays were killed by Chinese hoods when Chinese processions suddenly became wild and violent on the island.

The Malays retaliated causing sporadic riots lasting for months, the writer and three of his colleagues almost caught in one of these at the end of the year on the border of Penang and Kedah.

There was a trailer to the 1969 riots in 1967. In the Kampung Medan Incident we have a trailer for a catharsis that’s on its way if nothing is done to quickly stop the Hate Malays campaign which is now bearing fruits in heated Malay reactions.

In short, we have an existential crisis on our hands and in a region that’s being drawn deeper and deeper into a war culture.

With the Senkaku (Diaoyu) spat adding on to the Korean hot-plate, the existential well-being of this nation will need to be first secured in a clarity of purpose, policy, instruments and vehicle before we can remove the specter of the failed state from our minds and the eventual breakdown and breakup of Malaysia, 53 years old and clearly already debilitating.

A Malaysian disintegration will not be like Thailand. It will be more likely a Pakistan with the ethnic replacing the sectarian bases of contests and conflicts, the strings pulled by numerous saboteurs from military intelligence outfits as it is in the ill-fated Muslim state now looking like a nightgown in shreds, which is Pakistan serially raped.

Well, is there really Malaysian unity? Is there Malay unity for that matter? ----- a. ghani ismail, 20 Sept. 2010

The Malays In Critical Dilemma Again

2010-08-22T00:49:00.000-07:00

Caught midstream in geopolitical turbulence a mile wide with the South-Asian war on the right bank and on the left the Koreas on the boil, Malays in Malaysia may wish they can keep looking straight to avoid having to decide which way they have to go. But they must decide, and fast. Time is running out on them.

There is no middle ground left in the surge of asymmetrical terror in the Clash of Civilizations.

Our old friend in Cuba, Comrade Fidel Castro, has been saying since his recovery from bad health that the war is now verging on the ultimate nuclear holocaust. He may be right.

While the Man of Peace, Barrack Hussein Obama, preside over that civilization clash from the White House, India and Pakistan, both reluctant allies of the US (purposed mainly for the Containment of China), have applied to become members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that started out with Russia, China and five of the Central Asian countries.

As India sets aside US2 billion to reopen the Ledo Road built during WW II to reach Kun Ming through Myanmar, Pakistan and China have agreed in principle to extend the Korakoram road into a highway that will run through the Northwest Frontier into Baluchistan to the new port on the shore of the Indian Ocean.

China has also told Afghanistan she is ready to build a railway connection from Kandahar to the same port in Balochistan.

Iran, meantime, after successfully leading the ECO countries in building the rail connection between Islamabad and Istanbul, has committed US3 billion to build a railway from Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan.

After the US has sent back Afghanistan to the Stone Age and that once wondrous country has become the world’s largest producer of opium to stay alive, the great hegemonic power slapped the much-disliked Kerry Lugar aid-trap on Pakistan, giving the US virtually all authority to micro-manage Pakistan in exchange for the paltry USD7.5 billion spread through five years.

Pakistan has since become a death-trap and thoroughly a failed-state, now fearing the US will demand her small arsenal of nuclear bombs and render her defenseless in the South-Asian territorial conflict. To make matters worse, she is currently flooded with 20 million of her people badly affected.

Against the American war, Chinese outfits have been building quality roads in Central Asia and have begun to take electricity from there to eventually reach Turkey, for industry.

Kashgar, the Old Silk Road largest bazaar on the Tajik-Xinjiang border will soon be rebuilt into a modern city with giant trading and shopping malls, with roads leading out to Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and to the Korakorum and to the heart of China.

The contrast between the US and China-Russia with the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) is a simple contrast of War and Peace, leaving Obama, the Friend of Peace, on the side of War – a good man living with bad joss.

That’s about the right bank of the Malay world, in a nutshell. Just as border tensions become unnaturally and unnecessarily high between India and China, the world was edged into frantic tensions on the left bank over the two Koreas, the tensions reaching straight to the Spratlys, the Straits of Malacca, the whole of the China Sea and its neighborhood and stretching the Pacific into a grasp of heat.

In short, the turbulence on the left and right banks of the Malay World translates into World War.

While in the development even Sri Lanka has turned towards the peace-bearing SCO (and ECO), Malaysia, which had spearheaded the move to set-up our own East-Asian Caucus (involving ASEAN, China, Korea and Japan) has now virtually retracted that East Asian peace initiative.

EAC would have given Asean and her partners the leverages needed to return the tension-filled Containment of China back into negotiable conduct of trade,development and cultural exchanges.

It would have also given the chance for Asean countries to redistribute Asean trade which has been hogged by Singapore, the island republic taking the lion’s share o about 65 percent from the start.

Malaysia was en-route to leading the pack of 10 to reform the trade and economic profiles of our regional bloc when the previous to the previous premier led himself into a hilarious power skirmish with his nemesis, Anwar Ibrahim, making them both losers. It was ostensibly about sodomy.

Now, with the US-Vietnam nuclear agreement causing the scenario to totally change, the Malays, as they are led by Umno, are quite apparently in a state of bewilderment and not knowing on which side of the Malay River (Sungai Melayu) will the harvests become gold, and which will be fire.

Because around 30 percent of Malaysia is Chinese and the Chinese have been more economically successful in Malaysia (as well as in all Asean), it seems safe to say Malays in Malaysia are generally scared the Chinese would run them aground politically, sooner or later.

But how can the Chinese do that if the Malays do not sell off their birthrights this writer hasn’t been able to grasp since the beginning of time.

In other words, that fear seems to be seated on the self-assumption the Malays are corrupt, are naturally corruptible and will sell off their birthrights for a fee and bits of flesh, like it had been in Palembang and Jambe, the Malay heartland.

Some Malays appear to have been gripped by US propaganda that has made China into a US archrival now that the Muslims have been reduced into intra-Islam anarchy of sects (and sexes).

China, on the other hand, is the third country in Space and has modernized her arsenal to include ICBMs with cluster-nuclear warheads. But the US may be able to blow these with her anti-missile lasers.

The meaning is this: China is still decades away from becoming a contestant for hegemony or even for hemispheric imperialism.

China is, instead, a very successful vendor of intercontinental trade, diplomacy and development.

The same as with Iran, which the US and Zionists want us to believe is well on the way to becoming a regional power wishing to nuke Israel, China too is being made into a bogey by the US.

Some Malays enjoy this fear-the-Chinese syndrome. It had been a Malay trait from before WW II and dubbed in history as the Great Fear, becoming the motive force of the efficient anti-Chinese movement in 1944-46.

Truth is, China has just moved into a GDP of US5 trillion. Because the Japanese GDP had shrunk a bit, China may have become statistically the second largest economy in the world.

But that is US5 trillion in a country of 1.3 billion. It makes the Chinese urban per capita income only about RM5,000 and with about RM1,500 for the rural. Take note the numbers are in RM, not USD.

That is, indeed, a great leap for what had been an abject poverty-clutch only three decades before. But China would need time to use domestic consumer spending to boost her economy. She will be export-dependent for a long while yet.

This means, unless she reverts to the old style of command economy, she is not about to become imperial.

Militarily, while she has a huge infantry and a remarkably fast-expanding modern air force, she is merely in the process of building her first two aircraft-carriers to contest the mighty US Pacific Fleet.

Hence, the danger China poses to us is more in her cheap goods than in her military might. She is a US embarrassment because of the US1.8 trillion America owes to the Bank of China rather than for being militarily a contestant.

Because the US and Britain/Europe have all the time been technology-stingy, more and more countries in the world have been looking to China and Russia for technology-transfer and for state-of-the-art aircrafts and weaponry.

The US sold us (Malaysia) F-fighter jets without giving us the code to open the bomb-hatch! Will they give us the code if Anwar Ibrahim becomes the Malaysia Prime Minister? Is there any guarantee forthcoming from the Pentagon or from the Whitey House?

The Chinese isn’t much of a threat. Chinese in Malaysia can become difficult if they were to smuggle into the country something like three million persons from the Chinese mainland into the recently constructed economic corridors.

Short of that kind of a stunning human smuggling racket, the Chinese in Malaysia are at worst merely a case of bad breath, and at best, a vibrant commercial and industrial community that can become astounding with the right opportunities and the right mannerisms.

This is to say in the Sino-Malay periodical effervescences, it is the Malays that have been at fault.

Corruption-prone, they have been quick to swerve into banshee-screaming to extend the tenure of the super-privileged gotten-rich-quick class of Malay princes, politicians, contractors and businessmen, the Malay Labor left out and instead, made to pay for the costs of the hubris and debauchery. Malaysia is now on the edge of bankruptcy.

Hardly anything has gone into the way of Labor under the leadership of Najib Tun Razak who is hosting the High Income Economy, ensuring his father, The Great Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, is now truly dead.

Hardly anything worth redeeming has been heard of a Social Policy in Najib’s New Economic Model (NEM), him busy wooing Chinese and Indian voters who probably will continue to vote against the Barisan Nasional (BN), anyway.

The Malays are in critical dilemma once again for the lack of an ideological guidance other than an absurdly distorted Islam,

One Malaysia must need an ideology that can offer Malaysians a way out of the ethnic and sectarian conflicts or it will merely be a political posture worth no more than a lollipop that will melt under the sun.

The Malays have no place to rally around. This is an industrial society and it is senseless to believe Malays can anymore stand together around fundamental Islam or around the pool of the super-privileged nationalist elite that has gone berserk in corrupt practices and in arrogance.

Going back to Labor in Co-production is possibly the only way there is.-- a. ghani ismail, 22 August, 2010

ISRAEL’S MURDER OF HUMANITY

2010-06-01T21:23:00.000-07:00

Israel made no mistakes in the killing of at least nine aid volunteers and wounding 45 on board the Mavi Marmara leading the Flotilla of Freedom before dawn on Monday, 31 May, 2010, in the Mediterranean international waters 120 km from the coastline.

700 Israel elite troopers (commandos) were dispatched against the 700 unarmed multinational volunteers in a flotilla of seven seeking to save 100,000 homeless Gazans.

Among the dead is Swedish bestselling mystery author, Henning Mankell, it was reported. The wounded have been transferred to an Israeli hospital and reports say more may die in the next several days.

The Gazans are victims of the close-border stranglehold Israel and Egypt imposed from three years ago. Israel killed tens of thousands of Gazans in an invasion last year.

The Freedom Flotilla, put together by international humanitarian lifeline for Gaza on the intiative of the Freedom For Gaza Movement based in Cyprus, aimed to breach the siege with food, medicine and construction material, a simple humanitarian act that would be called charity in any language, including Hebrew, other than in Israel.

Israel imaged that charity as a breach of her security, an act of unimaginable malevolence by a bunch of Islamic states, meaning that the country the British and Americans had helped found in the wake of the World War II has a psyche of her own the rest of humanity can hardly deem as belonging to anything humane.

Turkey foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu said Israel 'has lost all legitimacy' and its action 'constitute a grave breach of international law...It is murder conducted by a state.'

The flotilla is not all done. The Rachel Corrie and two cargo ships have decided to continue to Gaza on June 1. It has Malaysians and Irish volunteers on board. The internaional community will have to protect the volunteers on board or never live down this event of castaway diplomacy against a regime of crime. Pro-Israel news agencies, and they are probably 75 percent of the old media, are saying the volunteers started the fight on the Mavi Marmara armed Israeli commandos boarded.

The picture below is of one of several protests in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday, 1st June, 2010.

It is another of Israel’s act of mass murder. Until the UNSC does something effective to end the inhuman atrocities of this brutal regime, simply boycott everything of Israel NOW! But make no mistake when asking the US to shun Israel. She is the USA's forward base in the Medterranean and the Arab World, now also of the Greater Middle East.

In all of her 62 years of existence Israel has never tolerated any difference of point of view. Any opinion that differs with her viewpoint is regarded as malevolent and belligerent. It's now about the Free Gaza Movement and you.- a. ghani ismail, 1 June, 2010

Part 2

Murder on Mavi Marmara - Malaysian Journalist Tells The Story

The young journalist from the Malaysian satellite television station was evicted to safety from a prison in Israel. He and hundred of volunteers in the Aid Flotilla were taken to the southern Israeli port of Ashdod by Israeli commandos from international waters 120 meters out to sea in the Mediterranean. They were attacked, 9 killed on board the Mavi Marmara and 10 dead to the time of writing. Forty five were sent to the hospital, mostly with gunshot wounds, some in critical condition.

Astro Awani’s Ashwad Ismail, 26, said on his arrival in Jordan, he had only been 28 hours in one of Israel’s prison and that brief experience after the brutality he encountered on board the Mavi Marmara gave him a taste of Palestine sufferings endured through 62 years of the brutal regime.

The Israeli commandos had surrounded the Mavi Marmara by 11 pm and they invaded at 2.45 in the morning. There were three helicopters circling overhead and in the sea were troops on boats. They invaded and shot at us with live bullets, Ashwad recounted.

“I had called Awani in Kuala Lumpur at 7.45 pm to inform them what reports to expect from me. I could not imagine Israel would do this. Suddenly I found myself crawling on the deck in a sea of blood, trying to find a way out and then a laser from a soldier’s gun was pointed to my head. I surrendered.”

Ashwad left Kuala Lumpur for Istanbul with Awani’s cameraman, Shamsulkamal Abdul Latip, 43. They left on 23 May and from Istanbul they went to Antalya where they boarded the Mavi Marmara for the journey that was to take them into a killing-field on the ship that took nine (now 10) lives and wounded at least 45.

The Mavi Mamara was leading a flotilla of seven with 10,000 tons of construction material, school equipment, some food and clothing as humanitarian aid for more than 100,000 Gazans made homeless by the regime’s heartless invasion of the Hamas governed finger-tip territory the Palestinians of Gaza call home underneath Israeli law.

For the past three years they lived under a siege applied by the regime and Egypt. Even the meanest medical supply and food could not go through the tunnels that had been dug by the Gazans and bombed to bits by Israel.

The twelve Malaysian volunteers were taken to Ashdod, fed pieces of bread and water, later evicted to Jordan where they were being waited for by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anifah Aman. Anifah fumed.

Back home Malaysia was preparing for a special parliamentary session to discuss the event and what steps to take. A number of small protests were held on June 1 mainly to deliver a memorandum to the US Embassy. A large demonstration is to be held on Friday, June 4. Parliament sits to discuss the matter on Monday, June 7.

The volunteers taken to Ashdod have mostly been evicted. About 50 have been detained against a fury of protests that threatens to turn Israel into an outcast terrorist state the likes of which should never have soiled humanity.

Ashwad said there were naval crafts, a ship and three helicopters that Israel had sent to invade and capture the flotilla. Other reports say Israel had sent 700 commandos. There were also 700 volunteers in the desperate humanitarian attempt to secure the basic needs of the Gazans living beneath Israel’s tyranny.

Ashwad continued his story. He had the laser of a commando gun on his head and he put up both his hands. Israeli soldiers bound him and he was ordered to stay on the deck.
The Mavi Marmara was then forced to sail to the port of Ashdod. All of the volunteers were later taken to a prison at Vir Sheba.

Ashwad said, it took 12 hours for the captive volunteers to be taken to Ashdod and then to the prison. They were given some water, but no food.

At the prison food was bread and greens, Ashwad said. ‘We were yelled at, humiliated and generally treated as common prisoners.’

The Mavi Marmara carried no weapons. Ashwad recounted that in self-defense some volunteers had used whatever pieces of iron on the ship that was within reach, after the Israelis had opened fire.

The volunteers mainly used water from the fire-hoses. They had not anticipated such a gruesome brute action and even if they did they would not have brought weapons with them. It was a mission to save lives, not to destroy any.

Humanity has been maimed, again, by a regime that has said and would be saying still, that it has the right to self-defense. Against everybody that disagrees? Is that it? ---a. ghani ismail, 3 June, 2010

Demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur on June 4. Parliament will sit on Israel's attack of the Mavi Marmara and the Gaza seige on Monday, June 7.

Please Get Justice Out of Jail for Aminulrasyid

2010-05-01T23:27:00.000-07:00

Has justice been thrown into jail following the killing in the early hours of 26 April of a schoolboy, Aminul Rasyid Amzah, in Section 11, Shah Alam, who took his sister’s car for a ride into town? He was barely 15.

Police want us to believe he and his schoolmate, Azamuddin Omar, 15, were possibly robbers who kept a machete in the car. Can that at all be true?

We were quickly told not to politicize the event. Did it become political because reports on the macabre event were written by the Pas Member of Parliament for Shah Alam, Khalid Samad, in his blog from a day after the Barisan Nasional had won in the Hulu Selangor by-election?

Khalid Samad’s reports based on witnesses' accounts showed the boy was already shot dead before he could reverse the car he had driven to threaten the lives of the armed policemen.

The IGP, Tan Sri Musa Hasan, by insisting that the boy had actually reversed the car as reported by the police personnel involved, caused the public distress to turn into indignation and logging more than 35,000 hits on Google search in six days (by 1st May) compared to 20,800 hits for single mother, Norizan Salleh, police had shot five times on Oct. 30, 2009.

She is still seeking for justice.

Could it be possible justice is in jail and we would need to aggress to free it before it can be done?

The number of people who died in police custody and those shot on the streets have been rising too high for anxiety to remain subdued in this terribly apathetic society.

In the recent killing of the schoolboy the CPO of Selangor, afraid the incident would become a major political issue, was reported to have said the policemen would be charged for murder. He asked, “Isn’t that enough?”

In other words, he admitted a serious crime had occurred and the execution of the schoolboy would be dealt with by the court of law, himself wishing to avoid a public probe some people had suggested before the outgoing IGP was taken to the crime scene and driven the six kilometers of the car chase (or it could have been merely 1.2 kilometers) that ended with a shot to the back of Amirul’s head.

The deadly shot was one of four from close range, or so we were told by a witness. Many more shots were aimed at the car tyres on the way to the fatal end, said police.

In short, the IGP, in his over-zealous I-take-care-of-my-men display, which he denied was his motive, had wittingly or unwittingly confused the already heated public indignation.

Musa Hasan was widely reported to have threatened to take his men off the streets “if that’s what you want!”

If not for the quick move by the Home Ministry, he could have set the public indignation into popular agitation in the streets and the stage would be made for uproar and riots, led by the Opposition, or who else? Aminulrasyid can be our son or our kid brother, you see.

What did the Home Minister do?

He suggested an eight-man panel to run an open inquest, the panel chaired by his deputy and the members would be drawn from the public, which is good for securing the people a true picture of what happened on the fatal night for the schoolboy who took his sister’s Proton Iswara at midnight to help a friend in Section 7 whose motorbike had a puncture. Or he and a friend could have gone to meet a couple of school girls. Should that matter?

It is clearly visible from the above that members of the Malaysian public who had troubled themselves to read what Khalid Samad had contributed on his blog would have formed a clear picture in their heads and cannot believe the police story. Hence, a panel-inquest becomes necessary before the trial.

The IGP should hold his breath for a little and ask himself how the Police Force is perceived. A few years ago his predecessor, Tun Haniff Omar, had written to say that his wife would have him armed with a pump-gun even if he was going out at night to attend a meeting in town.

In recent years the Force had stood as a tight pack to reject wholesale the suggestion to impose on it the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC), the suggested Commission standing as a loud statement of slackness, corruption and lack of discipline occurring in the police department and causing public anxiety.

Tan Sri Musa Hasan may believe society has decided he is a failure and so he is extra sensitive as his days at the helm dim.

That is not true. Most people are also appreciative of the police in general, many of whom have died for us in the line of duty. But the gratitude and appreciation cannot mean you are above criticism and cannot be called to book.

People are generally aware the Police Force has had to recruit and train large numbers, making discipline difficult to invest in the short training.

We have also been told when some senior officers from the district level up are transferred, they take with them their “boys”, causing the district to loose accumulated contacts and information.

It seems like central authority in the department has been undermined and if that is true a commission is called for to investigate and to study the dysfunction and then to recommend the means available to secure and rehabilitate the department.

It is possible the department may have become too large and should be split into several departments, some placed under different Ministries since their functions may not properly fit into the role of the Police Force.

In a society that’s aiming to become a developed society in ten years lugging public apathy as a crucifix, we can certainly do without sensitivities overwhelming the meager efforts made by the conscientious to get justice out of jail and reaffirmed as a strong value in this would-soon-be First World nation.

Amirulrasyid is now dead. The boy falls under the Child’s Act and had he been booked for the traffic offences he was guilty for, his name and identity would have been withheld by the law.

But police officers shot him in the head about 100 meters from his house, a decent suburban environment that had bred a boy who wanted to become an astronaut, but who had learned to drive years before he was eligible for a driving licence.

The Selangor CPO had said only one of his men had discharged his firearm. Well, what is there to say about that other than to acclaim his great talent!

Whether you like it or not, the police, instead of becoming people-friendly, which was the policy objective some years ago, has become increasingly nasty and is already a monster. A Royal Commission will be required to tame it.

Now will someone please free justice from jail and bring the crime to its court?---a. ghani ismail, 2 May, 2010

Is Hulu Selangor Anwar's Graveyard?

2010-04-24T00:54:00.000-07:00

As a casualty, Party Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) would be in intensive care on this last day of the campaign for Hulu Selangor (24 April), meaning Zaid Ibrahim, even if he was defensible in the rogue politics that’s gripped this yawn into a sudden wake-up, would still be a cadaver when the results are announced tomorrow night.

But it is Anwar Ibrahim, the immense and overwhelmingly important political ego who lost his chance to throttle Najib Tun Razak for the run to the sun who is mangled, beyond any compare in the history of Malaysia.

Hulu Selangor was Anwar’s harvest. Now it is his graveyard. He does what he likes and he’s clearly lost his appeal.

Distanced even by his personal physician, Dr.Halili, after a shocking fall from grace that is shrinking the PKR into the smallest component of the Pakatan in parliament, Anwar should have known better than to grab at straws to clobber Najib who has made it to the top and is doing better by the day.

What did he expect to gain by using APCO as a bogey to spin Najib’s One Malayia into a by-product of One Israel? That is really hard to say.

Other than effecting echoes of the street-gangs that follow him in his campaign trail, Anwar’s Israelite bogey is limp, especially against the accusation that he has been Paul Wolfowitz’s boy and Wolfowitz was an architect of the Iraq War people here condemn as grand homicide and connect it to the Zionists and to Israel.

When the bogey is repeated day and night in Hulu Selangor while PKR members leave the party, it is Anwar who tumbles. Along with him falls Yusuf al-Qaradhawi whose name he now employs like it is his fervent prayer that the religious scholar will pop out from somewhere to tell us that he (Anwar) had never been a sinner.

Truth is, Anwar had left his flock of followers in ABIM and his supporters in the society by a sudden twist in his game-play when he joined Umno to become a Deputy Minister in 1981.

Many of those he played out before are still alive and have not forgotten the egophiliac, a factor that could have been a reason for why the Pas members, who had come in force on April 17 (nomination day) had then stayed out of the campaign until April 23.

It is apparent the Pas president, Abdul Hadi Awang, had left it to Nik Aziz Nik Mat, the party’s spiritual leader, to decide. Nik Aziz returned home from Mecca on April 22 and he decided the party should join the Pakatan’s campaign, which happened on April 23 two days before polling.

The rot is stacked on Anwar in Hulu Selangor where once he had been the favored choice for national leadership. The candidate of his choice, Zaid Ibrahim, had been merely a victim of an extraordinary circumstance he had not been clear about.

It's Selangor MB, Khalid Ibrahim, who has kept the PKR remaining alive in the state. He gave the lower income groups free water, he gave people who stayed on Temporary Occupation Licence (TOL) land for 15 years or more leasehold grants and he has recently relieved those who bought houses or shops in stalled township or housing projects from paying quit-rent.

These go a long way to win over voters. But it is generally known Anwar and his former secretary, Azmin Ali, want Khalid out.

DAP legend, Lim Kit Siang, had said Pakatan would need 85 percent of the Chinese votes in Hulu Selangor to secure Zaid. But the Chinese, who are 26 percent of the voters in the constituency, had retained Kuala Kubu Bharu for the MCA in 2008 and would not want to lose that edge in the arithmetic of communal power-sharing.

The number of Malay voters has been increasing more than the increases in Chinese and Indian voters in Hulu Selangor.

Politically it is the Pas that has the greater potential in the constituency, the numbers of its members having risen from less that 1,000 in 2008 to reach about 7,300 today.

The sum total of that weighs heavily against Zaid. He will lose tomorrow (25 April), by what appears on my screen as probably between 800 and 1,000 votes, with less than 10 hours left for campaigning.

But while Zaid can still give it another try in a different constituency, Anwar may have to kiss himself goodbye and once again become a cause celebre should he fail in court to undo the knot Saiful Bukhari has tied him in. Saiful was another one of his aides.

It’s sad. The truth, taken without a dash of fiction, is sadder still.

But in the night of April 24, at the Kuala Kubu Bharu stadium where the Pas spiritual leader talked, PAKATAN troopers came in a force of 60,000 mainly from Selangor and Perak. Most bathed in the illuminations of the stadium lights as they listened intently to the old man of Kelantan, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, telling them the Devil is Umno and if they wish for a better life in Islamic garb they should vote Zaid Ibrahim.

Anwar arrived late and as he spoke thousands began to walk out of the stadium, a few saying aloud they have to get out of the little town pronto or it would take them the rest of the night to get to the highway. Bon voyage! ---a. ghani ismail, 24 April, 2010

____________

Result of the by-election of Sunday, April 25 2010: Barisan Nasional won the Hulu Selangor parliamentary seat by a majority of 1,725. Its candidate, P. Kamalanathan from the MIC, polled 24,997 votes to defeat PKR’s Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, who garnered 23,272 votes. A total of 48,935 people or 75.87% of the eligible voters cast their ballots.

SUNDOWN AT MID-DAY IN HULU SELANGOR

2010-04-18T03:41:00.000-07:00

It’s sundown at midday after nominations on April 17 for the Hulu Selangor by-election on 25th April, the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), looking the likely winner even if it had lost its quest and is becoming a rubble. The party crumpled what remained of its bearings by parading its wunderman, Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, through Kuala Kubu Bharu looking like this

The serious business of choosing a parliamentary representative for the larger-than-Malacca constituency is now a comedy.

Hulu Selangor had been ravaged by over-construction in the failed attempt to create another Klang Valley in Selangor. It badly needed a committed person for the people to place their faith in.

In the picture above is Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, former de facto Law Minister in a crazier-than-fiction outfit to resemble a Chinese culture hero, Justice Pau.

The legend was aired over the TV in Malaysia from immediately after Abdullah Ahmad Badawi assumed the premiership in Oct. 2003, with someone declaring through advertising spaces in Chinese newspapers that the former regime was “corrupt to the core.”

Whatever is the motive of the hilarity in Kuala Kubu Bharu on April 17, Zaid, who had left Umno and joined the PKR, is being cut down to size from immediately after the nominations were closed.

By what looked like a freakish storm following the sundown, he was struck as having a drinking problem, a man of questionable moral values who approved gambling and may own a racehorse or two.

On the same night, Anwar Ibrahim, the maverick head-starter of the bash at the Indonesian Reformasi in Malaysia, said Zaid admitted he had been fond of drinks in his younger days. Zaid was also said to have been found guilty of vote-buying when he was in Umno.

Anwar drew an audience of less than 500 in Kerling on the night of April 17, after nominations. He should have attracted not less than 5,000.

Hardly any Chinese (other than newsmen and photographers) were in the audience on the field beside the Kerling Hindu temple.

In Kerling is a string of Chinese New Villages that run right to the hot-spring of the little villages that had once been a Red Area.

While most of the speakers last night were PKR and DAP Indians, the number of Indians in the audience was less than 30.

Anwar had drawn only a little more that 300 in Serendah, it was reported and the PKR drew only about 400 in Asam Kumbang New Village, Kuala Kubu Bharu on 15 April.

What’s going on is simple to grasp. The party that had shaken the Barisan Nasional in the 8th March 2008 general-elections has lost sense of its quest and is crumbling from the top down.

The PKR is not much more than Anwar’s vehicle to grab federal power, which he tried to do before September 16, 2008 and failed, the party appearing like it is quashed on the canvas as a result and senselessly muttering ‘Reformasi, Reformasi’, but for what?

Now, in the hilarity of its joyous mood to walk into Kuala Kubu Bharu and in Hulu Selangor as the champion of the recent past, the PKR cannot escape looking like it is punch-drunk to have dressed and dolled-up Zaid Ibrahim in the Chinese opera costume with the loose beard hanging down like its the curtain.

What's the suggestion then?

The suggestion is to restructure form and content because the quest for Reformasi has long been dead and what the Pakatan had been lugging was a cause to free Anwar from prison and since, to keep him from going back in.

That would be at least a mite different from Reformasi or Doi Moi.

And it should be the likes of Dr. Syed Hussin Ali or Dr.Xavier Jeyakumar at the lead for a chance at a two-party system and for Proportional Representation (PR).

What about the Barisan Nasional (BN)?

It has been behaving like in a circus act over the selection of its candidate but now its candidate, P. Kamalanathan, MIC Information Chief, will win on April 25 where the BN had lost in 2008 by only 198 votes. The ruling coalition secured all three state seats in the constituency. –a. ghani ismail, 18 April, 2010.

PKR AND PAKATAN IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHTMARE

2010-03-08T07:18:00.000-08:00

Tossed into Alice’s Wonderland on 8 March 2008 by a fluke of fate, Anwar’s vehicle for his ride to power has now come loose, becoming a serious liability to its partners two years after the great surprise at the polls that brought in the absurdity.

It’s been departure time for scores of party members the past one month, with former party secretary-general, Salehuddin Hashim, leading the way and in his train three MPs have quit the party, another sacked and several more adrift.

While many from some parts of the world placed much faith in Anwar Ibrahim and the promises he made for reform, the facts say his outfit had been overwhelmed by his secretaries who struggled for influence among themselves, the losers leaving the party to publicly scorn Anwar and his favorites.

There was never a chance for the party to build a base for coherence and cohesion so it can survive the violence of a Punch and Judy puppet show.

The PKR was doomed from birth, riding piggyback on the Pas into the 1990 general elections and coming to an abrupt halt in 2004. It was wiped out at the polls, leaving Anwar’s wife, Wan Azizah, as the sole survivor in Parliament, winning as caretaker of Anwar’s parliamentary base, Permatang Pauh in Penang.

The pendulum swung to an extreme in the 8 March 2008 general elections. Seeing Umno and the Barisan Nasional (BN) were unable to remove Abdullah Ahmad Badawi from the helm, the people moved to vote against Badawi, denying the BN the two-third majority.

With the Opposition only 30 less than the BN in Parliament, Anwar became inspired to apply haste in politics and declared he had enough BN lawmakers willing to cross court and join the Pakatan to form the new government on September 16, 2008 .

It failed and it backfired, Anwar self-bashed to a pulp.

It was impossible for the PKR to recover since. Anwar and the Opposition could only hope for Najib Tun Razak to slump before he could succeed Badawi.

Najib made it. Then he moved swiftly to turn the tables on Anwar and the Pakatan. He recovered the state of Perak and in a series of offensives he left the Pakatan in distress in Selangor and Penang.

In Kedah the Menteri Besar (Chief Minister) is often sick and has not delivered anything worth a mention in the two years he has been chief executive.

In Kelantan the stoic old survivor, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, has finally gotten himself linked to a possible set of graft charges involving his son-in-law whom he appointed as the CEO of a state company he chaired himself.

In Penang Lim Guan Eng as Chief Minister has been alleged to have made a regulation giving him the power to withdraw contracts given out by the state or state agency, without having to give any reason for his actions.

In other words, he was said to have taken to himself extraordinary powers for someone demanding accountability and transparency in government.

The opposition has also been showing gross incompetence, lack of experience and silly arrogance. Some could not handle the simple taste of minimal power.

In many places it has been a lark the likes of which we have never seen or heard before – a powershoku that had come in with the 8 March 2008 electoral tsunami bringing to Malaysia a real life staging of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, featuring some who had done nothing more than ferrying mineral water from the shops to the election hot-tents and were amply rewarded for that.

When some councilors at the district and municipal levels were dropped there was the news in several online newspapers that one of these had ingested a weed-killer. The news item was withdrawn many hours later.

The truth is bizarre. The Opposition had been as surprised as anyone else with the 8 March 2008 election results and the PKR and the DAP were not prepared to run state governments and to place selected members as councilors at district and municipal levels.

Why would the DAP and PKR now want town council elections is yet another kinky curio when the DAP’s Magister, Lim Kit Siang, had recently wrote against the proposal, possibly because the party and its strange sidekick, PKR, do not have cadre outfits to fill in the positions with people who know what to do.

Other than the socialists in the PKR, hardly any of the party members had been in touch with farmers’, smallholders’ or fishermen's associations, meaning they have no idea of the tensions faced by these sectors and to exploit the tensions.

The same is partially true for the Pas, which is probably why the party failed to hold the rural electorates in many states.

It would now become pertinent to ask who among the members of the PKR (other than the socialists) and the Pas have been keeping touch with workers’ unions in the urban?

What, therefore, is the Pakatan about other than to make Anwar Ibrahim the boss over Putrajaya? Why would we want to do that?

If it is about Reformasi, we need to ask what have they done in that direction the past two years other than talk in road-shows and in the coffee-shops?

If it is about the chance to incur a two-party system we have to know at which point had that been a viable option since 8 March 2008?

Is Anwar managerially substantial or is he the same now as he had been as a minister and Umno leader, with many of his boys forming a cackle of menacing husbanded power who misbehaved while pretending to be the champions of Islam.

It’s bottoms up! There will have to be shifts of the paradigms and of the chimes for Malaysia to progress in the processes of change, modernization, development and integration. In the meantime, it is Najib who is widely perceived as doing very well as a leader. ---a. ghani ismail, 8 March, 2010

On A Scale Of Justice (Or The Matter of I21(1A)

2010-03-03T07:49:00.001-08:00

The writing below was to have been Marina's column in The Star. It was spiked because the paper had gotten into some trouble over a writing on Islam. Marina wrote in her blog to express concern, saying it is the Printing Presses and Publications Act (1984) that's the threat. In the column she had referred to the 1988 Amendment we know as 121(1A) which resulted in the country having two sets of laws and two judiciaries.

There are other laws, federal and state, that matter as well, even contempt of the mufti's orders and of Islam for options of the violence. Marina must have also known the Muslim authorities have discovered fire, long after Prometheus of course, but they still keep at burning books and newspapers. It's a tradition started sometime when Baghdad was the heart of the Muslim Empire before Hulagu's takeover in 1258 AD. Time hardly moved since, other than by stretching.

So here is Marina's spiked column - from rantingsbymm.blogspot.com

When we want to compete with anyone in any field, we seek those who are better than us. And we keep going until finally we are recognised as the best. For example, a tennis player starts at the unranked bottom and tries to play and win against better players until, finally, there is nobody to beat.

We do not, however, insist that everybody comes down to our level or to play badly in order for us to win. This is what puzzles me about the Shariah courts in our country.

In 1988, a clause was inserted into our Constitution that has been interpreted as having erected a “Berlin Wall” between the Shariah and the civil courts. Basically, Article 121(1A) said “the courts referred to in Clause (1) shall have no jurisdiction in respect of any matter within the jurisdiction of the Shariah courts.” This has caused untold problems because real life sometimes dictates that some issues cross over both jurisdictions. But leave that aside for a moment.

Although the new clause did not say it, there are some people who are of the view that the Shariah court is superior to the civil courts simply because Shariah law is deemed of a higher order than civil laws.

This is because apparently God made Shariah laws while mere human beings made the civil laws. Never mind the fact that human beings have been changing Shariah laws over the years, for instance, by loosening laws that protected women from losing all their property to their divorced husbands.

Shariah Laws

Like other laws in this country, Shariah laws have to be drafted, tabled and passed through our various lawmaking bodies, whether at the State or Federal levels. This process leaves a lot of human fingerprints all over them.

Civil laws are drafted, tabled and passed through Parliament. The difference is that at the tabling stage, they have to be debated before they are passed. The quality of the debate may be sometimes wanting but debated they are. This process provides some sort of ‘quality control’ over the laws so that they are hopefully current, reflect realities and are just.

The same does not hold true of Shariah laws. When they get tabled at State Excos, non-Muslims do not participate because there is the notion that they cannot partake in any such debate.

That leaves only the Muslim Excos, few of whom are women. This means that if a bill affects women, the opinions of the female minority in the Exco can be ignored.

Furthermore, most people are ignorant about their religion and tend to leave these matters to those they believe know best. Thus if the State Mufti or religious adviser says it’s a good law, they are unlikely to challenge him. Thus are religious laws passed without due scrutiny until something happens, such as when someone gets convicted of a Shariah crime and punishment is meted out.

Who knew that people could be caned for drinking, or for having a baby out of wedlock until the recent cases of Kartika who drank some beer and the three women who gave birth out of wedlock?

Not only were these laws not debated when they were being made, unlike civil laws they can’t be debated afterwards either. According to some, to do so is akin to arguing with God. (There are, however, some who think that God welcomes such arguments just so that He can prove He is right).

Superior Laws

If one believes that Shariah laws are superior to civil laws, should they not be held to higher standards? Should they not be subjected to more rigorous debate than civil laws out of fear that they may be unjust?

If Shariah courts are deemed superior to civil courts, should not their processes be more transparent and efficient? How is it that there are innumerable women having to suffer because Shariah court orders to their former husbands to pay child maintenance cannot be enforced?

How is it also that we suddenly hear about women being caned without any information about the processes they went through? Did they have the benefit of legal representation and heard in an open court? If they did, who were their lawyers and what defence did they mount? On whose behalf was justice served?

I have no problems with Shariah laws if their foundation is justice, equality and non-discrimination for all, even non-Muslims. But when their intent, processes and enforcement are unfair, they only give the impression that Islam is unjust and discriminatory. Surely to give such an image of Islam is a sin. –--
3 March 2010 rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/

* Marina Mahathir is a columnist with The Star.

ANWAR GOES INTO THE UNDERSIDE OF HELL

2010-02-01T05:50:00.000-08:00

AFTER THE CHRISTIAN CAPER ANWAR GOES INTO THE UNDERSIDE OF HELL

Instead of flooring Najib Tun Razak’s One Malaysia in the attempt to sabotage Malaysian racial harmony, it is Anwar Ibrahim that’s down, his Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) gasping for breath in the aftermath of the Christian demand to call the Trinitarian Godhead and the figure of Jesus Christ by the name of Allah.

The caper that has caused the desecration of several churches and mosques in the country would go down in history as a crude attempt to cause sectarian riots.

While it will be seen as a Christian oversight of fundamental Malaysian goodwill, the fact Anwar had quickly given his approval to the Church’s right to use the simple word has caused a net loss of respect and confidence in the man who had once led the country’s Muslim youths and gained for himself an image as a peerless leader.

As the excitement settles after the rabble aggressions on churches, mosques and one Gudhwara (Sikh Temple), Anwar is seen going on a road-show dropping the name of Yusuf Qaradhawi to support his position that the Christians should be free to use the term “Allah”.

It is inane. The trouble that brewed is not about the freedom to use that term “Allah”, which means “The God”, or simply the one God.

Anwar and the Christian Church must know the trouble stems from the constitutions of both the Federation and of the states and not in any Christian-imagined “Muslim Terrorism” that has been oppressing and persecuting Christians in Malaysia the way some would like the world to believe.

The constitutional “Islamic laws” are, in fact, Undang-Undang Raja (The King’s Law) issuing from the division of powers that was carried through from the British Intervention beginning in 1874.

Religion and Malay Customs became the sole prerogative of the Malay rulers and it was this power division that was drawn by a series of Acts and constitutional amendments into the serious complication that gave Malaysia two sets of laws and two judiciaries, one for the Malay-Muslims and the other for everyone.

Hence, there are laws and there are institutions that separate the Malays from other Malaysians by religious identities. These would need to be reviewed and possibly revised before One Malaysia would be realizable.

Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, or anyone else as premier, would need a little time to bring these incongruent matters to focus.

Needed is a panel of experts empowered to slap the Reid’s Commission and Constitution on the surgical table and to work on the body of histories in them until we can breathe easy and aspire towards a smoother passage to change, modernization, development and integration as we get ready for the Asean Union.

Anyone with a meager reading of politics and administration can tell that no central government can work with a given set of powers that can intervene and intercept the chain of command.

What had happened in several states at the end of the previous premier’s tenure was a loud distress signal that the central authority had been intercepted after several Menteri Besar (Chief Ministers) were chosen by the rulers (monarchs) who set aside Abdullah Badawi’s (Pak Lah) choices for the CEO in three states.

The central leadership and authority so weak, the state authorities worked overtime to display their extraordinary powers and the result is the renewed and wonderful assertiveness in the tug-of-war between the states and the center.

The religious departments grabbed bodies of dead converts, hold for years in rehabilitation centers young Muslims who ate in public during the fasting month (Ramadhan) or who were caught buying lotteries, and whipped or sent to prison those caught drinking beer.

Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the failed dictator, had tried to place the state’s power over religion under a federal umbrella. He hoisted a federal Islamic Fatwa Council and then pushed through the constitutional amendment we know as 121. 1(A) in 1988.

That amendment effectively turned Malaysia into a nation of two sets of laws and two separate judiciaries, his daughter, Marina, once ranted at as leading to apartheid.

Mahathir and his minions had agreed it would need a “strongman” to run a Malaysia that’s ridden by such a nasty manner of divide-and-rule, himself averse to being called “dictator”, but happy with the nom de guerre of “strongman”.

But he was not altogether strong. Over and over again during his tenure the Press had to blitz against the actions of the religious departments to warn the religious authorities of what can lie ahead should they persist to satisfy their appetites for power by abusing civil and human rights.

In Malaysia the constitution does not allow the Malays the right of conscience. A Malay is not even allowed to marry outside his district of domicile. He must attend a day’s course on marriage for RM80 before “qualifying” to be married. Saying in court he is no longer a Muslim will put him into custody for contempt of Islam.

These are not Islamic laws. These are issued from the powers of the Raja (monarch) and it needs to be known that in some understandings of Islamic Law (Shariah), the laws of the monarch (hukum raja) are accepted as a legitimate component of the Shariah as are customary laws (hukum adat).

The Malaysian Archbishop should have known this before he applied to the court for redress against the ban on using the word “Allah” for the Christian God.

It isn’t at all a Christian-alone fight. It should never have been a Christian-alone struggle.

As Lim Kit Siang had observed, the Muslims themselves are oppressed by these laws. Pas lawmaker, Khalid Samad, described them as “out-of-date”.

What would be the effects of these laws and regulations when Asean becomes a Union? Are the religious authorities in the states and in the Federal Territories serious about imposing these laws in an Asean Union which will be reality by or around 2025?

It had been indeed a crude attempt to sabotage Malaysian racial harmony, and at a time when Malaysia lost RM 115 billion in her foreign reserves within a few months, her exports marginally receding and internally the government had had to apply austerity that cut 30 percent of departmental budgets in some cases.

Anwar's Sodomy II Trial begins tomorrow.

The events could not have chosen a worse time to happen. But somehow the people stayed calm and composed through the spate of church and mosque desecrations. There was no tension at all wherever I went. There were merely expectations.

Anwar Ibrahim, who was prompt in his approval of the Christian caper, was soon in dire political distress. It is about this person that a lot of people are talking, mainly wishing to see the end of his political career and the demise of his party, the PKR.

It is certain a lot of people have had enough of Anwar’s wanderings in a wilderness of his own making. Anwar is mainly and essentially a rabble-rouser, they say.

The man had hallucinated about taking over the federal government by September 16, 2008 and today, which is the 1st of February 2010, it looks possible it is his party that shall soon lose three Members of Parliament in a beginning of total recall of a party born as a living dead in 1999.

Should it happen, the Barisan Nasional (BN) would only need eight more to regain the two-third majority in Parliament that Pak Lah caused the coalition to lose on 8 March 2008.

In Penang PKR lawmakers are taking on the Chief Minister, Lim Guan Eng, which can lead to the breakdown of the Pakatan. ----a. ghani ismail, 1st Feb. 2010

PAGING HELL. CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS HAVE ARRIVED IN MALAYSIA

2010-01-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

The Archdiocese in Malaysia should never have gotten itself embroiled in a court battle against the government simply to demand its right to use the Arabic term for God, Allah. Winning in court, the ensuing glory caused an overflow of temper to attack eight churches beginning Friday mainly in failed acts of arson by Molotov cocktails.

Now, as church spokesmen are reported to defy the official request for the Archdiocese to withdraw the demand, it does make the Archbishop to be seen behaving like a brat who must have what he wants. He shifted the general agitation of civil society for justice and for fair-play into a coordinated act of international espionage.

How does using the word Allah help the Church in its evangelism? Why make such a mountain of what is to the popular mind a mere mole-hill? Why can't they use the Malay word "Tuhan" (God) which is known to everyone in Malaysia?

After the baptism of fire, the Archbishop, Tan Sri Murphy N. Pakiam, for a long time much respected and loved by many across the religious barriers, is saddled with the choice either to apply strategic withdrawal or walk into outright rebellion.

The Church in Malaysia had firmly kept to the line of secure diplomacy to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what’s left of the remaining.

There was only the outspoken Jesuit, O.C. Lim of the Xavier Church in Petaling Jaya, who would mix politics with the apostolic in his sermons.

Then, from some years before, a wind came blowing the devil's artifices to change the Christian mind-set in Malaysia.

A group of Christians, said to have been funded by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, began an earnest campaign to shake the Church into a political awakening while founding at the same time a dubious Malaysian Inter-Faith Network (NIM).

Small bodies of church-led Christians appeared to have become politically active in that elections, bringing in its wake the train of events that nearly caused the Archdiocese to burn in the fire of hell.

What had transpired had been a relentless flame-baiting, a loathing of Malays and of Islam. In the terms of history it could only be construed as a Vatican-US-CIA devise to seed civil unrest in Malaysia.

It is, of course, far less vivacious than the grand plan of the complot to stump the expansion of Communism in Vietnam after French colonialism was battered at Dien Bien Phu by the Vietcong (here).

That was when the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem was propped-up as the first president and with his brothers and his sister-in-law and a Catholic Bishop to boot, he falsified Armageddon under the gaze of the Lady of Fatima in Vietnam.

He rained insults, injuries and blow after blow on the Buddhist population until monks in saffron began the unforgettable protests by self-immolation on the streets of Saigon. You remember? You can begin to remember better from here.

What followed the High Court decision to approve for the Christians the use of Allah, was a quick reflexive remark by Anwar Ibrahim, de facto leader of Pakatan Rakyat and an old buddy of the architect of the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz.

In Malaysia the connection means we are in the midst of a geo-political tussle for the containment of China and to secure both, the Straits of Malacca and the air space of the triangle from the Spratly’s to the Nicobar/Andaman islands and to Bangkok.

It is clear that the attacks on the churches since last Friday were a direct counter to this “Anwar-offensive”.

The IGP, Tan Sri Musa Hassan, was reported to have said the motive behind the acts was political. They were not about religious sentiments.

While Tan Sri Pakiam and the editor of the Herald had challenged an order of the Minister of Home Affairs, who also withdrew the license for the Herald, the fiery reactions that ensued had clearly been understood to have been a reaction against Anwar’s approval of the High Court decision.

The Muslims were widely split in their attitudes and responses to the Christians using the word Allah. It is possible the larger body of Malays and Malaysian Muslims are not averse to the use of the word by Non-Muslims.

Thus, to many observers the vitriol had been sourced from the underside of the political conflict and it had nothing to do with the broad-based agitation for the freedom of conscience by civil society.

The Archdiocese was clearly trapped in the political mess that’s now headed for a final countdown.

In this contest for power is seeded the fear that Malaysia may well have to pay a very heavy price for the hubris of the ruling elite that has caused executive and administrative dysfunction.

That price is re-colonization, the takeover of the micromanagement of Malaysia and of her resources in the quest of another operational staging point to contain China and the flow of the Islamic magma in the region.

So, does Tan Sri Pakiam, the Archbishop, want to continue challenging the powers which will force him to appeal to the Vatican sooner than later, or will he resist that temptation and himself retreat for the well-being of the larger numbers in the country?

We will have to wait and see.---a. ghani ismail, 12 Jan. 2010

Who Will Replace Nik Aziz In Kelantan?

2009-11-29T06:31:00.000-08:00

In the blur of a mutiny aiming to overthrow the “ship’s captain” in the Kelantan government, the big question that arises in the waves sweeping over the petty state is about who will replace the 77-year old PAS Mentri Besar (Chief Minister).

Nik Aziz Nik Mat, wiry, wily and aging, is also PAS’s (Islamic Party’s) spiritual leader.

Approaching 20 years into a secure tenure, he ruled like a surviving slur of the oriental despotism he seemed to believe will hold for another century or two.

Observers had him supped into a senile wanderlust when he kept taking to task the party president he wanted tamed and the deputy president he wanted out. It was a sustained attempt to dispel any notion that may reduce him into anything lesser than the “Captain of the Ship”.

He kept cajoling the party leaders and each time he did his thing the PAS swayed and buckled close to rupture.

When the mutiny broke out it was, to many, a much-awaited sign of sustained life in the PAS, but bringing in the tide a clear reading of monumental death.

The current crisis in the state can lead to a grab of power for a decent future of modernization and development the Barisan Nasional (BN) can make. The BN needs a frontline leader acceptable to the people of the small delta community.

The drama began when popular blogger, Kickdefella (here), suddenly sacked from his position as a liaisons officer of the state investment arm, hit hard on Nik Aziz Nik Mat’s nose.

The ancient squat protuberance of the spiritual leader and politician bled. It will bleed more if he is found guilty of accepting criminal gratification from a logger.

The rich logger, said to be a former truck driver who gained a timber concession from the state government worth RM20 million, must have been grateful enough to spend more than RM400k on a "five-star" Haj trip to Mecca for the Chief Minister and his select group of VVIPs.

Nik Aziz and his spouse was one pair of the beneficiaries of this Al-Santa Clausu, the Muslim Gift-Bearer. His son-in-law, Ir Ariffahmi Abdul Rahman and wife, was another pair, said Kickdefella, placing the parents of the bride and the prodigal son-in-law in a political embrace few would envy.

The "five-star" trip to Mecca costs RM65,000 for each pair when about RM10,000 would have sufficed.

Nik Aziz had appointed his son-in-law as CEO of the state’s investment arm he chaired himself.

It is this fellow who sacked the blogger for reasons still unknown, the probabilities leaning heavily to a spin of intrigues Kickdefella suggested was about the creation of a dynasty.

For reasons of her own Ir Ariffahmi’s wife, Nik Amalina Nik Aziz, had written and widely published in the net a soul-spilling letter to say her father, the Chief Minister, had indeed offered the big job to her husband from about one year before he husband finally accepted the appointment.

She described it as a “hot seat”. It is looking like it could burn through his pants.

She targeted the blogger.

Kickdefella is known to be an aide of Husam Musa, a state Executive Councilor (Minister) who had been groomed by Nik Aziz he served for almost 20 years beginning as a Press Secretary in 1990.

Observers mostly agreed Husam Musa did a great job to promote his boss. He was articulate, physically well-stacked and informed.

When he became Political Secretary six years later he was seen as a protégé of Nik Aziz and being groomed for high office in the state.

Husam rose to become a state minister in 2004 and soon into his second term he lunged for number two of the Islamic Party in mid-2009.

He lost, a failed crossing of the Rubicon that would have unsettled Rome for Julius Caesar.

But Kelantan obviously isn’t quite comparable to Caesar’s Rome and Nik Amalina cannot be the asp in Cleo’s chamber.

Kelantan is actually one of nine petty monarchies in the Malay Peninsular noisily bugging the environment to create heat for a constant clear sighting by GSP from above.

Kickdefella locked in and he gripped the stoic Menteri Besar in an allegation of blatant nepotism and possible graft, threatening to spill more beans that should cause the old man to rue the day he decided his son-in-law must be the CEO of the state company he sits on as Chairman.

Nik Aziz had slipped. The 77-year old stoic who is regarded by many as a Muslim saint is certainly having lots to explain.

Is Islam actually free of values that collectively forbid nepotism? Are gifts from the well-gratified merely a pleasant way of saying “Thank You” to state leaders and their councils of powerfolks called in Kelantan “VVIPs”?

Husan Musa, obviously dunked by the wily old man, was soon reported to have said he wanted out of the state government and the party, sending the Chief Minister into a corner too tight for him.

How can he face the future should his former protégé lead the final attack against him from within, or abruptly slide into the Opposition and invade his fort?

The Deputy Mentri Besar, Mohamad Yakub, is a quiet man of diligence that seemed to have cleverly failed to record his political existence. He is held in the state as unavailable for the high office.

Ariffahmi Abdul Rahman, the Engineer CEO of the states investment arm, should have accepted the job his father-in-law offered him a year earlier. He has many steps to go before he can be in the running.

That leaves either Husam Musa who is now zoomed into a limbo and the Umno Kelantan liaison chief and federal minister, Mustapha Mohammed, a brilliant former civil servant.

Nik Aziz, cornered into the wilds of the fall from grace, is likely to be thinking of dissolving the state assembly pronto and let the party run for the sun it can lose.

Whoever will finally be chosen to lead the charge in the BN must be the sort of personality the people of the tightly knit delta community can accept and can trust. Mustapha, who is the brightest, must quickly take the lead. But will he go for it? ----a. ghani ismail, 29 Nov. 2009.

Umno Won Bagan Pinang. Who Lost?

2009-10-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

Umno President and Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, slumped on the leeward side of Isa Samad’s landslide victory in the Bagan Pinang by-election on Oct. 11, suffers a popularity downslide he may find difficult to overcome as he plans to dissolve parliament next year for a quick grab of his own mandate to rule.

Najib had taken over a corrupt Umno. Unless purged, the party no longer made sense as a nationalist organization and would stand to lose more and more members to the Pas and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) Anwar Ibrahim had mounted to overtake Umno.

Isa Samad, Menteri Besar (Chief Minister) of Negeri Sembilan for 22 years, found guilty of buying votes to win as party vice-president in 2004, has now successfully made a tainted second coming, the taint a costly color that Najib had taken to win in the ninth by-election since the general elections on 8 March 2008.
Umno and the BN had lost the remaining eight.

Even if Isa was clearly in control of the constituency and could scuttle Umno in the by-election, a lot of people agreed with former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, when he openly attempted to persuade Najib not to choose the tainted Isa as candidate.

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, who contested Mahathir for Umno president in 1987 and narrowly lost, wrote on the eve of the by-election it’s better for Umno to lose rather than “affirm corruption” should Isa win.

Now that Isa has won by a record 5,435 votes, it is Najib who stands as a casualty.

He caused the party to reel under a weight it may not be able to carry through the next general elections. Umno cannot even be classified anymore as a nationalist party the Malays can trust to take care of their interests.

Many party divisions have been bought and are controlled by money-laden contractors and businessmen since vote-buying, or “money politics”, became rampant in Umno from sometime in the mid-1980s.

After suggestions to purge the party of the corrupt have fallen on deaf ear, the resurrection of Isa Samad on Oct. 11 seemed to have spaced out all alternatives to regime change, making it pertinent for my former teacher, Gamany of Daim and Gamany (now retired) to meet me to discuss some matters of ideological vehemence in the Opposition, the Pakatan Rakyat.

Gamany was a member of the PSRM and he agreed Kassim Ahmad's helmanship of the party for 18 years was senseless.

We areed even if there is still a chance for Umno and the BN to survive by an internal putsch, the possibility did not interest Gamany and the first thing Gamany asked when we met at Restoran Jamek in Kuala Lumpur was whether or not I could accept PKR’s Marhaenism as a suitable ideological base.

I had earlier suggested we use the broader Qur'anic class of Mustaz’afin (Oppressed/ Dispossessed/ Exploited) and the class of Mustakbirin (Oppressor/Exploiter/Corrupt) in socio-historical conflict to bridge the ideological divide between the Pas, PKR and DAP in the Opposition. (see here)

Since our purpose for an ideology would be to provide for coherence and cohesion while defining objectives, priorities and methods, whatever we decide should be something that can last a long time and not become merely a convenient adoption and adaptation that bears no relevance to our historical mission and society.

Marhaenism, whatever Sukarno had conceived and introduced it for, should be conveyed within the scope of historical materialism.

What we get is the petty traders and peasants who owned some scraps of capital but who would be badly mauled by a change in any of the factors of production, or merely by an increase of taxes or rent.

In our society we have 48 percent of landless farmers (in KADA and KEMUBU for example) and the social dynamics issued from the numbers do not favor Marhaenism.

Our landscape differ from the little patches of terraced rice-fields in Java Sukarno had seen fit to use as a means to enhance his NASAKOM (Nationalisme-Islam-Komunisme) of his Guided Democracy which lasted until his overthrow in 1965.

We need something that can provide for coherence and cohesion while striding distinctly above the communal and sectarian drawbacks of our own plural makeup, the likes of which would have been shunned by heaven and hell had these places been pre-informed in any detail about Malaysia.

Gamany did not worry about returning to a purely proletarian workout seeing that could inspire more Bangladeshi, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Myanmar workers in Malaysia than the sum total of the Malaysian blue-collar labor force.

So I suggested we can do with the scriptural generalizations and hone those into social stratifications and identities to display a broad ideological understanding as Ali Shariati had done in Iran during the Islamic Revolution that ended with the fall of the Pahlavi in 1979.

Gamany asked me what I thought of the DAP reviving the Chin Peng-Abdullah CD model of relationship between the Chinese-dominated MCP and the small 10th. Malay Regiment and I answered we can do better by aspiring to override the communalism.

Malays in Malaysia generally remain averse to socialism because of the anti-Malay policy of the MPAJA (Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army) during the Japanese Occupation.

Abdullah CD hailed from Lambor Kiri, a village several miles upriver from Pasir Salak where J.W.W. Birch was killed in the early years of the British Residential System. He and many of his Malay compatriots were anti-colonial first and last, or so his family members assumed of him.

There we stopped. Gamany and I shall meet again.

Since neither of us wish for a total command economy and both are favorably inclined towards choosing western models for change, modernization, development and integration, many finer points will need to be discussed before we can draw the Pas and other Muslims into serious discussions over the Islamic Welfare State and other matters of common interest.

Umno is obviously lost in the overwhelming materialism of the awesome transitional society and even if Isa Samad had won handsomely in Bagan Pinang on Oct 11, given its ruling attitude about corruption, Umno is bound to become even uglier still in the near future. -----a.ghani ismail, 12 Oct. 2009

CAN PKR BE MENDED OR WILL IT SIMPLY BREAK APART?

2009-09-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

With the newt-like metamorphosis of Anwar Ibrahim’s Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) encumbering the Pakatan Rakyat’s lurch for power, Lim Guan Eng’s hunch that the ground is no longer the same as it was under Pak Lah must be a strong hint that the DAP secretary-general has become illumined.

Guan Eng had said knocking off Najib Tun Razak from the helm would not be easy.

The PKR is breaking down. The recent crossover to Umno of the PKR Lunas assemblyman in Kedah and the recalcitrant Port Klang assemblyman in Selangor are obvious symptoms of the newt reaching maturity and must return to the mud and slush for it to spawn a fresh batch of larvae.

Guan Eng must have known there wasn’t and hasn’t been much in the PKR. It is mostly about Anwar, his secretaries and a few NGOs close to him, many of the rest picked from the streets without any character assessment.

Months after the Pakatan Perak state government was formed, two PKR State Executive Councilors were trapped suckling China dolls paid for by a contractor. As a consequence the government fell in disgrace.

The playtime of these PKR members in the lair of power did not stop there.

A personal tryst of another PKR State Executive Councilor rushed into the Internet a set of near-nude pictures a gory Gallum of the middle-world said was altogether alright in Islam.

Now a Kedah State Executive Councilor who is the assemblyman for Lunas has crossed court saying he has lost confidence in Anwar Ibrahim who is again facing a charge for sodomy.

What’s left for the PKR to use as a foundation to acquire public confidence is a mystery. After more than a year of coaching most of the party’s state executive and district councilors are said to be ineffective or utterly deadwoods

They are mainly members of NGO’s who are hardly acquainted with government or with any executive function.

Now suddenly propped with power they seem to believe that that power is well spent by attending meetings after meetings in a pretense of hard work. It is Anwar that is stuck and stumped in the up-shot.

While he and his team can win a significant number of seats in state assemblies and in parliament, delivery is yet to unfold into the tangible world.

The PKR, which may have started out well in Selangor with former Guthrie’s CEO, Khalid Ibrahim, leading the state government, is now looking frothy and fat.

The DAP too may be staring into space in Selangor where the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) investigations and the select committee on competency, accountability and transparency (Selcat)interrogations can reveal more graft-stubs and fund-pilfering graver than previously suspected.

In the Islamic landscape the Pas has run berserk with the party’s Selangor state commissioner, Hassan Ali, wishing to form mosque-based moral squads to nab beer from the shelves in Muslim-majority areas.

He seems enthralled by the Pahang Shariah Court judge who had slapped some Muslims who drank beer with a fine of RM5,000, six lashes of the whip and recently, with a year custodial sentence as well.

As Malaysia appears to be going religiously mad, the PKR’s Reformasi and Pakatan’s Civil Society are staying clear from the mental-waste.

Anwar and his PKR were strangely soft about the Pas’ war against beer.

When the powers-that-be decided to slam six Shah Alam demonstrators with sedition for parading a cow’s head and then stepping and spitting on it, the PKR quickly distanced itself from the deemed sacrilegious act to appease their members who are Hindus.

It will be the monkey that the PKR should next uphold as a sacred creature, the being associated in Hinduism with the god, Hanuman, and with Sun Wu Kung in Indo-Chinese beliefs.

What is the policy position of the Reformasi and of Civil Society concerning these bewildering developments involving beer and cattle? Anwar must elucidate or the whole of the Reformasi will have to be disregarded as merely a politically sopped maverick and hence, in Islam, as short-changing the people and therefore fraudulent (Mutafiffin).

The relevant Quranic verses run like this:

Woe to the cheaters,
Who, when taking the measures from the people, they take full measure,
But when they give the measure to the people they cheat.
Do they not expect to be resurrected? --- Q. 83: 1 – 4

The PKR may be resurrected as a newt given its sidestepping of issues relating to the religious mental-waste.

The newt lives through a three-stage metamorphosis – a creature born in mud and slush that lives on dry land as a juvenile and then back to the mud and slush in its maturity.

As for the cow, is it really sacred to the Hindus or is it merely taboo to a large number of them? Haven’t you seen Indian cowherds whipping cattle? --- a. ghani ismail (16 Sept. 2009)

Busted Party Hot Over Sacred Cow

2009-08-31T10:28:00.000-07:00

PAKATAN IS BECOMING WOEFULLY A BAD TASTE

Hot lips blowing flying kisses over a head of cattle in Shah Alam in psychedelic rays of sunshine on Friday 28 August– a brew of a Hindu temple, caning for drinking beer and the sudden leap of one PKR member, Radzi Salleh of Lunas, over to the Barisan Nasional (BN) in Kedah on August 23.

Now three others are rumored “missing”, meaning the Pas-led Pakatan Rakyat government in Kedah may have to call a snap state election to save its skin – gossamer-thin and serving no more than as a prophylactic to hide the non-performance since coming to power after the stupefying 8 March 2008 general elections.

Holy Cow! There’s really no need for the Police to exact a severe penalty over the Shah Alam ruse, nor any reason for paranoia.

What’s behind it is the death knell of the Pakatan in Kedah following the fall of the bugged pact in Perak. The position of the partnership in Selangor is also shaky.

If three other PKR elected members in Kedah officially swing, we would be seeing a clearance sale of the PKR in the state – all four crossing from the sick-bay to the glory of Hallelujah in a near repeat of the Perak sell-off. Pakatan would have 18 against BN’s 18, with one independent worth the moon.

It’s Anwar that’s gone all wrong with his September 16 (2008) misadventure of a calculation that was a bluff, leaving him and his party with a bill they can hardly pay for the trip that was merely a bad dream.

Anwar was reported to have confessed PKR is flawed and it is the weakest in the pact.

But some people find it is motley, showing up a legend of those types that were dragged from the trenches of the beaten.

Riding into the skirts of power they strut like crippled horsemen, making rather of a comic platoon of the wasted wherever they made their presence.

Some observers have asked whether Anwar is at all serious about making a bid for power, him to reach the pinnacle in Putrajaya with a bunch of slushy boys and big-butt sluts for the paradise his think-tank has devised for a third space of much fun?

Losing grip of the great dream to gain power over Malaysia after the paunchy win of 8 March 2008, members of the Pakatan-Pas leaderships are now seen to try for a racial polarization that will deny the 1Malaysia Vision.

While in the DAP it is about lancing Islam in the ribs, like Jesus had been lanced on Golotha, to those with a weakness for the Pas the game drags them into a historical curling, like the snake is swallowing its tail.

To the Malays the big fight that changed the course of history had been between Islam and Tantric Hindu-Buddhism in the 14th century, depicted in Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (the annals of Pasai) which marked the beginning of Islam in Malacca with the conversion of Parameswara when he married the princess of Pasai in 1409.

In that Hikayat was Perumal, the Pasai Raja and bhairawa (God-King) who insisted his daughters become his concubines and when his son protected the girls from their father, Perumal ordered his son to drink poison, which the son did.

It’s by the tantric to deify the kings and princes that the Malays came to know Hinduism and Buddhism in Sumatera.

It is this kind of a man-God that first became Raja of Pagaruyung, the Minangkabau heartland where Adityawarman enthroned himself king and drew attention to himself as a bhairawa who killed hundreds of his subjects, drank their blood and ate of their flesh about which he had inscribed on a stone statue which is resting in the Jakarta Museum, under the staircase.

This history of the fight against mangled Malay humanity is what is clearly stirring once again in the country, presided as it were by the Cassius-like Great Guru of the Pas whose umbilical attachment to Anwar’s PKR and the DAP cannot be taken flippantly as a passing fancy that will bear nobody any intended malice.

Though early Majapahit had driven back Kublai Khan’s 12,000-strong army in East Jawa, the Malays had never fought against the Chinese until they were forced to retaliate Chinese excesses in the 1942-46 conflicts from Batu Pahat in Johor to Grik in Perak. (see Chia Boon Kheng, Red Star Over Malaya).

It is not with the Taoist or Buddhist Chinese that the historical racial combustions lie in Nusantara, but with Tantric Hindu-Buddhism.

That is why it is critical for the Malays to be told the bhairawa-period of Perumal of Pasai and Adityawarman of Pagaruyung has long gone and that the Hindu-Muslim crises in India are differently patented.

Indeed there is no reason to be recalling the primitive conflicts between Islam and Hinduism in the Malay World.

When the chips are down there really is no reason to be flogging the Sacred Cow. ---a. ghani ismail, 1 Sept. 2009

Whip Kartika Publicly On Malaysia Day?

2009-08-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

Swarmed by a pious warrant of zealotry for more than a year because she drank beer at an hotel bar in the beachside of Cherating, Pahang, and after four court appearances, Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, 32, now Peoples’ Princess, was slammed by the Syariah High Court in the state with a fine of RM5000 and six strokes of the cane.

The mother of two who emotionally slumped when she was told on Monday 24 July 2009 the caning was postponed because it was Ramadhan, said she has been treated like a football since the arrest on 11 Dec 2007 and now she would prefer to be publicly whipped rather than caned, a report said.

As the country awakens to the agony of a woman and mother from the lower middle-class who had lost her full-time job in a hospital because of the “religious crime”, the Mufti of Perak, Harussani Zakaria, and Pas president, Hadi Awang, presented the country with a classic apology for the Islamic law.

Said they, drinking any alcoholic beverage is a hudud crime, meaning it is an offence mentioned in the Holy Qur’an. The punishment, they said, is between 40 to 80 light strokes of the cane, the victim fully dressed and not bared to show her flesh.

If you wish to debate that law you can begin by saying nowhere in the Qur’an is there a mention of the punishment. Since it will be said it comes from the Hadis (Prophetic Tradition), it should be asked, is it really sourced from the Hadis or from the reported sayings of the prophet’s companions, i.e. Atsar and not Hadis?

But the two missed the point altogether. The simple point is the fact Kartika was fined RM5000 and has paid the money. Had she been any poorer she would have to spend three years in jail. Are those deals also a part of the hudud?

She lost her fulltime job because of the zealotry. Is that not enough to satisfy the appetite for power to do violence of this unkind sort?

If the appeal to mercy and compassion is not enough to appease the temper of the holy of the holies in the country, then we need the pure souls to categorically inform us whether or not it was true Muawiyah, when he was Caliph in Damascus, was reliably reported to have been drunk on several occasions as he read the sermon and then led the Friday congregational prayer?

Was it true or false that the illustrious Umar Bin al-Khattab was drunk at prayer in the prophet’s mosque in Medina and because of that event God Almighty inspired the verse saying ‘ do not approach prayer when you are drunk so that you may know what you are saying...’ (Q. 4:43)?

That cannot be serious admonition of an abominable crime, surely.

Hence, we need to ask how serious is the crime in having a few beers to ease the stresses and tensions of working in a commercial and industrial landscape with a recession to boot and without a war to fight like the Muslims in Medina in the time of the prophet?

What more, the Pas Selangor Commissioner, Hassan Ali, wants to train squads of Beer-Fighters in all mosques in Selangor to perform a search-and-destroy mission of the beverage from hops and malt. He should begin by removing all Muslim workers from the breweries in PJ.

Since by Islamic law one drop of an alcoholic beverage is as haram (prohibited) as a jug of it, Hassan Ali should ask himself how about Air Tapai (fermented glutinous rice)?

The alcoholic content in beer is between 2.5 to 3 percent proof while in Air Tapai it is between 12 to 16 percent proof.

Go to Chechnya and you'll find some of the mujahids (Muslim fighters) drink Vodka to keep themselves warm in winter. You need to experience frostbite before you condemn that!

So, do you really believe we ought to apply the Prohibition in Malaysia in the 21st century simply because it is in the Holy Qur'an?

People of my ilk are saying it is a paltry matter Hassan Ali has grabbed for his mission and mileage. It has been said he has done nothing since assuming office after the 8 March general elections last year.

He could have worked on Cooperatives to help the members of the Pasar Tani (Rural Market) and the Pasar Malam (Night Markets) who are losing cients in the recession instead of choosing to raid 7-Eleven outlets and remove the beer.

Islam we know is a religion of mercy. But the nature and quality of a religion can and will change given a change of its environment and the means of production in the community it is upheld.

Therefore, when the environment of A and the means of production in that environment changes, A will no longer be equal to A. Its nature and quality would have changed.

The gist is, Islam will have to change substantially for it to remain a religion of mercy in our commercial and industrial society, not to mention the time that has lapsed between Muhammad in Medinah and Kartika in Malaysia.

Peoples' Princess, Kartika, should have been counseled and not punished by a RM5000 fine, removed from her job, taken into custody for a week and whipped in the privacy of a prison’s courtyard by body-builders, like these

What chance does she have? Where’s the compassion? Is it lost in the new metropolitan and industrial environs against what the Quixotic is, in fact, furiously battling?

The people is swiftly mobilizing. It'll be people against the traditional and religious elite. ---a. ghani ismail, 26 August 2009

CANE KARTIKA AS PART OF MERDEKA CELEBRATIONS?

2009-08-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

Sunk into the opening day of Ramadhan, the scheduled caning of Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno for drinking beer has ruined whatever lasting enchantment Islam in Malaysia may have advanced since the Arab religion beached here sometime in the 14th century.

Kartika, 32, a mother of two, on a modeling tour in Pahang for a tourism stint drank three glasses of beer in the lounge of an hotel in Kuantan, Pahang, on Dec. 11, 2008.

She was suddenly pounced upon by a squad of Islamic moral-police and shot to fame for being the first woman in the country to be fined RM5000 and to be caned six strokes for the terrible misbehavior, the brewery quite clearly enhanced as among the worst enemies of Muslims in Malaysia.

She’s due to be detained in a prison for a week beginning Monday for the sentence to be meted in the elegant privacy of a prison hours before the country celebrates Independence Day on August 31st. The gutsy woman has been asking for the caning to be carried out in public.

Inside the sullen side of the first of Ramadhan while the otherwise cacophonous and virile opposition has fallen silent over the event, Marina Mahathir and Nuraina A. Samad took up the challenge and called people to read the Qur’an for the whole of the month in code, like this,

(Q.2:34)

Even if meanings may be sometimes elusive, the intent of this suggested campaign is clear.

Islam, the way it is in Malaysia, is apparently coded in an exclusive system that is meaningless to the outsider and a referendum to let the Malays freely choose their faiths would probably leave the established domain to a minority of clowns.

In a society that’s plural and already long industrial, religious Puritanism should begin and remain at home.

But the matter is neither Puritanism nor any genuine concern for social morality. It is rather a system of feudal social control extended into the 21st century from the 17th by virtue of the fact the mullahs have no commercial, industrial or developmental talent to revise the method they had used from the time Nuruddin ar-Raniri became the Shaikh ul-Islam in Aceh under Iskandar Thani.

In early 20th century, while in Indonesia Tjokroaminoto founded Sarekat Islam and turned it from a batik cooperative into a revolutionary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movement, the religious departments in this staunchly feudal compliance during colonial rule fought against the modernists or Kaum Muda responsible for the advancement of independence in the Malay world.

The result was an Islam that was crass, violent and as shallow as a bird-bathing pool.

In 1922, before the Comintern in discussing Pan-Islamism, the Indonesian Communist leader, Tan Malaka, stood up against the tide to say Pan-Islam in the Indonesian experience, was not the same as it was elsewhere.

More akin to the Caucasus where the Muslims had joined the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks to overthrow the Czar in 1917, Indonesian Muslims likewise should be treated exclusively, the numbers at that time showing 13,000 members of the Partai Komunis Indonesia against more than one million in Sarekat Islam.

At that same time in Malaya, the conservative ulama working for the religious departments that were directly under the respective rulers, were relentlessly exhibiting their powers of violence against any and all non-conformists. There would be no religious dissident allowed in Malaya.

This feudal power abuse, once threaded into the fabrics of state power, will obviously need more than a drill of Wingdings a month long or even yet another media blitz to retrain the power-appetite and traditional inclination.

It will need the youth and the people to directly aggress for reshaping the Constitution and the terms of references of the Islamic institutions. We have to go the way of Fazlur Rahman and Cak Noor - Islam ‘Yes!’, Islamic State ‘No!’.

Malays must have the right to choose their own faiths, to conduct their marriages at the civil registry and to set themselves free from the feudal catch-22 to escape the violations.

This sustained display of abuse is about Consciousness. The apparatus is a schematic form lost in the woods of historical materialism and never to enjoy a union of opposites like when the Raja (King) also becomes Rakyat (Subject) for the contrast to blend into a different substance in a synthesis and so the Malays and Malaysians can finally enjoy Liberty – in the 21st century that already is.

Yes, I would like Kartika to be caned in public too, as a part of the Merdeka Celebrations. We need to be sure she will not be brutalized and raped after the caning. Members of NGOs can help take her home to her family after the ordeal.

And this is her family

-----a. ghani ismail, 22 August, 2009



LAMENTATIONS OVER ENGLISH FOR MATHS AND SCIENCE

2009-07-10T08:50:00.000-07:00

Has Parents Any Say In Our Education Policy?

Ghoulish in the way educational policies are crafted by politicians in Malaysia has dogged parents, teachers and children once again. This time, when after much ado a lot want the teaching of mathematics and science in English (PPSMI) to be continued with choices given to parents, the Cabinet reversed the policy in a flourish six years after the policy was begun.

A host of students were sent reeling, the three in the montage above representing many more this writer had met in the several weeks before the decision was announced.

Since the parents are divided about this and students who have learned mathematics, science and many more elective subjects in English want to continue with it, the Cabinet could have opted to let the parents make the choices.

There was a time when parents could apply to the school to teach a subject of their choice, needing only 15 parents to clinch the deal with the school. A posse should be quickly organized to search for that parents’ right in education. It must have run away.

The PPSMI policy reversal is not catastrophic as some may wish to suggest it is. But it clearly is a disappointing turn of policy for a lot of middle-class and urban families.

It should be noted this is not merely about teaching and learning of mathematics and science in English. Some elective industrial and vocational subjects are also taught in English, the reason stated being mainly because of the lack of supportive reading material in Bahasa Malaysia.

This is not about language learning, which the Ministry shall attempt to enhance and shall recruit more than 13,500 English Language and Literature teachers.

After that is understood, it remains rather of a big waste to relieve the society of a policy that had worked well in urban schools but not for schools in the rural, a matter of fact that applies for almost all subjects and for the whole of the teaching-learning process generally.

Gunnar Myrdal’s study of the rural-urban divide had made that clear.

Urban and rural performances in the learning process cannot be expected to be the same. The teaching-learning occur in different life-spaces, the same as between the better-endowed suburbs and the ghettoes, or with the inner-city schools.

After RM 4 billion have been invested in the venture over six years and every student I asked want to continue learning the subjects in English, the writer will have to register his own feeling of going south following the cast-away decision that need not have been as black-and-white as the Cabinet had decided.

It looks done, especially after it is clear very few teachers were trained to cover the need in the past five years.

But teachers can be trained if there’s the political will and with a mighty perhaps, enough parents can be brought to hold the pitch and ransom the Ministry to be accommodative and let those who want to continue with the subjects in English do so.

Former Prime Minister, Tun Pak Lah, declared the policy was a failure. It was not. It merely lagged in the rural, something we can find happening with subjects taught in Bahasa Malaysia and especially with mathematics and science.

Trouble brewed inside of the political nuances, which happened even in Proton, whence a whole chunk of valuable shares in Augusta were sold for One Euro or RM4.50, the same shares sold later for more than RM300 million.

Tun Pak Lah, as Prime Minister, also wrote off the Smart Schools project Tun Dr. Mahathir had started. Pak Lah merely said the money would be better spent to upgrade hundreds of schools.

We would not be facing the drastic decision had that been done satisfactorily during his tenure.

The three girls in the montage are from the first cluster of Smart Schools Mahathir had wanted to pursue, i.e. the Sekolah Seri Bintang (formerly Sekolah Bukit Bintang) located in Shamelin Garden, Cheras.

Asked, they replied they are from a Smart School (Sekolah Bistari) but when I followed through they said Smart Schools are schools where teaching and learning are electronic-aided.

Electronic-aided teaching-learning is less than 50 percent of what a Smart School should be and I suggested they get into the net and search for Smart School for a start.

When the concept is understood I told them they should get organized and aggress for a proper Smart School development. I had been a teacher, you see.

So the question should be asked as to whether or not we had been heading South in education because of the political blur and have we now done a leap South again?

Well, it’s about one and another policy and facility gone and we’ll need to wait to see if the new initiatives will show any better performances in our schools after 2012. --- a. ghani ismail, 11 July 2009

APA OBJEKTIF SYARIAT?

2009-07-01T03:22:00.000-07:00

DARI ROMA PULANG KE LINTANG PUKANG –
Bicara mengenai usul Objektif Syariat Presiden Pas, Haji Hadi Awang

Kerana President Pas, Haji Abdul Hadi Awang, mempunyai dasar dan ukurannya ketika menegur Sisters-in-Islam (SIS) supaya berhati-hati dalam mengejar reformasi Syariat untuk memperjuangkan hak wanita dalam Islam, beliau terus dibalun sebagai seseorang yang menidakkan kebebasan berbicara mengenai agama dalam ruang awam (public domain).

Undang-undang dan pengadilan, sama ada Islam atau sekular, tentu sekali merupakan bidang pengkhususan yang tidak membolehkan orang sebarangan mengusul bicara mengenainya agar umum tidak akan kekeliruan. Ia terhad untuk mereka yang terpelajar dan/atau terlatih dalam bidangnya.

Namun, mereka yang tidak senang dengan Islam terus menerus menolak Syariat sebagai sesuatu sistem undang-undang dan pengadilan yang patut dilindungi daripada kritik dan tuntutan sombrono.

Mereka bersikap seolah-olah Islam dan Syariatnya adalah kolot dan boleh diperlakukan seperti sampah.

Ini adalah gejala dan gejala ini merupakan sesuatu yang kelahiran daripada tujuan Reformasi di Malaysia.

Syariat mengutarakan budi bahasa yang berlemah-lembut (rifq), berbahasa dengan manis dan meringangkan (husn al-khulq) dan supaya berihsan dalam segala perhubungan dan perbuatan.

Maka kita perlu menerangkan dulu segala sesuatu yang asas berkenaan dengan dasar dan perhitungan kita kenapa kita tidak mengharuskan perbicaraan sombrono mengenai Syariat.

Tidak ramai orang Islam di Malaysia mengetahui apakah Objektif Syariat (Maqasid al-Syariah) kerana subjek itu, walau telah diperkenalkan dalam Pengajian Islam di Universiti Malaya sejak awal tahun 1960an, ia kurang menjadi buah perbincangan.

Objektif Syariat adalah kebaikan (masalih atau benefits) yang menjadi tujuan undang-undang Islam.

Lima kebaikan yang utama dan yang menjadi asas (dharuriyat al-khamsa) yang oleh Haji Hadi diungkapkan dalam Ucapan Dasarnya pada Muktamar Pas ke 55 baru-baru ini, adalah rumusan Imam al-Ghazali.

Objektif

Al-Ghazali mengutarakan bahawa lima kebaikan yang asas ini, yakni iman, nyawa, akal, zuriat dan harta, adalah tujuan Syariat yang utama dan yang tidak boleh dileka-lekakan oleh sesebuah masyarakat Muslim.

Ringkasnya, objektif Syariat bertujuan membentang dan melindungi kebaikan masyarakat yang maksima (the greatest public good) dan Dharuriyyat al-khamsa adalah lima keperluan asas dalam cara hidup Islam.

Siasah dalam Islam, secara yang unggul, justeru, adalah untuk memperjuangkan objektif-objektif (maqasid) Shariat dan Maqasid al-Syariat diberi kepada tiga bahagian yang besar, yakni:

a) Lima yang Asas (Dharuriyat al-Khamsa) – lindungan dan kemajuan (i) keimanan, (ii) nyawa dan anggota tubuh, (iii) kemajuan akal (intelek), (iv) zuriat atau lineage, (v) harta (property).

b) Hajiyyat, atau segala pembangunan dan kemajuan komplimentari pada yang lima perkara tadi.

Umpamanya, mendirikan sekolah adalah tergolong dalam kategori Dharuriyyat, dan meningkatkan keselesesaan persekolahan dengan ada bilik darjah berhawa dingin dan beroleh semua alat elektronik pembantu pembelajaran adalah Hajiyyat.

c) Tahsiniyyat, atau perhiasan yang diingini. Bila sudah masyarakat dan Negara beroleh pembangunan dan kemajuan yang asas dan yang komplimentari barulah perbelanjaan dapat diperuntukkan supaya mewujudkan sekitaran yang lebih cantik dan selesa. Ini kategori Tahsiniyyat, atau perhiasan.

Maqasid al-Shariat, justeru, menjadi dasar untuk sebarang tindakan reformasi Syariat dan sekaligus menjadi jadual nilai masyarakat Islam untuk menyesuaikan diri dengan zaman.

Penerangan Asas

Yang di atas tadi hanyalah penerangan yang asas. Kita akan dapati nanti susunan al-Ghazali yang meletakkan dasar Maqasid al-Syariat yang pada lima perkara seperti yang tersebut di atas akan diubah secara yang menyeluruh oleh ibn Taimiyya.

Pendekatan ibn Taimiyya, yakni Bapa Reformasi Islam, itulah diteruskan sampai sekarang oleh mujtahid Yusuf al-Qaradhawi.

Maqasid al-Syariah bukan satu undang-undang Islam atau sesuatu dasar yang berkuatkuasa sebagai satu undang-undang. Ia hanyalah satu perutusan yang diterima oleh umat Islam sebagai dasar dalam Usul Fiqh dan laku sebagai satu asas untuk segala perbicaraan berkaitan undang-undang Islam, atau mengenai Syariat secara umum.

Saya percaya itu sajalah yang menjadi maksud Haji Hadi Awang, yakni untuk mengutarakan pada masyarakat supaya menghurmati objektif-objektif Syariat bila melangkah untuk mengejar perubahan atau pembaharuan Syariat.

Apakah Maqasid al-Shariah ini berguna, atau masih laku dalam masyarakat di Malaysia yang sudah menjadi industrial dan berkotaraya, justeru, merupakan perkara-perkara yang bolehlah dibangkitkan dalam perbincangan.

Yang kurang disenangi hanya sikap acuh-tak-acuh sebilangan orang Islam dan warga Malaysia maupun yang terus bersikap bermusuhan seolah-olah mereka hendak menghapuskan Islam yang mereka pandang sebagai satu kepercayaan yang sudah jauh ketinggalan zaman.

Apakah mereka telah beroleh satu cara hidup yang istimewa? Di mana letak contoh budaya, tamadun dan cara hidup itu?

Satu garis retak yang sudah lama menanti belah telah membentuk konflik terbuka. Yang belum dapat dapat dipastikan adalah apa mungkin SIS akan membuka langkah supaya bertarung dalam gelanggang usul figh ini. ----a.ghani ismail, 1 July, 2009

PAS' MOON IS SPLIT!

2009-06-20T05:41:00.000-07:00

PAS PATRIMONY SPAT - THE SPLITTING OF THE MOON

The moon is split. It’s the clout of aging what’s hit the party, not the suggested Unity Government which is a non-issue, the tantrum this time going so far as to tell the deputy president, Nasharuddin Mat Isa, to resign as MP of Bachok, Kelantan, and get lost from Pas altogether, a wounding that will be hard to plaster.

Nasharuddin is from Negeri Sembilan and therefore a guest of Nik Aziz, 78, the Kelantan Pas chief and Menteri Besar (Chief Minister) who is also the murshidul am (spiritual leader) of the party.

The irascible stoical savant insists he is the captain of the ship and wants Nasharuddin cast overboard, opening a way for mutiny.

Will the ship sink this time? Or is the event only a splitting of the moon deliberately designed to issue an anticipated conflict to remove the distressing distortion of the power hierarchy in Pas?

For how can the party continue if there’s a sustained usurpation of the president’s power and authority?

The party has an elected president and a murshidul am or spiritual guide who is chosen by the Dewan Ulama (Council of Scholars) from an elected group of 15.

He can only be removed by two-thirds of his peers in the Council and therefore, can be a scary figure of power should he also become a state leader and chief executive like Nik Aziz Nik Mat in Kelantan.

Complaints about Nik Aziz performing against the party’s resolutions had consistently surfaced from months after he became Menteri Besar in 1990.

The difficulties arose from the personality, the positions he held and the poorly defined role and authority of the murshidul am – reasons enough to cause gaping holes to appear in the ship’s belly.

Then there’s the fact that Kelantan, which has been the host and fortress of Pas all through the party’s history, is losing the special status and privileges.

Pas, after the sudden surge into national stature in 1999, is now standing with more than one million members from about 60,000 before 1999. That expansion can only be described as an explosion.

While from the early days the party had rooted in Kelantan and expanded merely to the predominantly Malay states of the peninsular, the Pas has now become national and is only requiring to seed in Sabah to contest Umno as a whole.

Temper, personality and character of the leadership must change to accept the new membership profile which has outgrown the old rural and religious-school restrictions.

Pas now embraces an impressive stack of scholars, professional and technocrats.

Resulting from Nik Aziz’s remarkable outburst is a certain gloom. While he is widely respected as a party elder and as a symbol of Islamic stoicism (zuhud), the man is ledged in the patriarchal splendor only because of his appeal to moribund values.

The times have changed. So has the country that has long outgrown the rural dominance and is now having to deal with living in sprawling metropolises revealing hysterics of the industrial society that are unknown in all of Islamic history.

Nik Aziz Nik Mat is still seriously encased in his rural habits and he must reevaluate his own effectiveness, especially in trying to secure for Kelantan her special status as a state that’s central in Pas.

Kelantan cannot remain the center of gravity if Pas is to expand and contest Umno nationally.

For weeks after the 55th Pas general assembly (muktamar) whence the president, Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang, had delivered an inspiring policy speech, the murshidul am simply derailed the whole of the speech by publicly stomping the party president, the deputy president and the secretary-general.

The “Captain’s” anchorman and oarsmen had lost in the recent party elections. Nik Aziz must be feeling that his days too are numbered.

For him there’s no escape. He must immediately prepare for his retirement if the Pas is to remain a credible alternative to Umno or as an effective partner in a Unity Government.

Hadi’s idea of the Unity Government was only a suggested means to overcome the political distresses that had arisen from the 8 March 2008 general elections.

It is no more than a loose suggestion many regard as a good idea. ----a. ghani ismail, 20 June, 2009

PETRA AND DIN ABUSE CYBER CIVILITY

2009-06-09T05:19:00.001-07:00

EVERY DOG MAY HAVE ITS DAY BUT SOME MAY BE GOING MAD
Or

IS RUSDI MUSTAPHA PASQUALE?

Less than a week after I wrote to say a lot of people have had enough of the frantic indiscipline in the rank-and-file of the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), we have Rocky Bru writing today to tell us what well-known fugitive, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, and the new-fellow-on-the blog, Din Marican, had done to journalist, Rusdi Mustapha, who works for Najib Tun Razak. Rocky Bru described it as “something rotten”

The duo, both closely associated with Anwar Ibrahim, have been flexing their muscles often for nothing, this time alleging Rusdi Mustapha is an anonymous blogger who calls himself Pasquale and who is pro-Najib

Din Marican, quite completely ignorant of the person he is after, billed Rusdi as being Najib’s new spinner, when Rusdi has, in fact, been working for Najib personally for many years. He posted a picture of Rusdi with Rocky Bru (Ahirudin Attan), meaning he wants to take on Rocky for coming to Rusdi’s aid.

Rocky is the president of the Journalists’ Club. Who is this very daring Din Marican?
Will he not get himself torn to pieces as a rot should he want to war?

Raja Petra we all know. Big Dog, in his blog, described Raja Petra as a cyber-anarchist now turning to cyber-terrorism after Raja Petra posted on his blog, Malaysia Today, a picture of Rusdi with his wife and only daughter, thus attracting hate-mail aimed at the family.

It signals a new means of intimidation in the cyber issued by the Anwar camp, a warfare for what we have still to wait to know since this is altogether unexpected and unbecoming of civilized society, but apparently not in the Civil Society Anwar proposes to hoist in Malaysia.

Big Dog, as we know, is a former political secretary and a lawyer. Raja Petra, whatever he has been, is now a self-made fugitive, and Big Dog reminded him nobody had exploited the news about what happened to his son.

But the war is on and it is quite clearly uneven. The weights are certainly against Petra and Din.

It is rather of an inane development which will finally leave their master and mutual friend, Anwar Ibrahim, mired in the self-defeating comic, head down. Anwar is already sinking. The Pas has apparently taken enough of him and his “roughnecks” who seemed to deliberately want to sanctify vulgarity in the New Malaysia.

But who is Din Marican, the suddenly-appearing-maestro-of-some-sort in Anwar Ibrahim’s office?

Why has he returned from a posting in Vietnam several years before? Does anybody know? Can Anwar tell us why if someone were to ask him in parliament?

The writer doesn’t know much about Din Marican other than what he has written of himself in his blog. He was a year my senior in college. He did not luster. I listed his blog in mine and took it out after what he has done to Rusdi today.

Rusdi Mustapha is, of course, a long time journalist who had been with The Star, The NST and then with the Sun before working for Najib in a personal capacity. He was not attached to Najib’s official staff. I do not know if he is now included in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Rusdi is married to a Canadian and has a grown daughter. He lived before in Melawati and is known to all his friends as a very helpful, low-keyed, honest-to-goodness person who cannot be having any of the “great political acumen and charm” of the “big” fellows like Raja Petra and Din Marican who appear to have no qualms about stabbing people in the belly or in the back, even some who took them as friends.

Many are calling their style budaya samseng – “hood culture”, something rather stinking in the PKR and for which it is fast losing popular support, including a hefty chunk of the sympathies for it in the Pas.

After the stunts in Penang on the way to the Penanti by-election I wrote to say the Pas and Dap should “eat” into the PKR. Several days after, the Pas, at its annual general assembly, apparently gave notice the party will want to do exactly that.

Now the duo popped up like rotting sour-sops. The question they must ask themselves is whether or not they and their family members can withstand public scrutiny and cyber-splash. Can they? Isn’t there any vulnerability they may wish to secure?

Raja Petra has quickly posted an apology but said his daughter was threatened. Who threatened her? Rusdi Mustapha? Are you serious?

How about Din Marican? Who is he? What has he ever become to want to war with us?

We are probably going to hear a lot about this Johnny-come-lately and I wonder whether he will want to remain in the country or he will also flee like Raja Petra. LEAVE WIVES AND CHILDREN OUT OF YOUR SLIME. Now Din, go!.--- a.ghani ismail, 9 June 2009.

CAN THE PKR BE SUSTAINED?

2009-06-02T01:32:00.000-07:00

ONE FOR THE BRIBE, TWO FOR THE RIDE – A STORY OF PKR’S MAVERICK VICTORY IN PENANTI

After amazing things happened along the road to the Penanti by-election on May 31 including a needless call to bribe one of the three independents who also lost her deposit, the Parti Keadilan Rakyat’s (PKR) glory was still smart even if it rode only on a 46 percent voter-turnout. But how long can the maverick party last?

In terms of discipline the PKR is the weakest in the Pakatan pact of three, some of its members observably power-drunk very early in the day and hardly able to stay out of trouble, even for nothing.

Also apparent is the bite of narcissism some suffer by virtue of being visible in the Blogosphere.

Many simply rile, first flogging the Malays and Islam, then shifting to flogging Umno instead when the heat had touched the danger point.

It’s hardly possible to take the party anymore seriously than a mob.

It is Anwar Ibrahim’s vehicle to power, put together by a chance of history that came and went between 1998 and 2004 and then returned to hit the Barisan Nasional (BN) in the eye on 8 March 2008.

Inside the vehicle are Anwar and his family members, his secretaries and aides, an assortment of NGOs some of which were and are one person-with-a-sidekick shows, members of the former Parti Sosialis Rakyat Malaysia (PSRM) and, if we are to believe the incredible, the bulk could be members of urban groups, collectively the Mat Rempits.

Is this motley crowd socialists, or socialistic? Is there any intention to redistribute income and eradicate urban-rural poverty?

Is there a social policy guaranteeing human and social rights plus a system of taxes and provisions glued to the motive of this lightning-strike political force that has suddenly captured enough power together with the Pas and DAP to deny the BN the two-third majority in parliament?

None as far as the writer is aware.

The PKR is seriously unlike the social democrats of the DAP and the Pas with her Islamic Welfare State.

The PKR is merely about Anwar Ibrahim first and last, with an easily countable number of capable hands.

It started off as a powerhouse in March 2008 with a crisis in the Selangor Mentri Besar’s office and it is still as rough at the edges as when it started.

Can it be sustained in the future after power is acquired over the Federation, which could very well happen in the 13th general elections?

As it is that would be unlikely.

Without an ideological purpose and already showing the inclination to corruption and power-drunkenness, the PKR must necessarily be eaten by the other two in the pact for the Pakatan Rakyat to continue as a viable power-option that can provide for a stable government and for development.

The members of the pact will have to consider other likelihoods if that eating is not possible.

They would even need to think of joining the BN if this country is to be kept from crumpling in the conflicts between the innocence of the lesser endowed and the vicious corruption of the cunning.

PKR has been an endless string of trouble.

Beginning with the spat between Khalid Ibrahim and his Special Officer in the Selangor Menteri Besar’s Office, the party locked into a set of troubles between Anwar’s secretaries, followed by the two state executive councilors in Perak who were caught doing something in a hotel in Penang.

Then came Elizabeth Wong’s difficulty with her boyfriend that will come back later on and the latest is about the two who lunched in Aminah’s house to persuade her to withdraw from contesting in Penanti.

They could have offered her RM80,000 to withdraw. Why did they do that will remain rather of a mystery of power. ---a. ghani ismail, 2 June, 2009

WILL PAS BE LEADING PAKATAN?

2009-05-23T21:33:00.002-07:00

ISLAM IS NOT THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP

or

SOMETHINGS BETTER SAID WILL HAVE TO BE UTTERED

PSRM is a party of academic snobs and the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) is something of a disjointed group of political newbies led by Anwar Ibrahim, journalist, Shamsul Akmar, said. He was in a hurry.

It’s a knee-jerk reaction to my recent postings that say the Pakatan Rakyat is poised to win the next Malaysian general elections, not because it entices but because more and more voters do not want Umno and the Barisan Nasional (BN).

Many among my friends were shell-shocked by the matter-of-fact statement.

Professor Emeritus Dr. Isahak Haron of the UPSI said I was being “mystical”. He expects my reading to be correct again even if it does not appear right at the moment. But the reading here is simple.

The former PSRM is now a component of the PKR, which is the weakest of the trio in Pakatan Rakyat but with the largest number in Parliament (31 seats). Other than the PSRM the PKR is mainly led by a motley of Anwar Ibrahim's secretaries and NGOs. But was the PSRM leadership scholars and snobs?

Other than Kassim Ahmad who had led the party for 18 senseless years and has left it for good, the others I knew in the PSRM were not all scholars nor were they egoistical snobs. Syed Husin Ali and Gamany can’t be snobs.

I concede, however, the party had gone rather wrong after Boestamam (Pak Boes) left the helm to Kassim in 1967, at Kangar, Perlis.

Pak Boes regretted that day, saying he had to retire but the party ought to have chosen someone else.

Since then it was true the new stars of Partai Rakyat (later PSRM) would talk far above the heads of their audiences whereupon my friends and I, including Drs Ahmad Kamar and Dr. Raja Mukhtaruddin Dain, not only distanced ourselves but also launched into a lengthy and extensive study of Islam.

Shamsul, worried about what would happen to the Malays should Pakatan win the 13th general elections, said Pas would be the better choice compared to Parti Keadilan Rakyat. He mentioned several bloggers having trouble over the same question.

People ought to be told Anwar Ibrahim knew he was in deep trouble soon after becoming the number two in Umno in 1993. He suggested I quickly move to the Pas with the late Fadhil Noor at the helm then. Fadhil was Anwar’s deputy in Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM) and we were close friends.

ABIM

Today we have some writers dividing the Pas into the Traditionalists and the Erdogan groups, the latter meaning the Anwarites. That isn’t quite right.

Pas had been a variety all the time since it was born and with many socialists joining the party soon after. Socialists, including Pak Boes and Pak Sako, had been together with Abu Bakar Baqir in Gunung Semanggol when the Hizbul Muslimin was formed in 1948. The party was promptly banned by the British Colonial Government.

Fadhil Noor joined ABIM in the early 70s followed later by Hadi Awang, with Dr Haron Din, Abdul Ghani Shamsuddin and Ahmad Awang from the Persatuan Ulama Malaysia (PUM) and many more Pas stalwarts acting as advisors in the Muslim youth organization.

There was unity among those from the ABIM in Umno and Pas even if the groups had to undergo a severe initial shock following Anwar’s decision to join Umno in 1981.

By 1985 Anwar had gone places. He met Paul Wolfowitz who was US ambassador in Jakarta in 1986. The beginning of the Reformasi would soon be seeded.

ABIM was to get together with B.J.Habibie’s ICMI in Indonesia, ushering in a new element, new thinking and new Malay-Islamic outlook.

Habibie, an aero-engineer who was one among 20 bright-sparks Suharto sent abroad to become Indonesia’s future technocrats, would soon inspire with his wonder-ideas, like using the reflected sunlight from the sand in the shallows of the sea along the shorelines for energy.

He planned to make helicopters and submarines in Indonesian and usher in industrialization in a big way.

Since then, the ABIM in Pas and the groups under Fadhil Noor and Hadi Awang were no longer the same as they had been when the ulama took over the party from Asri Haji Muda in 1982.

By 1995 the scenario we see today had been set. It was sensed sometime in the late 80s.

We were told a multiracial party like the Gerakan had been in 1969 would be needed to change the pattern of votes if the Opposition were to win.

Gerakan, in 1969, listed members of the Malaysian stardom with the late Prof. Dr. Syed Hussein al-Attas as president, his brother, Naguib, and the venerated Prof. Dr. Wang Gung-wu, V. David from the labor unions and many more greats leading the party that Dr. Lim Chong Eu founded.

As a result of the intrusion the votes broke the historical distribution and several states fell to the Opposition.

The similarities between the election results of 1969 and 2008 had too many things in common to be given to coincidences. Anwar had advisors who had studied well the voters’ behaviors in Malaysia.

A Gerakan of the 1969 sort was required and it was this Gerakan-type party that skidded in the making and became the PKR we know today – broad-based, no doubt, but with drug addicts, thieves and sex-savants inside.

Anwar was in prison at that time, people fearing for his life after he was severely beaten by the then IGP in police custody.

As a result PKR divisions were formed riding piggy-back on Pas. Now many party divisions are non-performing. Wan Azizah, the president, had six growing children to take care of.

The PKR, however, functioned as a vote-collector and soon it will be put in better battle order by Azmin Ali and his task force.

Now that the Pakatan is poised to win federal power, the people who worry like Shamsul should be told there was pre-planning and in the end the Malays will be secure in the Pas, no matter what the ancient Nik Aziz Nik Mat is saying. He seems to fear retirement and the loss of fame, or notoriety, whichever applies.

Welfare State

Pas under Abdul Hadi Awang is going for the Welfare State. In Islam the Welfare State is simply a national and a universal order that guarantees a set of securities.

These securities begin with Food and Water Security, Health Security, Employment and Old Age Securities, Education Security by which everyone, young and old, are entitled to free education and will be paid a stipend sufficient to meet their basic needs.

Then there are Supplies and Consumer Security that traditionally were the domains of the Muhasib, the responsibility given to former Lord President, Tun Salleh Abas, when Terengganu was held by the Pas in 2004-2008.

The same department is responsible for Moral and Ethical Security which makes it impossible to hoard and escape punishment, or to purchase votes like it has happened in the two previous Umno Divisional and Supreme Council elections.

The list of securities is not exhaustive, of course. When in Medinah with Abdul Hadi Awang I dropped my wallet in the mosque during Subuh prayer, Hadi told me it will not be picked by anyone and we can retrieve it when we return to the mosque for Zuhur. The wallet was there, intact.

All shops, including jewel and money-changer stores, would be left open without any guard during prayer times in Medinah and Mekah, which are Haramiyah, or sanctuaries.

It’s hard to believe nobody would be tempted to steal in whole towns of shops and stores left open and unguarded.

That’s the Islamic state of security Hadi has been talking about several times in his speeches and Dr Mahathir denying that is so. Mahathir was not honest. In fact, many believe he and some of his men were corrupt.

Aaand…and…and Umno too became corrupt.

Said Tengku Ahmad Rithaudeen, chairman of the party’s Disciplinary Board, the party is already corrupt at the core.

People know that this is true, and the corruption had begun sometime in the 80s under Dr. Mahathir who wanted to remain PM for life.

Can the Malays any longer trust their future to Umno? Is corruption somehow tame and developmentally neutral, even after Bloomberg suggested more than RM300 billion had been lost to corruption in Malaysia?

What glory is there in the BN taking over the Perak government when two of the three grasshoppers should have been charged in court for accepting money and sexual gratifications?

What about the BN’s decision not to contest in Penanti on May 31? Is that what a political struggle is about? Isn’t there anything more to gain in whipping the Opposition during a by-election run?

Can it be the same as it would be with Islam under the Pas?

The list of securities in Islam given above is in the limited case, the object here is merely to show that Islam is not the Devil’s Workshop some in America and Europe would have us believe.

There’s freedom of religion in Islam. For the Socialists looking for nationalization, in the times of the second Caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, five essential items were nationalized, namely weapons (it was wartime), grains, salt, sugar and fabrics.

You would term those primary industries today. But the nationalization is merely “an attire” or a dressing in Islam. It is only useful when it serves to secure the People.

But where then is the “explosion” to be making history with in Islam, like with the Proletarian Revolution in scientific socialism?

That lies in the fight against “Falsehoods” (Taghut), the expressed arrogance of the Rich and Mighty that mars human liberty, equality, fraternity and dignity. It’s as easy as that, something everyone can understand.

If you have a problem with the PKR or the DAP, try Islam then, sans the mythic, the patriarchal, tribal and the superstitions. --a. ghani ismail, 19 May, 2009

INTO THE PERAK IMBROGLIO AND AFTER

2009-05-08T20:56:00.000-07:00

THE PERAK IMBROGLIO -
SWINGING FROM THE CEILING FOR PEOPLE POWER

As soon as one democratic history was made in Ipoh with the unprecedented disorder at the opening of the new session of the Perak State Assembly on 7 May, another history was being readied to repeat itself from outside the august building that’s become september.

If there had been chandeliers in the state assembly hall, assemblymen, fully dressed in the splendorous outfits of the state’s lawmakers, could have been seen swinging from the ceiling in the attempt to disrupt the proceedings the Pakatan Rakyat conceived as illegal.

The Pakatan Rakyat (Pakatan) literally means People’s Pact. It was contesting in court the legitimacy of the Barisan Nasional (BN) government the state ruler appointed in February. The judgment shall be read on Monday 11 May.

But in the wake of the failed attempt to disrupt the May sitting is to be seen the seeding of a failed state many observers have decided is staring at us eye-ball to eye-ball.

The turn of events in Perak from February, when the Sultan decided to appoint a new Menteri Besar, has now reached the point when the Pakatan will probably gain much politically by returning to People’s Power.

The court will decide who the legitimate Perak Menteri Besar (Chief Minister) is this Monday.

Whether it will be Nizar of Pakatan or Zambry of BN, it is the people who must be finally the kingmaker and the people are not sure that the monarch was vested with the power to dismiss Nizar.

That makes for a crack in the wall large enough for People’s Power to slip through and to continue aggressing for change.

This time the change is spelled into a simple compound of ending the BN (and Alliance) rule of more than 50 years in the 13th general elections which the new PM, Najib Tun Razak, will have to decide as early as he possibly can for a mandate.

It is now about the force of popular perceptions in a circumstance of a weakened government abruptly underscored by massive corruption and a ruling-elite of contractors, businessmen and professionals that’s popularly assumed as unreservedly arrogant.

It is also about a Prime Minister with a luggage heavy enough for him to be evenly distracted, isolated and demonized, which is what the game has become since Najib Tun Razak took over from Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Pak Lah) about a month before.

The doubt about the monarch’s power-reach is one thing and the problem of the PM and the power-elite is another. The third disturbing factor is about the police political over-reactions.

The BN, having lost enough popular support to be denied the two-third majority in parliament on 8 March 2008, turned under Pak Lah to using the police to stem the tide of popular demand for change and for basic democratic liberties.

On 7 May in Ipoh the police force apparently recoiled like a disturbed cobra and struck, arresting 69 in the ripples of the protests advanced by the Pakatan lawmakers in the State Assembly.

Some were arrested for wearing black T-shirts to mark 1Black Malaysia, a lithe marker of the 7 May opening of the “illegal” Perak State Assembly.

Others were arrested for standing around the State Assembly building and some for drinking tea at coffee-shops within a given radius from the building.

It was as though the State Secretariat building was conceived as a nuclear bomb test-ground.

When lawmakers, both federal and state, were among those arrested and were handcuffed and taken to the Balai, what was messaged in our heads was a repeat of the arrest and subsequent injury vested on the then Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, who was taken from his house in 1998 by a troop of police personnel wearing balaclavas and armed with automatic weapons.

The reactions were plain: If that could be done on the deputy prime minister and the lawmakers it can be done to any of us without a squeak being heard. It is feudal and it is tyranny.

It’s the kind of action designed to drive the people into a sense of impotence and that failed before, leading instead to the popular rejection of the BN and which has stayed for more than a year since 8 March 2009.

The pictograph issued to our brains from the day of Anwar’s arrest and subsequent abuse in police custody was of a Police State.

It was this pictograph of the Police State that has been the most tangible evidence of power misuse in a nation popularly conceived as ruled by a self-seeking and corrupt elite, now intervened by three monarchs for good measure.

This same hyperactive police force, we are often told, is faction-wracked.

When one senior officer is transferred to another location, it was said the group of his subordinates would follow him, leaving his successor having to begin anew in the arts and sciences of crime-busting in the given locale.

In the circumstances of rising prices, flips-flops or fumbles of policy decisions and which have even led to royal interventions in at least three states, increasing crime rate, unemployment, falling morale and growing malaise, the accumulated distresses must lend something familiar to the critical mind – i.e. failing statecraft.

Hence, more and more want a recall of People’s Power to furnish the gloom with a bright yonder. Allahu Akbar! Workers Unite! Ahem, it’s a naked backside of a China doll!

And yet the Pakatan is poised to win bigger in a Perak state re-election and in the 13th general elections. The People have had enough. --- a. ghani ismail, 9 May, 2009

CAN PAKATAN STAY UNITED?

2009-05-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

Gazing With Gamany Into The Future Of Pakatan Rakyat

When in a seizure of gloom Gamany of Daim And Gamany (retired) called to dispense present Pakistan as the prescribed end-time of Malaysia, the surrender of the socialist’s sense of optimism caused the hurt in the heart a paste of the Balm of Gilead cannot lighten.

Gamany was my teacher when I was in primary school, probably a member of the socialist circle in Taiping from back then, which was when I was introduced to the colonial banned items but was too young to read them.

These items were books and pamphlets, including Marx and Engel, and the manifesto of 1848, available later in the University of Malaya library where I read them in 1962.

I knew of the circle in Taiping in 1951. I had to collect these items for my eldest brother who was a member.

That’s a glimpse of personal history, when Gamany was my teacher, and later becoming a friend.

Now, a little older and wiser, I can tell Gamany he erred when he assumed the Pas would follow the path of the Taliban someday, possibly because the followers of Nik Aziz Nik Mat had gone to Kabul to show support for the Taliban regime before the Nato forces displayed their powers of Light-N-Sound in that wonderland weapons test-ground.

Taliban means students. The community is properly a Deobandhi movement, the Dar’ul-Ulum (House of Knowledge) in Deobandh being the oldest university in South Asia and the second in the world.

Nik Aziz Nik Mat, currently the Kelantan Menteri Besar, was a student of Dar’ul-Ulum before he did his Masters at al-Azhar in Cairo.

Deobandh was traditional. Even if the great Muslim reformist/modernist and member of a Freemason Lodge, Jamaluddin al-Afghani, had taught at Deobandh before leaving for Cairo and recruiting into the reform movement the then Rector, Muhammad Abduh, the Dar’ul-Ulum itself retained rather of a conservative outlook through the 20th century.

It was itself physically a small campus with merely about 15,000 titles in its library when I visited it the first time in 1972.

Dar’ul-Ulum, it should be recalled, was and is financed by Muslim endowments, and hence purposed to preserve the traditions, leaving little room for the westernization of al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh.

Islam and the Pas cannot be equated with the Talibans or the Deobandhis, surely. Pas president, Hadi Awang, belongs to the Egyptian Ikhwanu’l-Muslimin of the Abdul Rashid Rida school.

The Syrian Rashid Rida was publisher and editor of Al-Manar. He was a member of the reformists but who differed from Muhammad Abduh and al-Afghani about westernization. He inspired Hassan al-Banna, founder and leading light of the Ikhwan and Syed Qutb the martyr.

Now I need to ask Gamany whether or not because of the differences in worldview with the Muslim traditionalists of Pas, he finds little patience with them as it is with the American and Europeans and therefore, he too regards them as “Terrorists” who should be eliminated?

To a socialist, as it would be to a Muslim or a true Biblical Christian or Jew, optimism is interwoven with Life, the lost of which would sunder the soul and render it to prostitution of one sort or another.

‘…as they groaned under those who oppressed and afflicted them. But when the judge died, the people returned to the ways even more corrupt than those of their fathers, following other gods and serving and worshipping them. They refused to give up their evil practices and stubborn ways.

‘Therefore the Lord was very angry…’ (Judges, 2:18-20)

Gamany, now 80, had sunk by the weight of the conflicting ideologies in the Pakatan that bunched the former Partai Socialist Rakyat Malaysia (PSRM) with the Singapore-branded Social Democrats of the DAP, the Muslims in the Pas and the youthful sets of ‘Anwar’s secretaries and NGO activists’ a few of whom had ruined the pride of the revolutionaries with their rides on belles from China.

After the magical orgasms of two of these seekers of sexual succulence were over, so was the Pakatan government in Perak, stumped and slumped, but not spent.

The circus cast returned to the fore merely as snarling lions, the growls and roars lost in the driving spurts of New Malaysia, and yet it won against the Barisan Nasional (BN) in Permatang Pauh, Kuala Terengganu, Bukit Gantang and Bukit Selambau by-elections.

The rot in the Barisan Nasional (BN) has certainly set and Pakatan is definitely looking good for federal power in the near future, many expecting it to win in the 13th general elections.

Therefore, either Pakatan is cleansed from the Rambo sexuality and corruption pronto and a bridge is built between the differing groups and parties inside it, or, as Gamany said, the components of the pact will fight one against the other.

PKR’s Civil Society isn’t and cannot be about drugs-sex-politics, surely, and it is best for those notched at the top of the Pakatan posse to know they had dragged a few of these into the ark, strapped to the folios of the long gone hippie wave but still wishing to be free to suck into the shamanic soma of Shangrila.

Ces’t la guerre! This is war! This is not a New Age passage to release sexual pent-up on a springboard having only the water below as the attire of entire casts of stags!

This is war of a democratic sort, a fight for hearts and minds against inequality, against the denial of rights, against unjust laws and against tyranny, not of the classical industrial proletariat (landless workers) versus the bourgeoisie (landed owners of capital) in Marx’s 1848 manifesto for turning over power.

This is a Malaysian and global run against the sustained feudalism and plutocracy, the latter being the rule of the rich and powerful, for the rich and powerful, by the rich and powerful, the proletarian and peasant blurred in the structures and processes of the patron-client that’s able to lift, in a jiffy, a poor clerk into becoming a millionaire. Aaaand it is filthily corrupt.

For this war we have our own foundational and structural priorities. We have our own theories and strategies.

Even the “Marxists” in Kerala and Tamil Nadu do not keep to the textbooks and are not revolutionaries in a class struggle of labor against capital as proletarian revolutionaries of the kind imagined by many in Malaysia because of the Communist Insurrections.

In Indonesia, Tan Malaka did not keep to “scientific socialism”, nor did Musso keep to the instructions of the Comintern.

It was a fight against oppression more like this:

‘Why should you not fight in the cause of God, when the oppressed men, women and children are crying out,” Our Lord, deliver us from this community whose people are unjust, and make us worthy of having You as our protector, and make us worthy of having You as our support.’ (Qur’an, 4:70)

There in the Holy Qur’an and the Bible we can find the unity of purpose the Pakatan can use to seal the pact with, i.e. if that is what it wants to do.

In Islam it is a struggle between the class of mustas’afin (the poor, dispossessed, exploited or oppressed) and the mustakbirin (the powerful and arrogant). Islam is meaningless without this struggle.

It must be simple to see the two classes would be differently expressed between historical epochs and Marx’s proletariat was the mustas’afin of the European Industrial Revolution when the bourgeois was the mustakbirin.

Were the classes the same in Asia? Are the classes remaining the same in the post-industrial age?

Since the Muslims have a perception of their own about the class struggle, how the simplicity of Marxist dialectical and historical materialism are translated into a class and/or moral struggle will decide whether or not the pact can survive the change after power is acquired and distributed between the groupings in it.

Outside the dogmatic and show of bookish ideological fundamentalism, the Pakatan foursome can find enough sense in the class and moral struggles of the scriptural revolution to spring a unity of purpose and unity of thought so the different groups within it can become complements.

But should the DAP and the socialists in the PKR insist on seeing Islam in bits and pieces and name-call the Pas as Taliban or a party that’s glued to the Hudud and the Islamic State like it is a tri-foliated weed, the result will have to be a carefully graduated cooperation under stress that will have to win power first and then agree to battle forevermore.

The Muslims have their own idea of history and their own traditions, now working their way out of the crumpling orthodox fundamentalism and having the more stable financial institutions, insurance and securities in a world gone limp by the post-Bretton Woods super laissez-faire economy.

It is the Atlantic Axis that has become bankrupt while it was wishing to contain China and create a Greater Middle-East by diplomacy and by force.

The “New Islam” in Malaysia was very much Anwar Ibrahim’s brainchild. He introduced the Islamic financial institutions in the country, plus the International Islamic University to found the New Islam.

In Malaysia it was Ustaz Ahmad Awang who led the initial studies of the Islamic laws governing the financial institution. He is now the Perak Pas Commissioner and a member of the Pas Central Committee.

It is clear if PKR can get it’s act together it is especially suited to play the role of bridging the differences between the Chinese dominated social democrats of the DAP and the Malay Muslims in Pas, and to lend a hand to the socialists in the PKR so the trio may walk together in confidence as a unity in diversity, as it had been in the Indonesian experience.

It should be remembered former Pas president, Dr. Burhanuddin al-Helmy, was a socialist. It is also well-known that former Acheh governor and member of PUSA (Persatuan Ulama Seluruh Acheh), was a leader of PESINDO (Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia).

Are you still afraid? In all its blessed life it seems likely the PSRM never did acquire even a single fruit stall to lend a helping hand to the peasants and proletariat. For 18 years under Kassim Ahmad it’s likely it merely talked itself almost to death. Could that be the reason for your fear? ---a. ghani ismail, 2 May 2009

Umno's Changing Fore-tunes

2009-04-28T00:33:00.000-07:00

NAJIB’S UMNO RUNNING AROUND INTO A CIRCLE OF THE DEAD

The will to fight having snapped at the very top following the losses at Bukit Gantang and Bukit Selambau on April 7, Umno, which has long been overwhelmed by contractors and businessmen, can only hope to retain her dwarfed stature in the Barisan Nasional (BN) via off-party means.

The party is apparently in grave need of NGOs, the para-military Wataniah outfit and state agencies like the Biro Tatanegara (BTN) to fight the battles for the state-enriched Malay elite that’s mostly dissociated from the people.

NGO queen, Marina Mahathir, catching the call by the Umno Youth vice-president, Razali Ibrahim, for members of his wing to join NGOs, asked in her blog whether these chaps are expected to simply declare they are from Umno Youth and then expect to be elected presidents of the voluntary outfits.

The tomcat-call isn’t at all new. Over and over again it was voiced by office-bearers during the recent party divisional meetings. It can’t be such a piece of cake.

But rich contractors and businessmen now stud the starry sky of Umno, many, if not most, winning their way through the ranks via vote-purchase.

These are dissociated from the people. They do not fight politically. They do not know how.

Some said aloud they cannot fight because they are contractors who have now to depend on the largesse of the ruling Opposition in five (or four states) and in one Federal Territory.

It’s this loud song of business distress that’s breaking the morale to bits in Umno, now flung high as confetti after the new president, Najib Tun Razak, slumped to the ground before the unbroken losing streak running from 8 March, 2008 to 7 April, 2009.

He is himself a representative of the traditional and the entrenched elites.

Now unable to face another knock-out in Penanti on May 31, the man is certainly not an Umno and BN leader who can be expected to regain lost grounds. Worse, people are beginning to shun him and soon he may not be anymore listened to.

Purchase and sleight-of-hand is looking like the only ways to regain the loss grounds and loss states, like what happened in Perak which finally converted into a gain of merely five percent of Malay votes on April 7 in Bukit Gantang.

That gain was offset by 10 percent of Chinese votes going the other way, resulting in a bigger-than-ever loss the BN had sustained in that constituency.

The thinking is simple: Because a direct and comprehensive ideological dispute is impossible for Umno to launch against the Pakatan, it will mean we have to be sitting through a political paradigm shift that will make democratic elections a grand market-place with outright purchases, infiltrations and sabotage of NGOs to counter Civil Society.

How will that ever work?

Umno is not anymore the party that was born in 1946 and which was sustained by voluntarism through the murderous Communist Insurgency, the main thrust of which ended in 1960.

But after the fight for freedom and democracy has now become a furious greed and the party is merely a playground for the rich and connected, the questions members ask are about which Malays the party represents and what are the leaders fighting for other than for their own business and financial interests?

The party is fractioned into factions of the New Malay, the indigene Mafiosi, many members without a smear of nationalism in their natures.

The previous party president and Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (now Tun), could have even made Malaysia to become like a vassal of Singapore, himself sometimes described as a “Singapore serf”, a thing unthinkable in Umno until his tenure.

Singapore was made the anchor of Iskandar Malaysia in Johor and was apparently represented in Khazanah Malaysia and in Level Four of the PM’s Department.

Are these psychological warps the results of Umno’s successes?

Are these changes necessary in a party that leads in a successful industrial and trading plural nation of 28 million souls, mixed in a swap of ideological divisions for a Greater China, Greater India, and the bunched Anglophile Compradors which have now taken to Neo-Cons valuelessness by video-visages?

And are Malay contractors and businessmen the answer to the cultural shifts that ought to have been a leap towards modernization and integration in an industrial and digital setting?

Truth is, there’s hardly a Malay critical mass worthy of spawning the much vaunted Bumiputra Commercial and Industrial Community (BCIC) after more than 50 years since Independence or more than 30 years of the New Economic Policy.

The New Malays, dripping excessive Brute deodorants in their cosmetically sweetened spaces of BMWs and Mercedes, are definitely no match for the demonstration-hardened Marhaens, the Muslims of Pas and volunteer activists of the Pakatan demanding change to secure liberty, transparency and accountability.

The government had been run by a dictator in the second half of Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s leadership, the man taking power over religion and the judiciary as well.

He slurped power and decided on his own everything the Malays had held dear or distressful, including teaching of Mathematics and Science in English even in rural schools.

It was once rumored he had suggested the confusing anti-Hadith personage, Kassim Ahmad, to become Mufti of Penang. Many think of Kassim as an outright charlatan, either as a Socialist or as a Muslim.

The result is a gaping question that hasn’t been answered to date – Wither Malaysia? There is also the problematic and arousing puzzlement about where the Malays are being led to, like paddy-buffalos.

Najib has answered none of these questions. Has he the answers or will he eventually lead the Malays and the nation into one or another form of vassalage?

In the given circumstances it is the Opposition that’s looking more and more the likely winner in the next general elections. It is merely in need of a thorough cleansing to remove the dregs and the culturally bewildered.

The Pakatan represents the larger segment of the people and Najib’s Umno isn’t looking likely that it shall at all become relevant to the lesser endowed among Malays and Malaysians alike. These form the greater body of producers in Malaysia.

Adios amigo! Ces’t la vie! ---a. ghani ismail, 28 April, 2009

RAINBOW IN THE SON

2009-04-13T01:28:00.000-07:00

RAINBOW IN THE SON - NAJIB’S FIRST WEEK IN POWER

Wretched days gloomed the recall of power to the family of Malaysia’s glorious leader, Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, whose son, Mohamed Najib, 55, was sworn-in as the country’s new premier on April 3 only to be socked by a double defeat on April 7 when the Barisan Nasional (BN) he now leads lost to Pakatan Rakyat in Bukit Gantang and Bukit Selambau in a fight for grabs.

The spontaneous reaction when the results were announced was ‘It’s over!’ (Habis!).

The third contest in the by-elections did not bother anyone. Batang Ai was a BN seat in Sarawak the ruling coalition retained.

Bukit Gantang (Parliamentary) and Bukit Selambau (State) were fought against Najib’s clever takeover of the Perak government the Pakatan is contesting. Also staked in the fight for the finish was Najib’s One Malaysia concept.

People are now asking what does the One Malaysia actually mean, a critical question that’s sending his ascent to the highest office in the county into a popular frown that can cost him a quick loss of confidence.

Najib walked into his first day of office on April 6. A day later he was shrunk by the acid froth that surfaced from the larger-than-before losses in the two constituencies the BN should have walked away with, hands down.

As he shrunk in size his arch-rival, Anwar Ibrahim, rose into an out-of-proportion giant.

Anwar is now poised to grow into a mighty Godzilla win or lose against the peculiar charge of sodomy he was alleged to have enjoyed in a ride of his aide, Saiful, 21, a day after he returned from umrah (supererogatory pilgrimage) in Mecca.

It suggested he was addicted to forcible homosexual thrust many refuse to believe is possible for a man of 61 with a bad back to boot.

Clearly the dual defeat on April 3 injured Najib worse than before.

In his trail to the top he lugged an out-sized luggage which became heavier after his chosen running-mate, Ali Rastum, was disqualified from contesting for party number two by the Umno Disciplinary Board. Ali was found guilty of political corruption and the country is abuzz until now.

Wagging tongues had since verged on the vitriolic. When he chose Gerakan president, Koh Tsu Khoon and his Wanita Chief, Tan Lian Hoe, into his Cabinet, the Malays became sullen.

The duo was mainly responsible for the punishment meted out on former Umno divisional chief in Penang, Ahmad Ismail, for saying in a communal banter the Chinese were squatters in Malaysia.

When Ahmad was forced out of all his political and NGO positions and then, in fact, was charge for sedition (later withdrawn), the whole 14 divisions of Penang Umno protested against the severe punishment and against the Gerakan duo.

Later former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir, was to refer to the event in a speech wherein he said it would soon be seditious for the Malays to call Malaya Tanah Melayu (Malay Motherland).

It’s ironic, and perhaps negligent, for Najib to make Koh Tsu Khoon in charge of Unity, which ought to entrust the One Malaysia concept to him. And with him in the Cabinet is Tan Lian Hoe a lot of the Malays in Umno had wanted out.

It must also be remembered members of the Movement Against Teaching Mathematics and Science in English who had held a large demonstration in Kuala Lumpur weeks before had campaigned against the BN in Bukit Gantang.

The upshot is obviously bad for Najib. While some are saying let’s wait for the first 100 days of the new premier before judging him, a lot of Malays are saying he is not championing or even representing their cause.

Najib is, they say, only a more efficient version of Pak Lah, the party president they sacked and may now be punished for having done that.

Meanwhile, the MIC has shown its dissatisfaction for being given the junior Human Resource Cabinet post and not either the Works or the Transport Ministry where good fruits are bunched.

It’s certain Najib is in deep waters. What’s happened to the PPP is a question worth examining after it was said 6,000 of the party members in Kedah had joined the PKR before the April 7 by-elections.

It’s looking like Najib may sink before he is actually launched. But what would it take for the Pakatan Rakyat to become an acceptable alternative to the BN? ---a. ghani ismail, 13 April, 2009

PAK LAH'S UNEASY ENDING

2009-03-29T00:56:00.000-07:00

CRUSHING END TO PAK LAH’S RULE IN UMNO

Crushed into a crunch, leaving in a pall of gloom, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Pak Lah) on the last day of Umno’s 59th general assembly, took a final stab at his successor, Najib Tun Razak, on the Saturday that seemed to have planned to rain but didn’t, possibly to see to it his predecessor, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, would attend the event and come out dry and comfy.

The New Sunday Times 29th March front-paged the story, asking aloud, “April 2 handover?”, meaning will the transfer of power actually happen on April 2.

It’s about the last words of Pak Lah in the 2008 General Assembly he had stalled and was finally held the previous five days, electing a new set of office-bearers in the Supreme Council that ought to have been done in 2007.

In that final speech at the assembly he announced he would be seeking an audience with the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King) on Thursday, “to convey his intention of relinquishing his post as prime minister.”

He said, “Insya Allah (God willing), this will be accepted,” the New Sunday Times reported on page 3.

It’s a stretch of words that was a clear offence, leaving some interpreting the clause to mean the Yang di-Pertuan Agong did not want Najib Tun Razak to become Prime Minister.

Already unhappy about having to live in Umno with his remarkable son-in-law as the new Youth Chief, many could barely digest the offensive of the former party president and outgoing premier. It was uncalled for.

In the foyer a little later, a political writer told me the Agong does not want Najib, a quick semantic enhancement of the spit that could have had its root in the appeal to the King former de facto law minister, Zaid Ibrahim, had said he would make.

I replied it wasn’t true. It’s merely Pak Lah finding it difficult to relinquish his posts, I said.

Pak Lah was insisting he would go down in history worse than badly. His son-in-law had won in the election for Youth chief after he was announced guilty of political corruption by the party’s disciplinary board.

Even after he was booed in the assembly his father-in-law used the occasion to declare Khairy Jamaluddin deserved to win because ‘he had worked very hard.’

Family had always come first to Pak Lah. Now family had come before party and nation, a sizzling sufferance the party members will not hold without baulking, causing many to question whether the BN can make it in the Bukit Gantang by-election on April 7 with that man on board. The BN will.

When asked how Khairy shall find his spots in Umno after the repeated booing and heckling, Pak Lah said Anwar Ibrahim too had had a degree of difficulty when he became Umno Youth chief in 1982.

The comparison cannot hold. Anwar was not only a charismatic leader from his student days but an internationally acclaimed youth leader as well.

Before joining Umno in 1981 Anwar was ABIM president for nearly a decade and president of the Asia-Pacific chapter of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). How does Khairy at all compare?

In any case, Anwar is now leading the Opposition pact. Will Khairy be going his way?

The Supreme Council election had otherwise been satisfactory to the larger good of the party, bringing in Muhyiddin Yassin as number two with Zahid Hamidi, Hishamuddin Hussein and Shafie Afdal as vice-presidents.

The new team is widely read as giving Najib a strong support in his agenda for change, a call the party must make, or crumble to death in the process by the sheer weight of its luggage. The party has become corrupt.

The move necessitates a clean party leadership and cabinet, something Pak Lah was top-billed for five years ago, him turning upside-down so swiftly it defeats an easy example to be gotten from human history.

He seemed to have believed his job was first and last to dismantle all that Mahathir had done, himself willingly becoming Singapore-inclined to the degree he dumped the national quest to regain the use of the Selat Tebrau (Johor Straits).

People were aghast when Malaysia lost to Singapore Batu Putih (Pedra Blanca). Thousands had wept openly, the tears suggesting Pak Lah’s end times will not be an easy one. ---a. ghani ismail, 29 March 2009

THE UMNO DILEMMA

2009-03-26T03:06:00.000-07:00

NAJIB IN A DO OR DIE CLINKER DRY POLITICAL WARP

Or

Can He Avoid A Purge In Umno?

REALITY IN UMNO crashed like a head-on collision of bullet trains on Wednesday, 25 March 2008. The outgoing premier’s son-in-law, the notorious Khairy Jamaluddin, was announced the winner in the contest for the coveted Umno Youth chief against all odds.

It was just about 24 hours after Najib Tun Razak delivered his Umno-reform speech to the party’s wings, promising a clean-up and an acceptable team for his cabinet when he does become PM on April 2.

Khairy, who was declared by the party’s disciplinary committee guilty of political corruption was somehow not disqualified from contesting in the party’s elections.

Others were, including a contestant for the party’s deputy president.

Initial reactions were of deep dismay. The turn of events which was not altogether unexpected, was widely described as “disastrous,” the impact stupefying after Umno and the BN’s colossal losses on 8 March, 2008, and the bad streak in by-elections that followed.

The victory was indigestible, the stomach pain it caused trailing into certain conclusion that Umno has become corrupt at the core and will lose at the 13th general elections unless the toxic waste is quickly removed.

Diehard members in the party wishing to keep spirits from collapsing suggested Khairy may be made to prove his innocence in court.

But the contest for power hasn’t ended and should Muhammad Muhammad Taib win position number two today, many opined little would be left in the new leadership line-up to stage a credible moral conflict for Najib to regain any trust and stage a purge.

It isn’t Umno alone that’s facing a moral crisis. Malay elected representatives in the Party Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) have promptly proven themselves morally lacking as well, two unable to resist the dubious succulence of cheap China Dolls and another duo in Penang allegedly caught with their hands deep in the cookie-jar.

Those in Pas aside, the Malays, especially in Umno, have had to pay rather of a high price for rushing for big cash through the swift transition from the agrarian to the commercial and industrial society without the briefest ideological effect under Dr. Mahathir.

As a result, a large chunk of the urban and new-urban Malays were becoming overwhelmingly materialistic, currently described by the intelligentsia as “self- interested” for simplicity.

In other words, in his enchantment with pragmatism, Dr. Mahathir failed to administer the correct medicine for the people he pooled into his string of corporate housings and industrial parks to provide for his brand of the new society.

Najib’s father, the architect of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was different. Tun Razak was a Labor Party member in England.

As premier, basing his model of development on the ideals and strategy of Labor, he purposed a clear ideological direction and set of priorities which he secured in the NEP, plus his Red and Green Books.

The transition involved millions of Malays in the rural-urban drift.

In the social and cultural shifts, to function in a modern and plural society the Malays would have required something clearer and more concrete than the archaic content of the Malay-Islamic corpus that had become more of rites-of-passage rather than anything we may construe as a living ideology.

This is now the Malay Dilemma – to purpose an intelligible, coherent and comprehensive ideological display of the processes of change, modernization, development and integration, albeit dressed in Islamic garb, or to continue refuting the need of an ideology and trust in the charisma of the leader who addresses the future as a pragmatic accident of fortunes, and of fate – his own.

Hence, Najib must first resolve this dilemma with a certain sense of purpose and a strong will.

People ask endlessly, can he do it? Or can’t he?

The answer is simple – he must. Or it is indeed the end of Umno. It is do or die. --- a. ghani ismail, 26 March 2008

MALAY UNITY RECALLED ON SUNDAY

2009-03-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

With the worst over and Najib Tun Razak finally and actually taking over as Umno president and premier after the 59th Umno general assembly beginning Tuesday 24 March, tension was decently absent during the Sunday Malay Unity gathering at the TNB Multipurpose Hall in Kuala Lumpur where former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, delivered a lengthy keynote address to usher in the new regime.

Speakers and attendees, admitting their feelings of anxiety, were quite relaxed, some suffering themselves in private about the lack of a think-tank to settle for a common and coordinated strategy.

It was about surveying the grounds lost during Pak Lah’s five years of flip-flop and the moral decay in Umno crowned by Ali Rastum’s disqualified bid for party number two because of “money politics.”

It was a peep of the new divide among the Malays who are now given to three political parties with the intrusion of the multiracial Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) led by Anwar Ibrahim.

The underside up, the once docile Malay agricultural community, having been predominantly transcribed into a commercial and industrial society governed by state-enriched political, administrative and professional elite in as many years as Mahathir was PM, has split by dint of educational and workplace diversities as the strongman was retiring.

He had successful turned Malaysia into an industrial nation but the Malays had not derived new production tools worthy of note other than in manufacturing the Japanese techno-graphed Proton cars, hybridized with the Lotus from Norwich in England into a national pride.

After it had gone stale by Pak Lah’s politics of vengeance against Mahathir (he had even ordered the Augusta holdings of Proton sold for one Euro, worth RM4.50 at that time), the Malays in Umno and in some NGOs now want to regain the lost grounds and the lost time. .

Dr. Mahathir, ruing the divided house, called for a straight shot back to Malay political dominance. He mentioned Pak Lah’s Singapore Sling in apt rupture.

“Some Malays are even afraid to refer to Malaysia as Tanah Melayu (Malay motherland), preferring to steer clear of ‘racism’ since anything that has to do with a commitment to the unity and development of the Malays and Bumiputra would be strenuously condemned as being ‘racist.’

It’s a recall of the role of Umno, a role that has been lost in the moral slump of a party now seen to have been squashed into a cesspool and appearing no more than a grant of wholesale corruption.

After Malacca Chief Minister, Ali Rastum, was debarred from the Umno Supreme Council election, Pak Lah’s son-in-law, Khairy Jamaluddin, has been found guilty of vote-buying by the Umno Disciplinary Committee, but he was allowed to contest.

He wanted to become the Umno Youth chief now and Prime Minister before he turns 40 in seven years. Mahathir mentioned him and immediately took a drink to clear his throat.

Most leaders at the gathering were clear about rallying behind the new leader, Najib Tun Razak, and standing up against Anwar Ibrahim, who will have to hold on to his seat to face the impending slaughter.

But while among the speakers political outlooks were different, everyone was certain about one thing – that there should be no compromise on the special rights and privileges of the Malays and Bumiputras.

“We need to be clear about one thing first,” said Datuk Panglima Salleh Said Keruak. The special rights and privileges enshrined in the Constitution cannot be shared.”

Representing the Bajau in Sabah, he said, ”power can be shared but not in a 50-50 equation. We in Sabah are not willing to depart from what was agreed in the founding of Malaysia in 1963 and we look to the Malays in West Malaysia to uphold and to defend the agreement.”

After that was wrapped the worries extended to the decision to end the New Economic Policy and showed through in the technological gap that expanded during the five years of Pak Lah as premier.

Off-stage a few talked about the technological lapse.

A couple of years ago Sony presented in Malaysian malls its robots dancing in wireless choreography involving more than 200 movements.

That happened while we were perversely regressing into a digital gap with the Japanese that could span 60 years once again.

Pak Lah chose to plant fruits for export to Japan in a free-trade exchange with Japanese automobiles, an exchange that could have been inspired by Aladdin’s new lamps for old.

Umno should be made conscious about that fact. It was that kind of criminal waste that had caused much of the widespread disillusionment and anxiety when in a time like this the nation should have opted to employ high-tech in agriculture too.

It was primarily because of that technological and moral regression that Umno lost her role as the Malay leader and must now quickly regain the profile or the Malays will not rally behind the party as they had done many times in the past.

The party is corrupt at the core, its rich elite sunk prematurely into debilitating hubris bringing an unprecedented dissociation the party leaders cannot fail to redress without losing altogether the faith and the trust of the Malays.

The malady is captured in a brief and succinct description by Prof. Dr. Shamsul Amri of Etnika, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Said he, Umno has become socially and politically distanced from the Malays.

The party is no longer representing any ideals of the youths too.

With six million new voters expected to be registered for the next general elections in a total of 16.9 million, the Umno leaders ought to slot that remark into the members’ brains to instantly motivate re-orientation. .

Umno and the BN are facing three by-elections on April 7, which could be less than one week into Najib’s leadership.

Even if losing in Bukit Selambau and Batang Ai may be overlooked, in Bukit Gantang a BN defeat can mean a very long haul to redeem Najib.

The former Perak Menteri Besar, Nizar Jamaluddin, will be Pas candidate. Umno/BN ought to win.

The fight for Malay survival and political dominance is on in earnest and it must begin right now. Hidup Melayu! ----a. ghani ismail, 24 March, 2009

PAKATAN - INTO THE FLOURISH OF A FAILED CAUSE

2009-03-17T01:40:00.000-07:00

INSIDE THE MELODY OF A FRANTIC MOTLEY

Shultz is dead. But inside the Pakatan Rakyat’s capricious political lap-up, his catching comic-strip, Peanut, is kept alive and going strong in Malaysia.

The Pakatan is nearly a juvenile cult that’s severely struck by self-flogging the likes of which has never been seen or heard on this side of sanity.

It’s gone mad. The behavior from the sudden loss of power in Perak, hopelessly infected by the undressing of a Selangor State Executive Councilor has given the political pact to convening the Perak State Assembly under a tree and then celebrating the event of March 3 with a plaque planted beneath the tree it named “Democracy Tree”.

Hilarity of such a height cannot be serious about damage control.

The pact, having sustained serial self-inflictions, ought to have had the sense not to behave as a comic opera if it is at all serious about becoming an alternative to the Barisan Nasional (BN), the corruption and snoot-arrogance of the rich considered and duly detested.

When the plaque under the “Democracy Tree” was vandalized and then removed, the comic opera in Perak reacted as expected, to vow to replace that plaque with a better one – in four languages, making itself a political trite worth no more than a used tissue.

Right on time like a bell that tolls, Gobind Singh Deo in Parliament shouted across the floor to call Deputy Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, a “murderer”, crowning his lusty version of the Altantuya trial with a spiteful abuse of parliamentary privilege to seal his own fate and that of the Pakatan in one blabbering blob.

Whether or not Gobind Deo will recover from his suspension of one year beginning 16 March is of no historical value. It will be a historical fact that Pakatan is sunk.

Change has come to Malaysia after five-years of stupefying somnolence of a leader Dr Mahathir had seen fit to prescribe as his successor.

Now that Najib Tun Razak will become Premier at long last, it is his concept of One Malaysia that will attract popular support and reduce the Opposition once again as it happened in 2004.

Najib knows he must appeal to the people. He is aware the people have become a Third Force that will morally decide between the Ruling Coalition and the Opposition.

The Opposition, even as it attempts to scare Najib with the ghost of Altantuya and wring his neck with allegations of mega-corruption, has failed to show any evidence to underscore the wild fabrications.

What appeared last week as a “new revelation” purportedly written by a French journalist residing in Bangkok merely made public what was in the cautioned statement of Sirul, one of the pair still in trial over the gruesome killing. That statement was not admitted in court.

Even the last minute attempt by the spurned Prime Minister, Pak Lah, to gain some vital sympathies from Malay and Chinese parents, teachers and scholars by protesting against the teaching of Mathematic and Science in English, has failed to inflame popular temper.

What that means is simply that the extraordinary swing the Opposition enjoyed in the previous general elections will not stay after Pak Lah, le estranger, has gone home to roost.

The Opposition had won by a hulk of BN voters who voted against the Coalition to remove Pak Lah, a willed act of moral conscience.

A quick look at the 2008 elections results will show merely 15 percent of returnees are needed for the BN to regain the two-third majority in parliament and all state governments including Kelantan.

But it is unlikely, at this point of time, for the BN to capture Kelantan. There the Pakatan has gained Tengku Razaleigh as an ally, him failing to gain a second nomination to contest for president in Umno against Najib and therefore, is at war.

Now, as the excitement begins to subside and more people return to sobriety after the drunken recall of primitive power in the Opposition pact, the question most people would want to know is not about who will be brought home in the three by-elections to take place on April 7.

Rather, it is about what kind of gel is best to enlarge poorly endowed bosoms for exciting sexuality in the back seat of Toyota Camrys with LCD monitors bought at higher-than-normal market price in a stressed economy.

What?

Yeah! People are generally more politically relaxed. Most have made up their minds. It’s the cult members and supporters that are still a scream---a. ghani ismail, 17 March 2009

PAKATAN NEED MAPWORK OR SLIDE BACK TO BEFORE

2009-02-25T20:04:00.000-08:00

Political absurdity in Malaysia had never peaked to such heights as it did from February 6 when in the reach of the Pakatan Rakyat to stop the Sultan of Perak from swearing-in the new Menteri Besar (Chief Minister) some members of the former governing pact demonstrated and slept on the road leading to the palace, after Zambry Abdul Kadir had been driven in.

That began the flourish of frolics which followed the opposition pact’s downfall in the state.

Pakatan Rakyat, not to be undone, then willfully shot itself in the head by scuttling the new Perak Menteri Besar and six others using the Speaker’s power to suspend the assemblymen, a move popularly perceived as wild.

Former Menteri Besar, Nizar Jamaluddin, going to court on 13 Feb. to challenge the legitimacy of Zambry’s appointment should have been action enough.

But in the rush to force a state re-election following the decision of the Perak Sultan to advise Nizar to resign, state assembly Speaker, V. Sivakumar, found it opportune to slumdog the whole state government by suspending Zambry and six State Executive Councilors for more than a year from Feb 18.

The Speaker’s privilege is beyond judicial review, meaning he effectively scuttled the state government, altering the face of politics in Malaysia to something hideous.

But for the fact the Pakatan Rakyat is now perceived as being frivolous and devoid of political responsibility, the Barisan Nasional (BN) can do likewise where the Coalition rules.

The Pakatan Rakyat has and is losing a lot of popular support by self-infliction. Malaysia has no stable pact in it and there is no two-party system in the making.

Nizar Lightning Struck?

Nizar had not been struck down by a bolt from the blue. Having merely 31 in an assembly of 59, he should have swiftly moved to dissolve the state assembly after two of his state councilors accepted sexual gratification from a businessman and were believed filmed by the ACA (now Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission).

Nizar failed to act, saying instead the duo were not guilty until proven in court, last words that could not be less than awesomely absurd since by then the two had confessed.

The disease struck another PKR member next, for alleged bigamy, him hurriedly vacating his constituency and his position as Kedah State Executive Councilor two days before Sivakumar lunged for the state’s jugular in a quixotic display of extra-judicial force.

What followed was hilarious.

After one Umno state-assemblyman had leapt to the PKR, the sexy PKR duo changed sides while the Umno hero made a successful back-flip that was worthy of a place in Barnaby’s Circus.

The three bringing with them one from the DAP, the table was neatly turned upside-down, giving the BN side 31 after the three from the Pakatan Rakyat pledged their support to the ruling coalition.

Even as Nizar ran to contest in court the lost of his job, it is the arithmetic of the frantic frolic that shaped public perception.

To all and sundry it was a simple sum. However witty the Pakatan Rakyat could have been to some of its sympathizers, there is little doubt the pact has lost a lot of respect it had gained before and is now popularly seen as a hurriedly grouped motley bunch of untested political meat with little moral functionality or worth.

Like bad cheques, they bounced. Like clowns, they colored themselves vividly and stumbling awkwardly, they boldly tumbled for the laughter from the gallery, not for any sense of dignity as alternatives to the BN blunderers under Pak Lah.

Whatever remained of democratic dignity and sense of honor was forcibly wrenched.

If there had been any charisma in the making of the Pakatan Rakyat, that charisma must be lying limp, spent like a gossamer after the tricks of the three were sumptuously seasoned by a set of peek-a-boo pictures sent through the mail of Elizabeth Wong from the PKR in Selangor.

It is true the BN is now quite disconnected from the people and under Pak Lah is now nearly meaningless.

But Pak Lah is on his way out, making that sorry story of Dr. Mahathir’s hasty choice of a successor finally reaching an end.

It was him that caused the Opposition’s ballot boxes to bulk into the surprising winning numbers on 8 March 2008.

But crouching in the foreground now and requiring critical attention is a self-mauled Pakatan Rakyat that has become incredible.

Will the Pakatan Rakyat weed its political distorts out? If so, how long will it take for the parties in the pact to do that?

The pact must admit its errors or its pretense to being an alternative at this point merits laughter. It has rotted and is distinctly self-disabled before reaching puberty and badly needs re-invention.

Karpal had asked someone to taubat (repent). Could it be possible Pakatan Rakyat actually is in need of exorcism too?

Other than Anwar Ibrahim and the immensely amusing Nik Aziz Nik Mat in Kelantan (he insists it was an “intruder” who took the pictures of Elizabeth Wong), it is likely the Pakatan Rakyat leaders did not want to become the government. They would have been happy as a strong Opposition.

Since it was Pak Lah that caused the popular over-vote and he is soon leaving, the Pakatan Rakyat had better accept to face the inevitable return to sanity, not totally a dead-ringer of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, but still a reckoning.

The agonizing birth and decay of the pact is over for now. It’s a map-work that was missing from the first. ---a. ghani ismail, 25 February 2009

ELIZABETH WONG'S BOSOM PAL BOMBS PKR

2009-02-17T00:23:00.000-08:00

Wreaths do not express the widespread grief of Parti Keadilan Rakyat’s (PKR) supporters. Tombstones and graves do.

The bad joss of State Executive Councilor, Elizabeth Wong, captured nude in self-described “intimate positions” has stripped the party of the remaining moral tolerance.

This episode follows the gripping tale of two PKR’s men accepting sexual gratification paid for by a land applicant in Perak soon after the duo became state executive councilors.

Another was struck down in Kedah by bigamy, a beginning of a contagion that may not stop soon enough for the Pakatan Rakyat to breathe easy for months yet. Many were selected without due diligence to hold public offices.

It’s a lesson in the corruption of power that has, in this case, led to the fall of the Pakatan Rakyat government in Perak.

The new BN Menteri Besar (Chief Minister), Zambry Abdul Kadir, was sworn in on Feb. 6 in the midst of a failed demonstration to foil the ceremony at the palace in Kuala Kangsar, a bad choice of a means to control the damage.

Pakatan Rakyat hasn’t accepted the moral debility, rising to a high level of noise instead to cast doubt over the legitimacy of the ruler’s decision to admit a new state government.

On Friday 13th Feb, while former Menteri Besar, Nizar, was filing a suit in Kuala Lumpur to challenge the legality of his removal from office, journalists from the Malay Mail prepared to call Elizabeth Wong to inform her of the photographs/video the newspaper had received showing her in her entirety.

She could do nothing other than to admit she was the “victim” in the pictures/video.

Even with a grand attempt launched to control the damage, the actual offence is appearing to reside in the lifestyle Wong had led before becoming State Executive Councilor.

She admitted in an interview after her appointment she was a hippie.

The nudity thus popularly associated with her lifestyle, the case against her looks well-done, the pictures believed taken by a boyfriend making some people say she was a victim of indiscretion or of self-indulgence.

The litmus is easy. Will PKR accept to make her resign and field her again in Bukit Lanjang?

Elizabeth Wong will have to go but the event is no longer about her. She is politically a featherweight, more useful to society as a spokesperson of a leading NGO, Suaram.

The build-up of antipathy against the PKR and the Pakatan Rakyat has usefully secured the two by-elections on April 7 for the BN.

When Elizabeth vacates Bukit Lanjan (they have named it Bukit Telanjang), it will also be the BN that will take the seat, a popular assumption that is a thumbs-down primarily for the PKR and the DAP.

People from the two parties are blaming the Pas for the removal of the rot in the pact, bothering little about the fact the PKR is supposed to be led by a husband-wife team that had cast a long shadow on the Islamic landscape in Malaysia and Asia-Pacific.

What, therefore, are the true colors of Anwar Ibrahim and Dr. Wan Azizah, people ask? Are they about the underside of a long coat?

It’s probably more of an obsessive rush for power that had overlooked all other factors, including letting the compradors in the Pakatan to endlessly dribble against Malays and Islam.

It’s easy to see it’s now payback time. The larger number of votes given to the Pakatan on 8 March issuing directly from a widespread distaste for the outgoing Prime Minister, Pak Lah, will believably swing back to the BN.

The single largest casualty in this caper of carpetbaggers is the will to achieve integration.

This is what the Elizabeth-in-the-Nude symbolizes – a clear stripping of the veils to show the end of a bewildering collusion that nearly caused the ruin of Umno and the BN while it took the nation to the brink of bloodshed.

Elizabeth Wong is not important as a politician. She only needs to be strong to weather the bad personal mileage. But in her distress she raises questions we need to answer.

How will Anwar fare after the bad start in the power-sharing of his own? Will he float or will he soon sink? How will people vote the PKR after this? ----a. ghani ismail, 17 Feb 2009

PS. - Elizabeth Wong tendered her resignation from the state government and as state assembly person for Bukit Lanjang today - 17 Feb. 2009. De facto PKR leader, Anwar Ibrahim, was reported to have told her to hold on. - ghani