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Beware of false prophets

— Jacob Sinnathamby
The Malaysian Insider

SEPT 27 — Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak certainly talks a good game. It is election season and he needs to win big so everything goes.

Today he talks about how Bumiputera quotas need to go, eventually. No one knows when this eventually will be because as we all know the Umno-hijacked New Economic Policy was extended under pressure from the Umno beneficiaries.

Najib is not the first Umno president to talk about removing quotas or taking away the crutches from Bumiputeras.

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Tun Abdullah Badawi both mentioned this when they wanted to show Malaysians that they were enlightened leaders and when they were fishing for support from non-Malays before elections.

Needless to say all their “good intentions” never materialised. Once they got the votes, they promptly forgot about taking away the quotas and instead fortified the distortions in the system. Continue reading “Beware of false prophets”

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Hudud Laws, between the literal and the implicit

— Dr Ahmad Farouk Musa
The Malaysian Insider
Sep 27, 2011

SEPT 27 — The hudud controversy has now returned to the eyes of the media after it was discussed at the National Syariah Seminar sponsored by the Department of Islamic Affairs of Kelantan. PAS indeed had taken a step forward in their comprehensive proposals for a welfare state but their preoccupation with the hudud issue clearly shows that they are still stuck in the framework of antiquarian politics.

For this evidently shows that the Hudud laws are still a crucial part of their raison d’etre. It doesn’t look likely that this will change, since evoking the hudud is a convenient way to claim that they are the real fighters for Islam in Malaysia, as opposed to Umno. It also somehow implies that the Islamic credentials of any party somehow hinges on their willingness to apply hudud laws.

Much worse, once the hudud issue is sensationalized it makes it difficult for there to be critical discourse: what is overstated, in the loudest tone, is to be regarded as truth. The priority is to scramble for as much influence in the debate as possible to show that one side is more Islamic than the other. Thus it is not surprising that PAS is no longer the only party supporting the Hudud laws. Continue reading “Hudud Laws, between the literal and the implicit”

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DAP accuses The Star of misreporting hudud quit vow

By Shannon Teoh
The Malaysian Insider
Sep 27, 2011

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 27 — The DAP accused The Star today of falsely reporting that Lim Guan Eng had threatened to pull the party out of Pakatan Rakyat (PR) if hudud became part of the pact’s joint policy.

Zairil Khir Johari, Lim’s political secretary, wrote in an open letter to the English daily that the party secretary-general had merely promised that “the entire central executive committee (CEC) would resign to take full responsibility if hudud” became PR policy.

“An initially correct report had come to be replaced by one that was imaginatively concocted,” Zairil (picture) wrote.

He said that a correct version of the article was uploaded on thestar.com.my on September 25 in which the reporter quoted Lim as saying that the party’s CEC would resign if anyone could prove that hudud law was in the Common Policy Framework (CPF) or Buku Jingga.

But a second version was uploaded the next day which changed the headline from “Guan Eng: DAP top leadership will quit if hudud law included in Pakatan policy” to “DAP leaders threaten to quit Pakatan council”.

Zairil said the second article “implied wrongly and falsely that Lim had threatened the resignation of the party’s top leadership” from PR. Continue reading “DAP accuses The Star of misreporting hudud quit vow”