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Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

Less political rebellion, more mollycoddled mob
Tension Grows in Malaysian Religious Controversy
A Reluctant Symbol for Electoral Reform in Malaysia
London riots: how BlackBerry Messenger played a key role

Less political rebellion, more mollycoddled mob

Posted: 09 Aug 2011 07:16 AM PDT

Brendan O'Neill, The Australian

MANY commentators are on a mission to contextualise the riots that have swept parts of urban London and other British cities.

"It's very naive to look at these riots without the context," says one journalist, who says the reason the violence kicked off in the London suburb of Tottenham is because "that area is getting 75 per cent cuts [in public services]". Others have said the political context for the rioting is youth unemployment or working-class anger at Prime Minister David Cameron's cuts agenda.

"There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored," says a writer for The Guardian, and it is the "backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures". The "mass unrest" is a protest against unhinged capitalism, apparently.

These observers are right that there is a political context to the riots. While the police shooting of young black man Mark Duggan may ostensibly have been the trigger for the street violence, there is a broader context to the disturbances. But they are wrong about what the political context is. Painting these riots as some kind of action replay of historic political streetfights against capitalist bosses or racist cops might allow armchair radicals to get their intellectual rocks off, as they lift their noses from dusty tomes about the Levellers or the suffragettes and fantasise that a political upheaval of equal worth is occurring outside their windows. But such shameless projection misses what is new and deeply worrying about these riots. The political context is not the cuts or racist policing, it is the welfare state, which has nurtured a generation that has no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it. They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people's existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain "mentally fit", has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.

The most striking thing about the rioters is how little they care for their own communities. You don't have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal. It is entertaining to watch the political contortions of commentators who claim the riots are an uprising against the evils of capitalism, as they struggle to explain why the targets have been Foot Locker sports shops and why the only "gains" made by the rioters have been to get a new pair of trainers or an Apple laptop. In the Brixton race riots of 1981, looting and the destruction of local infrastructure were largely incidental to the broader expression of political anger, by-products of the main show, which was a clash between a community and the forces of the state. But in these riots, looting and smashing stuff up is all there is. It is childish nihilism.

Many older members of the urban communities rocked by violence have been shocked by the level of self-destruction exhibited by the rioters. Some shop owners have got together to defend their property, even beating up rioters who have turned up with iron bars. In one video, a West Indian woman in her 50s braves the rubble-strewn streets to lecture the rioters: "These people worked hard to make their businesses work and then you lot wanna go and burn it up. For what?" On Twitter, the hashtag #riotcleanup is being used by community members to co-ordinate some post-riot street-cleaning, to make amends for what one elderly Tottenham resident described as "the stupid behaviour of the young".

But it is more than childish destructiveness motivating the rioters. These are youngsters who are uniquely alienated from the communities in which they grew up. Nurtured in large part by the welfare state, financially, physically and educationally, socialised more by the agents of welfarism than by their own neighbours or local representatives, these youth have little moral or emotional attachment to their communities. Their rioting reveals not that Britain is in a time warp in 1981 or 1985 with politically motivated riots against the police, but that the tentacle-like spread of the welfare state into every area of people's lives has utterly zapped old social bonds, the relationship of sharing and solidarity that once existed in working-class communities. These riots suggest that the welfare state is giving rise to a generation happy to shit on its own doorstep.

This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one's own community. And as a left-winger I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly adverse affect on working people's lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, this welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth remembering Marx's colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base among parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that "ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation". In very different circumstances, we have something similar today where the decadent commentariat's siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, "the labouring nation", look on with disdain.

There is one more important part to this rioting story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are adapted to consensual rather than conflictual policing. It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed by the politics of victimhood, where virtually every police activity gets followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters only fuels the riots because, as one observer put it, when the rioters "see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria". So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. The riots tell a very interesting story about modern Britain.

Tension Grows in Malaysian Religious Controversy

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 08:02 PM PDT

Religious police accuse Christians of attempting to convert Muslims

The federal constitution, which ensures freedom of religion in Malaysia, also bans conversion attempts. Other state governments have enacted other statues that prohibit proselytizing by non-Muslims.

Asia Sentinel

Always-tense relations between Malaysia's religious communities continue to be strained again over a raid on Aug. 3 by officials of the Selangor Islamic Religious Department on a Methodist church in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Petaling Jaya where they said Malay Muslims were being converted to Christianity.

The Christian leaders say nothing of the sort was going on, and that the affair was a dinner to recognize an NGO called Harapan Komuniti (Community Hope) for its efforts to combat Aids. About 100 to 150 people were attending the dinner, among them 12 ethnic Malays.

Yesterday afternoon, the religious department said it was considering arrest warrants for the 12 Muslims, who apparently have refused on the advice of lawyers to give the department statements about their activities at the dinner.

Both Malays and Christians have repeatedly accused the other of attempting to convert the opposite members to their respective religions. According to Malaysia's Demographic Statistics Division, 60.3 percent of the population is ethnic Malay, 22.9 percent Chinese and 6.7 percent Indian, with other races making up the difference, although the size of the Malay majority is disputed by the smaller ethnic groups.

The story has been complicated by reports in the Malay-language Berita Harian, a daily owned by the United Malays National Organization, and Harian Metro, a tabloid, that two women who attended the dinner said they had been offered RM1,000 each to convert to Christianity. The stories said Christian groups often target poverty-stricken Malays and offer them money to change their religion. The religious police also said the fact that a speaker had used the words Quran and "pray" in a speech was an indication of proseylitizing.

Christian leaders denied the charge. The raid has been roundly condemned by other religious groups as well, who expressed shock that Islamic religious police would enter a church. However, the youth wing of Perkasa, a group that advocates so-called Ketuanan Melayu, or Malay rights, said the reports by the two papers could be credible and asked for a police investigation into the claims.

The federal constitution, which ensures freedom of religion in Malaysia, also bans conversion attempts. Other state governments have enacted other statues that prohibit proselytizing by non-Muslims.

The presence of the Malays at a Christian church dinner during the Muslim fasting month was particularly sensitive, said a Malay source in Kuala Lumpur. "You don't enter a church during Ramadan," he said. Muslims are forbidden by their religion from taking food between sunrise and sunset.

The raid has caused confusion because the Selangor State government, which has control over the Islamic religious department, is in turn controlled by the Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition. Typically it is the United Malays National Organization, the leading ethnic party in the national ruling coalition, which is accused by the opposition of fomenting religious tension. In fact, the raid was condemned by Khairy Jamaluddin, the chief of the UMNO youth wing, although mainly because the opposition coalition had allowed it to go forward.

Parti Islam se-Malaysia, which is still largely a fundamentalist Islamist party despite the election of moderate officers earlier this year who declared the party to be secular one now, shares an uneasy balance in largely moderate, middle-class Selangor state with the ethnic Chinese Democratic Action Party and more moderate urban Malays.

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 04:51 PM PDT

Ms. Ambiga, who is ethnic Indian in a country that is mostly Malay and mostly Muslim, said that the protesters "exploded many myths" about Malaysians, such as the notion that people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds could not work together and that the middle class was "too comfortable to step up to the plate."

By LIZ GOOCH, The New York Times

Her photograph has been burned by ethnic Malay nationalists, there have been calls to revoke her Malaysian citizenship and she has been threatened, via text message, with death. The movement she leads, Bersih, an alliance of 62 nongovernmental organizations pressing for electoral reform, has been declared illegal, and a demonstration that brought thousands of its followers into the streets of this capital city last month ended with nearly 1,700 arrests.

But having stared down these challenges, Ambiga Sreenevasan, 54, a University of Exeter-educated lawyer and former president of the Malaysian Bar Council, is now being hailed by many here as the "new symbol of civil society's dissent."

"She has not been afraid to speak the truth to power," said Ibrahim Suffian, director of the Merdeka Center, an independent polling firm in Kuala Lumpur.

Over peppermint tea in a busy cafe recently, Ms. Ambiga squirmed uncomfortably at the attention she had attracted.

"This focus on me is actually ridiculous," said Ms. Ambiga. "It's a true citizens' movement, because the citizens have taken ownership of Bersih."

The Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, or Bersih — "clean" in Malay — got its start in November 2007. Members of the political opposition and civic groups defied restrictions on gatherings of more than five people without a permit and rallied for changes in an election system they said unfairly favored the governing coalition, which has been in power since Malaysia achieved independence in 1957.

The demonstrators were dispersed by tear gas, and some were arrested. They did not achieve their immediate demands, which included better access to the state-owned news media by opposition candidates and the use of indelible ink on voters' thumbs to help prevent fraud. But their action was credited with winning support for the opposition and contributing to the governing coalition's poor showing in the 2008 election, when it fell below a two-thirds majority for the first time.

Ms. Ambiga did not attend that rally in 2007, but earlier in the year she had led a march of more than 2,000 lawyers calling for judicial reform. And while she runs a commercial litigation practice, she has also devoted considerable time to pro bono cases involving the rights of squatters, indigenous people and women. In 2009 she became the first Malaysian to receive a U.S. State Department "International Women of Courage" Award.

Maria Chin Abdullah, executive director of Empower, a nongovernmental organization that promotes women in politics, said it was because of Ms. Ambiga's "commitment, dedication and leadership in defending human rights and democracy" that she and other N.G.O. leaders approached her to lead Bersih 2.0, the second incarnation of the electoral reform movement.

Ms. Ambiga agreed, on the proviso that it be "civil society-driven," and not simply a tool of opposition parties.

Again, Bersih pushed for an end to electoral fraud, media access for all parties and a minimum 21-day campaign period before any election. But Ms. Ambiga said she never expected the event to unfold the way it did.

What began as a call for reform morphed into widespread anger at the government's handling of the activists. When Bersih was declared an unregistered and therefore illegal organization, barred from demonstrating in the capital, and more than 200 people were arrested in the weeks leading up to a July 9 protest, Ms. Ambiga said, the effect was to prompt even more people to join in the rally. Bersih estimated that there were 50,000 protesters; the police put the figure at 5,000 to 6,000.

As the demonstrators tried to march to Stadium Merdeka, the police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowds. Among those arrested was Ms. Ambiga, who, along with the others, was released that night.

"While I was sitting there the most wonderful things were happening in Kuala Lumpur, which I could only read about that night," she said. "It brought tears to my eyes. I just didn't for a minute expect Malaysians to rise to the occasion in the way they did that day."

Even though the rally was blocked, she said, Bersih has heightened public awareness of the need for free and fair elections. "A number of people have told me that they may not have voted before, but they'll definitely vote next time," she said.

Even now, though, she does not call herself an activist.

"I think I'm an advocate for a cause," she said. "In a sense it was a learning experience for me, pulling myself out of the comfort of the Bar Council and all its support that it had, including finances, coming into this organization that didn't have a single cent."

She attributes her willingness to get involved in public causes to her upbringing. She cites as an inspiration her late father, a doctor who helped establish the National Kidney Foundation.

"I suppose I've been brought up to always try and do the right thing no matter what the odds," said Ms. Ambiga.

Haji Sulaiman Abdullah, also a former president of the Bar Council, said he was not surprised by "the breadth and depth of leadership she has brought to the Bersih movement."

"Even the ordinary man in the street has come to appreciate what Ambiga stands for," he said.

The events of recent weeks offer plentiful fodder for a compelling election campaign narrative, but Ms. Ambiga shoots down any possibility that a political career could be in the offing. "I don't have the stomach for it," she said.

In fact, it has been Ms. Ambiga's ability to define the Bersih movement as a cause apart from partisan politics that has enabled her to unite Malaysians, said Mr. Suffian, of the Merdeka Center.

Bersih has pledged that its campaign would continue and has called for people to wear yellow on Saturdays, but no more protests are planned for now.

"People keep saying, 'What next?,' but, quite frankly, I think the citizens have taken it upon themselves to organize things around the country using the yellow theme, the theme of democracy. What I think Bersih has achieved is the awakening," Ms. Ambiga said.

She said there have been positive responses from the Election Commission, for example, making it possible for Malaysians living overseas to vote. Its announcement that it would introduce a biometric fingerprinting system, she said, was an admission that there had been a problem of election fraud.

When pressed on how Bersih would respond if the government did not meet other demands, such as equal media access, before the next election, which must be held by mid-2013, Ms. Ambiga's tendency to deflect the focus from herself resurfaced.

"It's not me making the decision," she said. "It will be the rakyat" — Malay for "people" — "making the decision."

London riots: how BlackBerry Messenger played a key role

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 03:34 PM PDT

Police looking on Facebook and Twitter for signs of unrest spreading will have missed out – they should have watched BBM

(The Guardian) - In October 1985, on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham where the death of Cynthia Jarrett sparked riots that culminated in the brutal murder of PC Keith Blakelock, a community leader stood on his chair at a packed open-air meeting.

The man bellowed into a megaphone to the 150 residents in front of him: "You tell them that it's a life for a life from now on. This is war."

Over whoops and cheers from the residents, he turned to a huddle of police officers standing 50 yards away and warned: "I hope you're listening. There is no way I am going to condemn the actions of the youth on Sunday night."

Twenty six years later, police officers are still listening – but the megaphones and open-air meetings have been largely replaced. This weekend's north London riots, the Daily Mail announced on Monday, were "fuelled by social media".

But is this necessarily the case?

Certainly, the first online gathering of people mourning – and soon vowing to avenge – the death of Tottenham resident Mark Duggan took place on Facebook. Some of those behind the page, which now boasts more than 7,500 fans, launched into action shortly before 10.30pm on Saturday evening – more than five hours after the first public show of protest, outside the police station on Tottenham High Road.

At 10.45pm, when rioters set a double decker bus alight, the page posted: "Please upload any pictures or video's you may have from tonight in Tottenham. Share it with people to send the message out as to why this has blown into a riot."

However, otherwise, if there was any sign that a peaceful protest would escalate, it wasn't to be found on Facebook. Twitter was slightly more indicative: tweets about an attempt to target Sunday's Hackney Carnival were spotted by police and the event was abruptly cancelled.

Scotland Yard warned on Monday afternoon that those "inciting violence" on the 140-character social network would not go unpunished. Deputy assistant commissioner Stephen Kavanagh confirmed that officers were looking at the website as part of investigations into widespread looting and rioting.

However, the most powerful and up-to-the-minute rallying appears to have taken place on a more covert social network: BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).

Using BlackBerry handsets – the smartphone of choice for the majority (37%) of British teens, according to last week's Ofcom study – BBM allows users to send one-to-many messages to their network of contacts, who are connected by "BBM PINs". For many teens armed with a BlackBerry, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free, instant and more part of a much larger community than regular SMS.

And unlike Twitter or Facebook, many BBM messages are untraceable by the authorities (which is why, in large part, BBM is so favoured by Emirati teens to spread illicit gossip about officialdom).

One BBM broadcast sent on Sunday, which has been shown to the Guardian by multiple sources, calls on "everyone from all sides of London" to vandalise shops on Oxford street.

It said: "Everyone from all sides of London meet up at the heart of London (central) OXFORD CIRCUS!!, Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!) fuck the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! >:O Dead the ends and colour war for now so if you see a brother... SALUT! if you see a fed... SHOOT!"

Another sent shortly before the outbreak of violence in Enfield on Sunday afternoon reads: "Everyone in edmonton enfield wood green everywhere in north link up at enfield town station at 4 o clock sharp!".

Jenny Jones, the former deputy mayor of London, blamed an under-resourced force for missing the tweets and the status updates. "It's quite possible if they had more resources they could have picked up on this," she said.

But maybe they were looking in the wrong place. Just as Tottenham residents in 1985 lambasted the media for scaremongering about protesters – the Daily Express suggested some had been trained in Russia – today's rioters might be surprised to read about "Twitter-organised chaos".

Kredit: www.malaysia-today.net

Selasa, 9 Ogos 2011

Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

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