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Posted: 16 May 2013 01:20 PM PDT

I feel sad that this country does not accept me, but I feel sadder for my children who will still have to face the same.

Kee Thuan Chye

"On this date, we are embarking on a move to recolour the nation's historical canvas with colours of unity. This is our motherland. From this day on, no one can tell the Chinese to go back to China or the Indians to go back to India."

This is the best, the most positive, people-unifying statement to come out in decades. And it did not come from a leader of the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN).

It came from 20 civil society groups, led by Solidariti Anak Muda Malaysia (SAMM) headed by Badrul Hisham Shaharin and student group Solidariti Mahasiswa Malaysia (SMM) headed by Safwan Anang, as they marked May 13, the tragic day in 1969 when racial riots broke out and drove the races apart, with a call for an end to racism.

A teacher told me that when she read the statement reported in a newspaper, she burst into tears. It was particularly emotional for her because she had personally experienced being told to go back to China.

This was about 30 years ago when she had newly arrived in Kuala Lumpur from a small town up north, and was riding in a taxi. As she tried to explain to the taxi driver where she wanted to go in halting Malay, the man was repulsed by her lack of fluency in the national language. He bluntly told her to go back to China.

The remark shocked and humiliated her, but she was too afraid to say anything. Since then, she has lived with the wound without hope of healing. The decades that followed made it worse – as politicians of the ruling party played the race card to divide and rule, as the media reported more incidents of Chinese being told to go back to China and Indians to go back to India. As if they were not citizens of the country. As if they were merely tenants in the home they helped to build.

Even today, although the 13th general election is over, the silly season is still going strong as pro-BN figures, including a former judge and the Perak Mufti, make statements that are overtly racist and divisive.

Speaking at a forum last week, former Court of Appeal judge Mohd Noor Abdullah accused the Chinese of betraying the Malays because they largely rejected BN. He said they were plotting to seize political power.

He said, threateningly, "When the Malays are betrayed, there is a backlash and the Chinese must bear the consequences of such a backlash." He called for the Malays and Bumiputeras to have a two-thirds presence in key sectors like education, the civil service and business. "Arrange it in such a way that from today, every business will have a 67 per cent share ready to be taken up by Malays," he urged.

He also called for the terms "Chinese" and "Indian" to be abolished and replaced with "non-Malays" and "non-Bumiputeras". Disdainfully, he regarded the Orang Asli as "our cousins" and the Sabah and Sarawak Bumiputeras as "our relatives" while the others "are just our neighbours because they came to menumpang (squat) here".

This is divisive and akin to calling the Chinese and Indians pendatang (immigrants), another derogatory reference they have had to suffer. It echoes the insult former Penang Umno leader Ahmad Ismail inflicted on these communities after BN's electoral debacle in 2008. Now, in the wake of BN's worse performance this time, Mohd Noor appears to be an Ahmad Ismail clone. The only difference is that he's not a politician, but it's still not acceptable.

Politician or no, his vindictive tone contrasts starkly with that of SAMM, SMM and like-minded organisations. But more than that, Mohd Noor is patently wrong in concluding that Chinese rejection of BN amounts to a betrayal of the Malays.

You can only betray a party to whom you owe loyalty. And in a democracy, you don't owe loyalty to any party unless you are a member of that party. And even then, you are still a citizen in your own right so you can vote against your own party if you think it has not been doing a good job. You are entitled to vote for a rival party that you think can deliver good governance.

More important, BN does not own the country or the government. It is merely the government of the day. You owe your allegiance to your country, not to BN. So all that talk of betrayal is utterly misleading.

Najib's Survival Cabinet

Posted: 16 May 2013 12:33 PM PDT

Malaysian PM turns to old foe's allies for help

John Berthelsen, Asia Sentinel

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak has appointed what amounts to a survival cabinet, turning to allies of former foe Abdullah Ahmad Badawi to fend off intra-party challenges in the wake of the May 5 election, in which the opposition actually won the popular vote but was thwarted from taking power by gerrymandered constituencies.

Some of the appointments represent a sharp about-turn by Najib from the policies of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and the deputy prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, whom an outraged Mahathir is said to be attempting to goad into trying to push out Najib immediately as prime minister and head of the United Malays National Organization instead of waiting until the October party Annual General Assembly. Although the opposition has pointed to the appointments of Shahidan Kassim and Umno secretary-general Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor as indications of Mahathir's clout, the opposite seems to be true.

In addition to facing internal rebellion for the Barisan Nasional's relatively poor showing in the May 5 polls from the conservative, Malay nationalist wing of Umno, Najib has also borne the brunt of almost daily rallies and demonstrations as the shock troops of Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim charge that the election was stolen from his Pakatan Rakyat coalition with a mix of gerrymandering, ghost voters, outright theft of ballots and other electoral misuses. An estimated 30,000 protesters turned out in light rain in Johor Wednesday night, following rallies of up to an estimated by supporters at 90,000 each in four cities earlier.

Two individuals particularly have drawn Mahathir's fire. They are Khairy Jamaluddin, former Prime Minister Badawi's son in law. Mahathir helped to drive the former premier from power following a relative electoral debacle in 2008 that cost the Barisan Nasional, or ruling national coalition, its two-third parliamentary majority for the first time in history. The other is Mohamad Nazri Abdul Aziz, who Mahathir dubbed Badawi's "hatchet man" and who has openly accused Mahathir of racism.

Khairy, 37, was a charter member of the so-called "fourth floor boys," for their location in Badawi's government offices --relatively young, media-savvy ethnic Malay cadres with good business skills whom Mahathir accused of using their links to Badawi to influence government and UMNO decisions. Khairy has remained a bete noir of the Mahathir wing because of his espousal of moderate racial politics, publicly going to churches and temples that were desecrated by Malay nationalists two years ago.

In the wholesale bloodletting that accompanied Badawi's fall from power, Khairy was one of the few who survived all attempts to dislodge him, even edging out Mahathir's son Mukhriz to become head of the Youth Wing of UMNO. He was named Youth and Sports minister yesterday by Najib.

Mohamad Nazri Abdul Aziz is if anything an even bigger foe of the Mahathir wing than Khairy. Mahathir, a party insider said, pulled out all the stops to try to prevent his appointment. He earned the octogenarian former prime minister's ire for calling him a "bloody racist" because of Mahathir's support for what Nazri said was a government program indoctrinating racist sentiments on the part of civil servants and public university students. Badawi's former law minister, Nazri was dropped in a cabinet reshuffle. In complete opposition to Muhyiddin, he came out in defense of Najib's 1Malaysia policy, saying he was a Malaysian first and a Malay second. Muhyiddin has repeatedly said Malays come first.

"(Mahathir) made a last ditch effort to block Nazri but Najib went ahead anyway," a well-wired source said. "Najib realizes he needs Khairy and (Badawi's) support in case the Mahathir and Muhyiddin forces move against him in party polls in October or November this year."

Curse of Australia's silent pervasive racism

Posted: 16 May 2013 12:13 PM PDT

The most insidious racism is just so ingrained it's involuntary. It's about the fact no one responsible for the decision even saw the existence of the problem.

Waleed Aly, The Age

As opening lines in letters go, ''I find you deeply offensive'' is pretty direct. Fair enough. I suspect lots of people do. It's a natural consequence of media work. But then my anonymous correspondent decided to explain why: ''You are foreign, you shall always be so. Piss off back to whatever Middle Eastern sink hole you blew in here from.''

There's nothing surprising about this. There's nothing even particularly rare about it. Some version of that letter arrives every few months or so. This one was particularly unvarnished - complete with references to my wife and ''half caste kids'' and cheerful threats of the inevitable return of the White Australia policy - but the message hardly varies: this isn't my country and my public presence is unwelcome, either because I'm a Muslim, or because in some racially determinable way not a ''real'' Australian.

I've been accused of everything from taking elocution lessons, to changing the spelling of my name to appear deceptively Australian before I unleash some Trojan conspiracy. Apparently Aly is roughly equivalent to Smith. They're onto me.

I have almost no emotional reaction to this kind of goonish racism. It's simply too ridiculous to engage me. In fact, I'd completely forgotten about this most recent letter until racist ranting hit the headlines this week following yet another racist diatribe on a Sydney bus that was captured and posted to YouTube.

It's at least the third such case in about four months. Hence the fresh round of debate on Australian racism that always seems to follow the same unedifying pattern.

First comes the shock, as though such incidents reveal something we never knew existed. Then comes the argument over whether or not Australia is a racist country. To be frank, I don't know what the argument means. Every country has racism. Precisely how much do you need before a country itself is racist? Is it a matter of essence or degree? Do we judge it by surveying legislation, newspapers or behaviour on public transport? And even if we can answer those questions, then what?

That argument is a dead end. It's more about a condemnatory label than the substance and nature of Australian racism. The real question isn't about which adjective describes us. It's about how best to identify and respond to the racism we inevitably harbour.

Debating the meaning of the occasional racist tirade doesn't help answer that. It's just not that helpful to take extreme individual behaviour as the starting point on an issue like this. Sure, it's troubling. Sure, it's more common than we like to admit. Sure, it's a problem. But it's not the problem.

The racism that really matters in Australia isn't the high-level, weapons-grade derangement that winds its way via YouTube into the news. The truth is we can't compete with Europe for hardcore white nationalism or the US for white supremacist movements. We can't compete with Asia or the Middle East for the maintenance of an explicit, institutionalised and sometimes codified racial hierarchy.

Our racial and religious minorities aren't having their communities torched (though the occasional building has been firebombed), and our handful of far-right politicians aren't leading political parties that attract 20 per cent of the vote.

No, our real problem is the subterranean racism that goes largely unremarked upon and that we seem unable even to detect. Like the racism revealed by an Australian National University study, which found you're significantly less likely to get a job interview if you have a non-European name. The researchers sent fake CVs in response to job advertisements, changing only the name of the applicant. It turns out that if you're surname is Chinese, you have to apply for 68 per cent more jobs to get the same number of interviews as a Anglo-Australian. If you're Middle Eastern, it's 64 per cent. If you're indigenous, 35 per cent.

Kredit: www.malaysia-today.net

Jumaat, 17 Mei 2013

Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

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