ANWAR IS LOSING

ANWAR IBRAHIM – A POLITICAL QUEST UPSIDE DOWN


Time is reaching a standstill for Anwar Ibrahim. While the clock has turned back to place him in the dock for sodomy once again, the votes he had drawn from the masses to strike the biggest win in history for the Opposition in Malaysia is dwindling at a rate faster than the slide of Dow Jones in Wall Street.

Anwar is in the dock this time on the reverse side of his attempt to deny Najib Tun Razak the chance to become Prime Minister of Malaysia. But Najib has clinched it.

In the wake of Anwar’s ill-will lies a couple of affidavits, one alleging on hearsay that Najib had serially sodomized the murdered Mongolian woman, Altantuya Sharibuu, and the other appearing as a desperate attempt to send Najib and his wife, Rosmah Mansor, to the gallows.

Najib’s political strategist, Abdul Razak Baginda, since freed of the charge of abetment in the murder, has denied Najib and Rosmah had ever known Altantuya.

Razak lifted from the couple the cloud of suspicion Anwar and his sidekick, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, had conjured, giving the breather Najib needs to move on to his destiny, a chance to do as well as his great father had done for the Malays and for Malaysians.

The result is a certain relief especially among members and supporters of Umno who had voted the Opposition on 8 March 2008. Chinese and Indians are returning to the MCA and MIC too.

Most people answered positively when asked whether Malay voters would choose Umno again as they did between 1999 and 2004.

The pendulum had swung one way and then the other in the aftermath of Anwar’s incarceration following charges of corruption and sodomy.

Asked whether they would support Umno after Abdullah Badawi retires from government, Prof. Dr. Isahak Harun from the Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI), Tanjung Malim, said “possibly”, him wishing the new leader would opt to use the Malay language instead of English to teach Science and Mathematics in schools.

Others contacted were quite unhappy with the government’s failure to foster a viable and sustainable Bumiputra (indigens) Commercial and Industrial Community (BCIC) well into the 9th Malaysia (Fiver-Year) Plan.

Former BERNAMA editor-in-chief, Rahman Sulaiman, said Najib is somewhat injured but Umno members and supporters will have to eventually return home to roost. There’s no where else for them to go.

The real forces behind the “re-conversion” of Malay voters must be the fact some non-Malays among members and supporters of the DAP and Anwar’s own Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) kept bombarding Malays and Islam in a frenzy of race-hate.

In the aftermath of this round of the flame-baiting for the communal votes, DAP’s Senior Selangor State Executive Councillor, Teresa Kok, sued a newspaper for RM30 million and RM100 million for what she construed were defamatory reports and a damaging short-story.

Earlier, a couple of dud Molotov-cocktails were tossed into the compound of her family home, a note attached to warn her and everyone else against playing the role of the enfant terrible in the combustible comedy of errors.

Raja Petra, Anwar’s friend from his school days, in his famous blog, Malaysia Today, slammed the Malays and at Islam for reasons people are still seeking to know. He says he is a Bugis, and not Malay.

The point is, there is nothing anyone can do to change the status of the Malays, of Islam and of the National Language, without summoning a two-third majority in parliament and tossing away the relevant clauses from the Constitution.

As a result of the bad political and social tastes, and for asking Who Are The Malays?, the Malays have after years of patience, suddenly turned around and are asking who had been responsible for giving the non-Malays their status as Malaysian citizens?

The Malay rulers themselves have issued caution. Do not question their sovereignty, nor distress their dignity.

The idea of the aggression was to seek for equality between the races and reject the special status accorded by the Constitution to the Malays and to Islam.

Malays simply have to retaliate. They are openly asking the non-Malays in the Opposition, including Anwar Ibrahim’s PKR, to agree to do away with the Social Contract even if there had, in fact, been one. In other words, they want to go back to before British colonization.

In the wake of the new developments someone quickly wrote to remind the people Anwar had made an agreement with the Pas and the DAP not to question the special privileges of the Malays and the position of Islam.

But what would such an agreement be worth? These matters are already enshrined in the Constitution.

Anwar is still baying for a simple majority he could not produce as promised before 16 September 2008, and now “before December,” which is only several days away.

He ought to be reminded the Opposition merely managed to take about 40 percent of the total Malays votes in the 8 March elections, the largest chunks coming from Kelantan and Kedah states.

Umno, which held onto the remaining 60 percent, can and will regain the lost ground in the next general elections or in a snap-election Najib may choose to call before the end of next year, though probably not as well as it had done in 2004.

Even as Umno is grappling to control “money politics” that’s bedeviling the party’s morale, Anwar, it would seem, has failed to control the emotions of his bedfellows, and is now verging upon political bankruptcy.

The charismatic political maestro, his persona screwed, is closing in on his end……. the sage withered from the lakes and the birds no longer sing. ---a. ghani ismail, 20 November, 2008

NAJIB RAZAK ON TOP OF MALAYSIA

BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH - ABDULLAH’S EXIT, NAJIB’S FALL?

A Tale Of Moral Depreciation And Morale Slide In Umno




The Malays are returning to communal politics after the bad flirtation with integration, Except for the pool of young voters who are enthralled by Anwar Ibrahim’s charisma, most will either vote Umno once again or split the votes between Umno and Pas.

Umno has been deprived of moral and historical functions.

After five years of Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s unsubstantial leadership, the party which was born to fight British colonization has become “rotten at the core”, a remark and conclusion made by the chairman of the party’s disciplinary committee, Tengku Ahmad Rithaudeen, that hit the nail right on the head.

The Malays have had enough of listening to Chinese and Indians who think of themselves as the successors of the British Raj, and therefore, are remaining mentally comprador.

The ceaseless Hate-Malays and Hate-Islam campaign they launched from some years before has finally struck gold.

On Sunday 16 November a forum that discussed the Social Contract convened by Perkasa, decided to tell the non-indigenous Malaysian communities they can reject the Social Contract and end the agony of questioning it. The non-Malays have even been asking who, indeed, are the Malays!

It is clearly a signal that the color-blind days of the Malay Anak Malaysia have ended. I am told most of these good people have decided to revert to their identities as Malays and Muslims.

While it would be a happy hum-along tune for Najib Tun Razak who will become Umno president and Prime Minister at the end of March 2009, Umno is sadly saddled with a gigantic internal corruption.

Facing deep global recession, the party is now having to reach into its heart for what’s left of a historical mission and an ethical purpose to continue being relevant to the Malays.

“It has gone rotten at the core,” said Tengku Ahmad Rithaudeen, him charged with the responsibility of taking disciplinary action against “money politics” in Umno, the vote-buying and vote-selling in the party that’s making it a market place for political aspirants who are rich to gain power without political effort or talent.

The disease, erupting about two decades before, reared its head again from the moment Abdullah Badawi took over from Dr. Mahathir. His son-in-law, a new comer, intervened in party and government, becoming number two in the Umno Youth by rewarding contestants who pulled out.

Abdullah was hauled into national prominence as Mr. Clean. The irony and stark contrast of Mr. Clean and Dirty Politics is probably not a matter of nature but a straight character of incompetence, or non-substantial leadership that’s now lazily sauntering to a finish by end of March, a date that’s bad simply because it will take time to come, says his predecessor, Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

There was and is an audible sigh of relief when it was decided Abdullah shall not stay on after March. But the question many are asking is why should Abdullah stay on after December when the party’s general assembly should be held?

Abdullah ought to go. Japan has fallen into recession. Commodity prices have fallen from USD147 for a barrel of oil to USD 55 and still falling.

Palm oil, which affects directly a large number of Malaysian farmers and workers has fallen below the critical RM1,500 to around RM1, 450 per ton. It is expected to go down some 46 per cent more by mid-2009.

What’s Abdullah doing about this?

He is doing nothing. Instead, he insisted he should stay for an extra three months from December simply to read the Bills in parliament that will introduce a Judicial Appointment Commission, an independent Anti-Corruption Agency and three other Bills in a state of an economic meltdown that will be the worst Malaysia has endured.

Abdullah can stay for the three months if the Prime Minister-elect, Najib Tun Razak, is given the freehand he needs to quickly put in place the stimulus and fallback packages the country will have to have. We should have already begun counter-trading, for instance.

There will be about 300,000 unemployed Malaysians coming home from Singapore alone.

But how can Najib act freely and take all responsibilities to usher in new policies and to change structures if he is still number two?

Umno reacted to the stresses of party and nation in remarkable somnolence during the recent divisional meetings that nominated Najib as party president without contest.

In more than half of the party’s divisions, it is learned that the members just came and went, leaving the halls and the speeches delivered inside merely a bout of stout words mainly for old men and women.

These oldies came with the belief that the party they love is still the same one they had known before. But it is not.

Umno is now a ruling party of a successful commercial and industrial nation. In the transition moral integrity in the party simply slid off, leaving the idealism in a slough of despond.

Moral integrity virtually caved-in inside Umno, leaving a bleeding wound that can only be medicated by “money politics”.

Members of the newly enriched in the party were known to have spent more than two million Ringgit for positions number one at divisional level. Some among these took vote-bearers on oversea trips until the eve of the elections so opponents cannot reach them.

They were never purged and neither were they disciplined.

Umno members asked, was there collusion, negligence or a blind spot at the top all along?

At the general elections of 8 March 2008 many party members refused to work unless their palms were laced. When that was done some branch and divisional leaders complained the amounts paid were chicken-feed.

The party paid dearly. The Barisan Nasional lost five states and one federal territory on the 8 of March and a lot of members were happy with the outcome.

Umno was not facing an internal revolution. Rather, it was internal revulsion that had caused the party to bleed profusely in the 8 March elections.

Abdullah was seen not only as an incompetent leader but corrupt as well. His family and some friends blatantly became ultra-rich.

They became multi-millionaires - father, son, son-in-law, brother, brother-in-law, cronies and, according to Dr. Mahathir, also his sycophants. Mahathir himself enriched his children and his cronies, Abdullah said. He called Mahathir a Ten Percenter.

The rot at the core of the party had become debilitating. Umno lost moral purpose.

The question before Najib is how can the party recover its moral and historical motives? Alternatively, should he rule as a member of an oligarchy comprising of the ultra-rich in Umno and in Malaysia?

Umno is not ideological and neither is it religiously Islamic like the Pas is. Will Najib turn in a rule of a triumvirate with his cousin, Hishamuddin Hussein Onn and Mahathir’s son, Mukhriz, for a powerful mix of kickapoo to overcome the problems of ideological and moral lack in the party?

But that would put Mahathir in the Big Man’s shoes and he is alleged to have ruined the integrity of the judiciary as well.

This is what Najib will have to resolve along with the impacts of terrible global stagflation (recession with inflation) that has already set and will quickly worsen, with no solution in sight.

This is a systematic breakdown of the world financial order.

It is also a systematic moral depreciation in Umno, and a certain erosion of party morale Najib will have to somehow restore.

Which way Najib navigates once he is in power will finally determine whether or not the majority of the Malays will want Umno, or go to the Pas instead.

People will not be impressed by a simple communal pretense. Being ultra-Malay is of no value. What will he do to translate that into policies and goodies? Will he reaffirm what his great father, Tun Abdul Razak, did for the Malays?

The PKR of Anwar Ibrahim is sadly viewed as the cause of the mud-slide the Malays are facing from the comprador mentality of some non-Malays in Malaysia. Some Malays say PKR opened the flood-gates. ----a. ghani ismail, 18 Nov. 2008

IS KASSIM AHMAD OLD AT 75?

HO, HO, HO! - REACHING INTO THE HEAVENS FOR A BOTTLE OF WINE,

or

Kassim Ahmad And His Autobiography, Mencari Jalan Pulang – Daripada Sosialisme Kepada Islam




It’s about reaching for an ending of a normal kind for an extraordinary lifetime the former Parti Sosialis Rakyat Malaysia (PSRM) president, Kassim Ahmad, has put into a book Mencari Jalan Pulang, an autobiography that’s a full-bodied jug of inebriating wine.

While it ought to answer the critical questions why he left the PSRM after 18 years at the helm and then joined Umno, the book answered little of those mysteries of Kassim; writer, scholar and mainly a gadfly with a voracious appetite for ideas and an equally powerful enthusiasm to let loose those ideas into a society that has been reluctant to accept them.

But the ideas were often imported along with their masters, forcing Kassim having then to look for a group of writers to help him weather the storms he brewed or to explain to society the abstruse philosophies they brought.

After he had left PSRM he first launched Dr. Rashad Khalifah and his rejection in toto of the Hadis (Prophetic Traditions). It meant to demolish a basic structure of Islam, the Hadis being a source of Islamic Law.

Rashad was soon to be killed in his own mosque in Tucson, Arizona.

Kassim, himself knowing less than he should about Islamic culture, was visibly shaken by the event and to stand clear he found Lyndon LaRouche. He soon dragged the ideas of the man into the country.

This was a useful move. LaRouche’s movement not only served Kassim with good ideas but would prove useful as an American connection that did not appreciate Anwar Ibrahim.

LaRouche was leader of a Quaker political movement which later became a faction of the Democrats. His ideas were and are revolutionary, threading the development of political, economic and scientific ideas carefully from sources in the Greek beginning to reach for a future humanity.

But Kassim, in the process of these flights to fulfill some emptiness in his life, lost his new friends and lieutenants, something he seemed to find difficult to explain in his book, and perhaps also to himself.

Kassim’s trouble was he could not be genuine in Umno however much he tried. He was primarily a socialist thinker and leader who should have remained in PSRM where he had been at home.

For reasons of his own he left the PSRM in 1984, explaining in his book he had been meeting Umno president and premier, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who, though reluctant at first, was later to agree to consider the possibility of PSRM joining the Barisan Nasional, the ruling coalition.

But did the socialist party know of his meetings with Dr. M or had Kassim taken matters into his own hands and then expected the party to simply agree to abide by his edicts?

Some PSRM members say “Kassim stole PSRM’s money and he had to flee”, a metaphorical description that stuck on Kassim like a leach that would not let go. He had leapt away like a frog after leading them for 18 years, and they preferred him dead.

They regretted the years some of them had spent in political detention.

In one case a few interrupted this writer’s speech to tell the forum four members of the audience had been in detention in Kamunting “because of being loyal to Kassim”.

Now that the leader had joined Umno, what were they supposed to do? Should they all hug, kiss and bid their past goodbye as Kassim had done?

Were they all merely to fall in line behind him and together aggress against the Hadis and then study Lyndon LaRouche and assiduously read the Executive Intelligence Journal of Lyn’s outfit?

Even if he tried to explain he had lost faith in Socialism, the image he had built of himself as a socialist he cannot erase for as long as the men and women he had led remained alive.

These workers and peasants haunted him. Some spent more time than Kassim in detention, him incarcerated from 1976 to 1981. Many of them believed he broke down in detention and so he changed his color and his soul as well.

I was to witness a little of this distressing abyss in Kassim’s life after he called me through Dr. Chandra Muzaffar to help put right his writings on the Hadis he presented in a series of seminars at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Chandra was later to remark Kassim never acknowledged the contributions we made to help him with those papers that became his book on the Hadis.

Now, in his autobiography he wrote to say those meetings we had in Chandra’s house or at his office in 1985 were about Islamic Reformism.

We discussed that for only one or two days. The other times we met were about the Hadis and on what we deemed proper concerning the subject.

Kassim did not know enough about the subject. He had not known then about the Medinah Charter (Shahifah Medinah) and the treaties, letters and pledges the Prophet had made and which defined the bases and limits of Islamic diplomacy.

He had also failed to take into consideration the Islamic financial institutions and instruments that were determined mainly by the Hadis.

These institutions and instruments are today offering the best alternatives to the world that’s wracked by a systematic financial breakdown.

LaRouche predicted the breakdown from decades before but he had nothing to say about Islamic financial institutions, instruments and products, which are measures of civilized progress, no less.

Kassim kept telling a few of us he had been meeting the premier Dr. Mahathir and Dr. Mahathir agreed with his views. About what?

What would the premier’s agreement do for him and for us? How would that help him become a Muslim reformist in or outside Umno? When had Dr. M become a prophet of Islam, someone asked him.

His friend and business partner, Hamid Merican, became so fed up with Kassim’s talk about his meetings with Dr. M he finally told Kassim to simply ask the premier for a fat contract or shut up.

It is now clear from his book that Dr. M’s position was the same as that of the rest of us. He accepted authentic hadis and therefore had no intention of damning the structure of the Shariah (Islamic Law).

In the meetings with Chandra Muzafar and this writer, Kassim was confronted with instances when the law had only the Hadis to stand upon and we insisted he change his views.

He finally did but would revert to his iconoclasm time and again, whence we called it a day. He had committed himself too widely to retract. He had cast the dye on himself.

My friend Kassim had nothing to put in the spaces he was causing to rupture by rejecting the Hadis and blowing apart a basic structure of Islam.

The liberation he was after was possibly more meaningful to his own intellectual and spiritual maturity rather than relevant in the game-play of forces to shift Malays and Malaysians into a new deal, or in the world at large.

He was merely playing a game of his own shadows meaning to show to his friends he is still the same Kassim they knew but in a different guise and wishing to remove the opiate from inside the anatomical system.

I argued against Kassim’s blind distaste for Islamic traditionalism, the time being the period when Muslims were putting together the Islamic financial institutions with which I was a little involved.

Regulations defining these financial institutions and instruments are mainly sourced from the Hadis.

Kassim kept insisting Islam was merely available as theocracies and refused to think as I did in terms of “theological states”, such as Japan and Israel, or of India under the BJP. In any case, how many theocracies are there in Islam today for Kassim to make his general assumption?

It would seem like Kassim has not been able to forget me because of the disagreements. He now mentions me in this book too.

In page 207 he alleged I had been a member of Uthman el-Muhammady’s group at Tar Tujuh (sic) in Pasir Mas in 1974-75 and we (Uthman and I) were waiting for the world to end.

The facts in the book are not true. No such thing happened.

Uthman’s group was probably wishing to build a community which would develop into something akin to the Darul Arqam of Ustaz Asha’ari Muhammad, but it failed. The leader, one Abdullah Sharif, did not measure to the height of Asha’ari.

I was never a member of Uthman’s outfit. I went to Pasir Mas to join Abdul Wahab (an economist, since deceased) and Sharifuddin (an Accountant) to begin a business base and a school.

Wahab was soon to fall terminally ill and we shelved our project.
But we had become a strong enough force to threaten the Pas under Asri Muda and it reached the point when he demanded I leave Kelantan in 24 hours.

Asri couldn’t lift a spoonful of rice to his mouth to feed himself after more than 75 percent of his party had left him from the first quarter of 1974. We could have taken half of Kelantan in the next general elections, hands down.

You cannot do without Islam in Malaysia at that time. You cannot do without Islam in the world now, especially not when the geopolitical structures and designs will have to change with the financial and economic crises.

Kassim’s cannonball against Islamic structure in 1984-5 came as a bolt from the blue and many who knew my friend, Kassim, wondered whether or not he was having a difficulty to live with himself after leaving PSRM and hence, he was tossing a tantrum.

In Mencari Jalan Pulang Kassim admitted he kept losing his friends. He said the reason was the pressure from the controversies he enjoyed.

I doubt if that had been at all a reason. Rather, he was losing his friends because they were seeing him as laboring to cover a deep gash in his life and he was not genuine in seeking to form a group of ideological juggernauts in or outside Umno to combat Islamic conservatism or extremism.

Deciding to quit PSRM after 18 years at its helm must be an injury that would leave behind a showy scar. That scarification will show on the members of the party as well, and especially those who had lived through detentions. Their families were ruined “because of Kassim”, some said.

Many thought my friend, Kassim, seemed unable to see beyond himself. But a flight of the sort that he had done would cause many to simply flop on the floor, blabbering insanely to be convinced they had done the right thing.

How does anyone dump 18 years of party leadership on the pretext of philosophical immaturity? Can the person become useful other than as a writer and an agent of other movements after that?

Kassim quit Umno in 1996, believing it’s time to let the past rest and the present come to relax in the shadow of his doubts.

This autobiography of Kassim, published in his 75th year, is his own description of the means a prodigal son had chosen for his return journey from the wilds of philosophical search and ideological conflicts to come to rest in a pleasant country home.

It is very interesting reading. Read the book, Mencari Jalan Pulang, Dari Sosialisme Kepada Islam. ----a. ghani ismail, 13 Nov. 2008

Ps. The food supplements with his book in the picture above is to tell Kassim to stay fit and to keep writing. He’s only 75!

Goodbye Pak Lah

IS PAK LAH LEAVING BY THE BACK DOOR?

WHO IS KNOCKING ON THE FRONT?


Critical questions rise like morning mists as Pak Lah agonizes about how he shall make his exit after five years of weird leadership. At the Umno Supreme Council meeting on Thursday he was told he would not get enough nominations should he choose to contest the party election in December.

His day is done. He should leave before Oct. 9 when the party divisions begin to nominate the contestants for the Supreme Council.

With Pak Lah assumed crippled and out, members have now to decide about how to rehabilitate party and nation.

Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Pak Lah) will be remembered for suspending democratic elections for all numbers one and two positions in Umno in the first party election he presided.

It was his means to ensure he will not be contested. Consequently the 2004 Umno Supreme Council elections became a market for votes.

More than 50 Umno veterans appealed to him to restore democracy in the party immediately after. It did not bother him.

He instead postponed the next Umno election by more than a year on the pretext he intended to call the general elections in 2007, which he did not, resulting in the 8 March 2008 general elections being his doomsday.

In the run-up to the upcoming Umno Supreme Council election reports of corrupt practices abound and one Menteri Besar (Chief Minister) has opted not to contest in protest of the rampant vote buying.


Five Years Destruction


The five years of Pak Lah at the helm of the party and government have been destructive. He not only refused to continue with the purpose and vision of his predecessor but he instead dismantled piece by piece what Dr. Mahathir had done, including selling Proton’s holdings of Augusta for Euro One which was later sold for about USD300 million.

Dr. M, soured to his gallbladder over his choice of successor, remarked Pak Lah has said nothing about the global financial crisis. The Ringgit began to weaken against the USD after gaining some ground, prompting Dr.M to suggest pegging it once more.

But even when the Lehman Brothers collapse caused Asian bourses to yoyo in panic The Premier still said nothing.

In his Family First leadership the son-in-law, Khairy Jamaluddin, in his wish to become prime minister before he turns 40, already has several of his men appointed ministers and deputy ministers.

In scrap-yards in Sungai Chua and Serendah are a couple of thousand Rapid KL buses left to rust when the country is in dire need of an efficient public transport system. In many cases, bus services have been terminated since the sudden fuel-price hike in June.

There is no more bus plying the route from Kuala Kubu Bharu to the Fraser’s Hill resort for instance.

The Komuter (train) that ran every 10 minutes is now running once in 20 minutes and the trip from Rawang to Kuala Kubu Bharu which ran every half hour now runs once an hour. Some people say these problems of dysfunction are linked to the son’s companies.


Baroque Leadership


It has been somewhat of a baroque leadership these five long years, the sufferance of which prompted Dr. M to conclude there’s a Level Four in the Prime Minister’s office that makes the decisions and does the interventions, Level Five, where the premier sits, merely acting out the roles that utters and mutters.

After the doctor’s diagnosis gained wide currency, the questions that must now arise immediately address how Umno and the Barisan Nasional can best be rehabilitated and quickly return the country on course to Vision 2020.

In the recent Permatang Pauh by-election Umno members accounted for more than 20,000 of the voters but the party candidate was returned with much less than that, showing the same ills that paraded in the 8 March general elections that floored the BN in five states in West Malaysia plus a Federal Territory.

The BN lost the two-thirds majority in parliament for the first time.
Then three rulers refused to accept the Prime Minister’s choices of Menteri Besar.

The Premier was interceded in Perlis, Trengganu and Johor, causing a large question to loom concerning state-federal relationship and whether or not the rulers will form an intervening power in the structure of government.

How shall the irrationalities and the ills be overcome? How can Umno and the BN survive the next general elections?


Presidential Council


Now, after Pak Lah’s insistence that he will stay as party president and premier until 2010 has been rebuffed, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah will be free to contest for party president against Najib Tun Razak in December, should he get the required number of nominations.

But after the new president is decided, will the party be run as it used to be or will it opt for a presidential council?


Pragmatism and Mineral Water


From 22 years of his leadership, Dr. M was a strongman for 14, though hard hit in the final four. He could have run the country solely on pragmatism and mineral water when he was the big boss.

He did not need to articulate an ideology, though he looked for one.

What the country needs to know is how can Malaysia be run smoothly and efficiently without an ideology when there’s no strongman, especially in a global financial crisis with a hot geopolitical landscape to boot?

We have no stable and meaningful ideology, like what Tun Abdul Razak had attempted to introduce when he was Prime Minister and Umno president.

As a result Umno failed to produce a cadre system.

Dr. M was an early warrior, having started in his school days to aggress against the environment, and therefore, had in his head a clear vision that he did not care to articulate in words but did by his deeds.

Yet, in five years of the baroque twist in leadership almost everything he had painstakingly built was eroded and dismantled in a deliberate pursuit of obsessive destruction.

To dispel the fact the structure allowed one such as Pak Lah to succeed him and to undo what he had done would be the height of impudence towards history.

Something is structurally weak, or even wrong. Could it be located merely in the fact the Malays have apparently no wish to become a civil society and therefore, is mute and hapless within the Umno patron-client overdrive?

Has it been only an irregularity particular to Pak Lah? What? Even the striking hubris and the overwhelming materialism and the colossal corruption that hasn’t the civility and humor to spare the party even?

Is everything dependent on who exits and who enters in Umno?

Morale in the party is rather low. The members and people need to know what will be done. ----a. ghani ismail, 20 September, 2008

Teresa Kok On The Rocks Over Azan Issue

TERESA ON THE ROCKS –

DISENCHANTMENT IN THE MONSOON INTERCHANGE


Teresa Kok isn’t the face that could have launched a thousand ships but she would have rocked the Pakatan boat strong enough to capsize it for good if allegations against her are founded.

Protests against using the loudspeaker for the Azan (Islam’s call to prayer) especially for Subuh (dawn prayer) by some Chinese residents of Kota Damansara, Sri Serdang and Puchong Jaya point towards a third hand using the event as a ploy to win over more Chinese even if the society and country are destabilized – a game of desperados meters away from power.

Teresa denied the allegation, but another matter with ethnic overtones and clamoring to champion the Chinese slipped into the frontline tension – a demand to add to road-signs Chinese characters while dropping the Malay Jawi script.

Teresa was said to have made a road-sign of her own for Bukit Bintang in that fashion, an art not so skillful in the given tensile climate of change in Malaysia.

The Barisan Nasional (BN) suffered its worst setback in the March 8 general elections under the absentminded leadership of Pak Lah, The Premier.

Teresa was appointed a senior executive councilor of Selangor, an exposure to power and to political maneuverings the DAP big-wig could not be naïve enough to become victim so soon.

The allegations are about a double-barrel ambush in an already charged atmosphere involving an extensive Hate-Malay Hate-Islam campaign worse than what transpired in the run-up to the May 13 1969 blood-let.

The question to ask is who gains should Malaysia lose ethnic harmony once again.

As for Teresa, Raja Petra Kamaruddin and Ahmad Ismail (who was punished before anyone verified what he had actually uttered), they merely serve as facts or fictions in the making of the historical event one or some powers are pursuing.

If Teresa has nothing to do with the twin-attack as she wants us to believe, she should have been smart enough to positively reject the demand rather than allow herself to be trapped by the devises of her opponents, or her sponsors.

This is what the police probably want her to do – appear on TV explaining the entire development and make the spectacular condemnation of the two protests to defuse the situation.

Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley residents live with the hustle and bustle of grown metropolitans, in some cases with screeching LRTs and the rumble of the Komuter trains beginning 6.00 in the morning, for now.

The protests against the Azan having surfaced several times before, the police read into it what it actually says – to tempt the devil and take the lead role in becoming champions of the Chinese.

It’s popularly seen as yet another political samsu trip of the DAP, the first a lash-out against the Perak Royalty that earned the party three Molotov-cocktails bouncing off the signboard at the party’s HQ in Ipoh weeks after winning in the state.

But something more ominous appeared to have loomed in the plural society and country.

An Umno divisional leader in Penang was suspended for three years on the basis of a solitary report in a Chinese newspaper that he had said something nasty against the Chinese in Malaysia. He apparently called the Chinese pendatang (migrants).

Only after the suspension of Datuk Ahmad Ismail following protestations and pressure from the Gerakan and MCA was an effort made by the police to question the reporter.

The editor responsible for publishing the three paragraph report in the Sin Chew Jit Poh was reported to have fled, leaving little for the accusation to stand upon and a lot to wonder at the Chinese sensitivity and paranoia.

Then came the Teresa Kok adventure, the event causing some people of the mosques in the country to call her Porky The Pig (Babi) and spreading the largesse to include Raja Petra Kamaruddin for his volume of bad remarks on the Malays and on Islam in the blog, Malaysia Today.

Some ask, is he married to a European or to a Chinese?

Fact is, Raja Petra was formerly into the Flower People (a hippie) and quite scantily religious. But the trouble with the man may have less to do with whatever he was rather than what could have become after the rude intrusion of Narcissus.

The upshot is a certain rejection of the Pakatan, now obviously a Hate-Malay Hate-Islam elephantastic dance the wildly-charismatic Anwar Ibrahim is leading from where-to-nowhere in particular.

Anwar is finally the loser in this Hate-Malay Hate-Islam caper the DAP is seen to be leading with his school-mate, Raja Petra, as the thumb sucker.

In many mosques all over the country Malays who once prayed for his release from prison now read Sodom and Gomorrah in the Holy Qur’an, showing certain distaste for Anwar, his strange-bedfellows and his type of politick.

His, they say, is a mission to become premier at any cost and by any means.

Unless Teresa was out-maneuvered, whatever it is she had done merely makes her a political kookaburra, laughing alone by the billabong and having little else to do by the limitation of her own nature, and stature.

Now it is Anwar and the Pakatan a lot of the Malays want out, a quick change of mind perceiving him as a leader who will be at the mercy of the DAP.

The Pas too is in trouble again. Whatever is the party doing sleeping in bed with the DAP?

That obviously must have been the reason for the Pas’s Kota Raja MP, Dr. Mariah Mahmud, to quickly lodge a police report against former Selangor Menteri Besar, Khir Toyo.

To counter the effects of his remarks against Teresa it was feeble and wishful, making Mariah a willful nut-cracker attempting to remake what has already become a trap and placing Teresa limp upon the rocks. A slip will equate with her drowning.


After the Pas is known to have been discussing informally with Umno to avoid a Pakatan takeover that cannot be undone, it is difficult to conceive the three strange bedfellows can concur and conclude the marriage of convenience with an unabashed, neat and fruitful ménage et trio.

Teresa Kok may or may not have willfully taken the country closer to ethnic combustion than had anyone else in this season of economic and political depression.

But it is rather apparent Teresa did nothing to dissuade the remarkably coincidental protests among some Chinese in Selangor to aggravate the already tense situation.

It is clear there’s not going to be a let-up. Many are waiting for the Selangor Menteri Besar, Datuk Khalid Ibrahim, to open his mouth and reveal his position concerning his Senior Executive Councilor’s conduct in view of Islamic ritual propriety and Chinese letters on all road-signs, sans the Jawi script.

Will he continue to keep her in his state government? Will he be consulting the new Opposition Leader, Anwar Ibrahim, and leave it to Anwar, who is PKR’s Adviser, to decide the fate of the sassy damsel in self-distress?

This is Ramadhan and it has been eventful for millions of Malays and Muslims who convene nightly for the special Tarawih prayers, then adjourn to the corridors of the mosques for tea and talk.

Perceptions built in this way are difficult to change and once the idea is fixed the truth does not anymore matter.

I am told in Kota Damansara the mosque first complied, then minds changed and tempers build instead, which was probably why the police acted in a hurry.

One way or another, the months that follow this September ought to make for a time to remember. --- a. ghani ismail, 15 September, 2008

Dark Clouds Over Malaysia?

ONWARDS INTO THE VALLEY OF DEATH RODE THE SIX HUNDRED!

OR

SIMPLE SIMON MET THE PIE-MAN GOING TO THE FAIR


The punishment meted on the Umno Bukit Bendera chief, Datuk Ahmad Ismail, generally perceived as too drastic, has made the Umno president and premier, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Pak Lah), too much a caricature of power to be redeemable.

Now, two days after, we are suddenly told Malaysia Today Blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin was arrested under the ISA and three newspapers were asked to show cause, meaning the security situation is under some threat.

Are the events inter-related and the threat is coming from tensions that have been rising since the March general elections and the June fuel price hike? We are not given enough to even guess intelligently.

To make matters worse, Singapore issued unfriendly restrictions affecting Malaysian travel, causing security to loom more important than it could actually be.

On Wednesday the Umno Supreme Council, under pressure from Gerakan and MCA, sentenced Ahmad Ismail by a split-decision to three years suspension for what cannot be anymore than name calling of Malaysian Chinese as “Asian Jews” and as “squatters” (setinggan?).

With all 13 Umno divisions in Penang (including his) giving Pak Lah the butt over the issue the Gerakan raised, the prime minister and party president should have known better than to push as hard as he did to punish the party divisional leader.

The Umno leader was suspended for three years and relinquished of all his political and social positions by the Umno Supreme Council on Wednesday.

But what did Ahmad actually say during the Permatang Pauh by-election campaign which seemed to have extremely offended Gerakan nobody cared enough to inform the people.

All that’s known is the fact a vernacular newspaper had dedicated three paragraphs to what Ahmad was alleged to have said.

Now, as a result of the three para report, Gerakan, which was mauled in the 2008 general elections, wanted Ahmad detained without trial for saying ‘the Chinese in Malaysia are squatters and cannot expect equality vis-à-vis the Malays and Bumiputras’, or words to that effect.

The Umno Deputy President, Datuk Seri Najib Razak was asked to apologize on Umno’s behalf and Pak Lah came in strongly against Ahmad, only to have the 13 Umno divisions in Penang firmly backing the divisional head.

The result was the party president appearing more baroque than Charles Chaplin could have been to parody political leadership on the screen.

Ahmad Ismail was called to appear before the Umno Supreme Council and punished while the army and police were asked to warn the people against fueling the tensed situation. But what was it all about?

To the observer it was quite apparently a political skit issuing from the tantrums of a party and coalition that lost miserably in the recent general elections. Someone has to be the source of a ruckus.

But how terrible were the things Ahmad could have uttered has become a question that’s gaping like the Batu Caves, causing Professor Dr. Adnan Nawang from the UPSI to conclude we are dealing with Bebalism (tantrum).

Well-known intellectual, Professor Dr. Shamsul Amri of UKM, suggested it could be that the Barisan Nasional may have to lose power first, like it had been with the Congress in India and LDP in Japan before it can regain the stature and the sobriety it has lost.

The two reactions simply say people are at a lost. The conflict is between members of BN components in Penang and not with the Opposition.

It could not have been anything more than name calling, the semantics of which is uncertain since we do not know what had, in fact, been said and meant.

Everyone knows most of the Chinese in Malaysia are citizens and there really isn’t any movement in Umno or in any other Malay political organization that’s wishing away the rights the non-Malay citizens enjoy.

In any case you would need a two-third majority in parliament to try such a stunning constitutional reform, the same as what it would take to remove the Malay Special Rights clauses in the Constitution.

How could it be that the Gerakan found the name calling as offensive apparently defeats some of the best brains in Malaysia.

Is there, indeed, such a state of paranoia for some Chinese in Gerakan to believe Umno will, for the heck of it, curtail the rights of non-Malay citizens and employ apartheid?

Hence, either it is Bebalism we are facing or some cunning maverick is trying hard to find a reason to shut the doors to the alarming possibility some BN MPs may crossover to the Pakatan Rakyat.

A third possibility is that the components in the state that lost badly cannot any longer hold together and its time for the fireworks display before leadership change ensues.

The people in the skit are otherwise good persons. Neither Koh Tsu Khoon, nor Ong Kah Ting or Ahmad Ismail is the ogre-type.

But it must be tough to be losing jobs, money and power in a single go like the sun suddenly refused to rise after March 2008.

Golf mates leave you, neighbors let their dogs out on you and your wife wears her le masque in bed. Husbands take to the hookah, oozing smoke like they are on fire and hence, Gerakan Women’s Wing wanted Ahmad locked up under the ISA. Who’s bad?

Ahmad was reported to have said Umno (meaning his division and/or Penang Umno) is happy to work with the MCA and that the Gerakan can quit the BN if that is what it wants to do.

What communitarian impulse and output could that ever be? What “racism” do we have in Ahmad and the Malays when the term racist must assume race superiority, like Nazism, or White Superiority that called the Niggers and colored the sons of Sam.

Have you heard any Malay who thinks the Malays are genetically or racially superior? Have you? Have you met any Chinese who thinks and believes he belongs to a superior race?

Unless it is Tsu Khoon’s and Ahmad’s joint idea of humor to rock the boat and cause Pak Lah to slip overboard, I have to agree with Dr. Adnan Nawang, that Gerakan is looking like a poor loser.

It was a split decision in the Umno Supreme Council and the end of the story may not have yet been told.

In the meantime many in Umno are happy with the way Muhyiddin Yassin is speaking up for the members and the people.

An Umno divisional leader called me to say he hopes more and more in Umno will do as Muhyiddin is doing.

But what will be happening in the country now that the ISA is back and several newspapers have been asked to show cause or get clamped? ---a. ghani ismail, 12 Sept. 2008

In The Path Of Mahathir's Return

MAHATHIR ON THE REBOUND –

WHO IS KILLING COCK-ROBBIN?


Dr. Mahathir is coming back into Umno by the back door. Disgusted with Pak Lah’s ineffectiveness and lack of direction, some Umno warlords are preparing for a resolution from a party division to restore Dr. M as a member, leaving the party’s Supreme Council to decide whether or not he can be readmitted.

Nobody threw him out. He relinquished his membership in dismay.

But the chips are down and with problems appearing unresolved, a triumvirate could be the solution to return a direction to the party and nation.

Warlords opposed to Pak Lah are trying to put together Tengku Razaleigh, Muhyiddin Yassin and Dr. Mahathir, in a last ditch effort to remove Pak Lah.

It will depend a lot on whether or not Umno delegates to the Supreme Council election in December believe the party and the BN are systematically being crippled and the country will be in a bloody mess should Pak Lah continue as number one.

But with Najib Razak staying with Pak Lah, the triumvirate can only count on a slim chance to win, the party still steeped in a patron-client culture and will want to follow the incumbent leaders.

Expected is a showing strong enough to further weaken Pak Lah, making it untenable for him to stay on until 2010 before letting Najib takeover, the couple of years some described will drag like a thousand years.

Since Pak Lah is expected not to care and will deny he was even challenged, observers are reading it is the end of the BN rule come the next general elections. Some say Umno and the BN are both asking for it.

Tension is high. With the initial demand for meritocracy successfully worked into a hate-Malay and hate-Islam campaign worse than it was in 1969, the face-off in Penang where all 13 Umno divisions has given the party president and BN chairman the butt now teeters like a rock that can anytime roll into an avalanche.

The Tengku Li, Muhiyuddin and Dr. M grouping will need the avalanche to upset Pak Lah and Najib together.

DAP has always stood for meritocracy and for equality, a path the Singapore PAP had taken when Malaysia was formed in 1963, leading to the expulsion of the island republic in 1965 and snowballing into racial emotions that finally combusted on May 13, 1969.

This time around the recall of meritocracy was initially given a wrapper for integration, meaningfully devised by the Barisan Nasional (BN) into a step-by-step move, with the Vision Schools (Sekolah Wawasan) at the base in a clear attempt to bring together the children of all communities.

About 95 percent of Chinese parents send their off-springs to Chinese primary schools. With Chinese education rising from primary to tertiary in Malaysia, the shared life-space in the old system of colonial education was gone.

Now that China and India are speedily growing into big powers and economic giants infecting a new swing of ethnic nationalism in Malaysia, while Islam is under and returning fire in more than half of the Islamic world, unless integration is taken seriously the chances of Malaysia avoiding ethnic strife in the next 15 years would be thin.

The Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Pak Lah), unprepared for premiership when he replaced Dr. Mahathir in 2003, hugged Singapore in vicarious embrace,

He abruptly dumped The Bridge, a move Mahathir had made on the request of the Sultan of Johore to remove the Causeway and return the use of the Tebrau Straits to Malaysian shipping.

The Singapore-Sling inebriated Pak Lah. He was prepared to allow the Singapore Air-Force to use Malaysian air-space, prepared to sell Singapore 2 billion tons of sand from Johore, and then he made Singapore the anchor for the Iskandar Malaysia.

When his leadership was roundly raped by the Opposition in the 2008 general elections and the BN was left clinging to power by a margin of only 29 bodies in parliament, the flood-gates were lifted and vocal non-Malays with a minimum of education and altogether lacking taste mucked the Malays and Islam like the country was already theirs to ruin.

Pak Lah could not decide who he should first represent - the Malays as Umno president, the Malaysians as BN chairman, or those non-Malays who are Singapore’s boon.

The nation Mahathir had built in 22 years is dying. The Vision Schools are history and even the Smart Schools Pak Lah shunted out. Who, indeed, is killing Cock-Robin?

To a lot of people the premier and party president is a dysfunction. He flip-flops, he dismantled and he confounds, leaving hardly any confidence to enable him to resolve the Penang face-off and the many difficulties the country is facing.

In Penang the Bukit Bendera Umno chief, Ahmad Ismail, up to the gills with the incessant complaints and demands for equality, said the non-Malays are migrants and cannot be equal in all respects with the Bumiputra, a statement a lot of Malays are happy someone finally uttered.

Gerakan president, Koh Tsu Koon, demanded stern action or he wanted out, his party routed in the recent general elections leaving only two in parliament.

Pak Lah cast a strong warning on Ahmad Ismail whereupon all 13 Umno divisions in Penang (including his own) stood firmly behind Ahmad, goring Pak Lah in the butt like a Spanish bull.

The Wanita Gerakan has made itself silly for demanding the Bukit Bendera Umno chief to be sacked from the party and locked under the ISA.

There could be riots on the streets if Pak Lah were to do that. A hearing will do. Malays are being made to feel they are guilty of ethnic-cleansing even and nobody cares how they feel. For how long do these people believe they will keep cool?

Malays, Islam and Malaysia have been pilloried without Pak Lah showing the least will to take control of the situation, him acting only against the Hindraf Five who had taken matters to an extreme of extremes.

It is apparent Pak Lah hasn’t even a whiff of a solution to the current confusion, what with the sudden hike of fuel prices that lifted the Consumer Price Index (CPI) obviously higher than any kite he has flown as premier or before.

The result is a simple compound of emotional stress, tension and rebuff Dr. Mahathir had clearly foreseen and cleverly kept to his own brand of deliberated process of change, modernization, development and integration.

He is comfortably saddled on the Malay resistance. What’s left to be seen is whether or not the resistance will pick up a sustained pace long enough to bring the required alterations and resolve the problems before hell instates.

It’s almost like the Spielberg thriller, Dr. Jones and the Temple of Doom. ----a. ghani ismail