Time to make a stand, Malaysians

By Mustafa Sharif | May 12, 2011
The Malaysian Insider

One common feature of us Malaysians is our ability to stomach so much nonsense and then don’t do anything to make a change.

We are lied to on a daily basis by politicians, bureaucrats and the media but still shrug our shoulders and get on with our lives. The strange part of this is that if our wife, children or siblings fudge the truth, we chew their heads off and threaten Armageddon.

And yet, arguably, it is the daily deception by politicians, bureaucrats and the media which impacts our life greatly. Let me just list a few examples of these lies and deceptions.

1) The great Lynas scam. If not for the role played by Internet portals, the Lynas rare earth project would have flown under the radar. Federal politicians and Pahang Mentri Besar Adnan Yaakob knew about the toxic nature of the project but FDI is more important than TMR (the mortality rate). When the firestorm about the project could not be contained, the newsletters@newspapers suddenly discovered the issue. More like, they could not bury it. It is crazy man. Hundreds or thousands of lives could be at stake and government politicians and their newspapers are either ignorant or part of a deception.

Now the government says that it will have an independent body to vet the project. But nothing is going to happen. Because Lynas has already built its facility. In addition, the United States wants this project to become a reality, concerned that Chinese is having too much control over the rare earth industry. So expect the US-centric international atomic energy body to give the Lynas project a wink and a nod.

2) The Christian debacle. Ever since, the Christians withdrew their support for BN in the Sarawak election in the wake of the Alkitab issue and a host of other acts of persecution, Umno has been waiting for retribution.

That “opportunity” came when Umno bloggers and the Umno newsletter, Utusan Malaysia, wrote and spread fiction about Christians wanting to take over the country. Talk about an alien plot.

But following that fiction, we had Umno ministers and even the prime minister console and sympathise with Muslims like as if this fictional plot were true.

If this was not bad enough, the newspapers, which have a duty to report truth and expose falsehoods, kept silent, one of them buried the story right inside the paper.

My point is that we can’t depend on the politicians in this country. We surely can’t depend on the MACC, judging by the evidence presented at the royal commission of inquiry (I wonder if any of the MACC officials will pass a lie detector test).

We can’t trust the police because they can’t catch the serial acid attackers and close a simple porn video case. We can’t trust the Attorney-General because evidence presented by a former top cop suggests that he can’t be trusted.

We can’t trust the media because they have forgotten who they owe their allegiance to and have become poodles of their political masters.

So what should be do? I don’t propose to have all the answers but I know WHAT WE CAN’T DO ANY LONGER: just shrug our shoulders and say that it’s not our business.