— Fikry Osman
The Malaysian Insider
May 12, 2013
MAY 12 — One week after GE13, you get the feeling that some Barisan Nasional (BN) leaders, especially in Umno, are in denial about what went wrong with their campaign.
Instead, they first blamed it on the Chinese for rejecting them, and then told the Chinese they were stupid enough to be duped by the DAP into rejecting them. In not so many words, the Chinese are ungrateful and stupid.
“Umno was not defeated, in fact it added more seats. If not for some quarters playing race issues, we would have won more seats,” Umno president Datuk Seri Najib Razak said in his speech at the party’s 67th anniversary celebration at the Putra World Trade Centre here last night
“We are not a racist party, we are a party that is moderate. We have been serving other races for a long time,” he added.
One of the harsh realities of the new world is this: you cannot tailor your message to different race groups and get away with it.
Umno and BN tried that in Election 2013 and failed, Umno’s Utusan Malaysia tried to scare people with DAP being the master and PAS the puppet, while MCA’s The Star did the opposite.
The NST, well, it couldn’t do really much because its sales and readership, is shrinking and it could only rely on bloggers for its news content.
And all these newspapers since then have only task at hand, to help the prime minister protect his Umno flank, which despite winning more federal seats and Kedah, however failed miserably in Selangor and Johor.
It lost more in Selangor and also in its home state Johor.
Umno and its leaders must understand one thing, that in order to protect whatever constituency and credibility among the Malays, you have to make sure you don’t alienate the other races.
You do that, and you get your “Malaysian tsunami” on May 5, 2013. The results already show that your divide and rule campaigns don’t work.
That putting the various races in silos don’t work.
People see through that campaign, that you talk in a narrow sectarian way to the Malays while preaching unity among Malaysians. We have become Bangsa Malaysia and such bigotry is not tolerated.
If you want to continue leading this country, believe in your 1Malaysia and be a Malaysian. If not, we will show you the door.