Shit-Stirring In Sabah

Hantu Laut

DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang is in town to do his rabble-rousing particularly with the Kadazan community.He even attended UPKO Chinese New Year open house and met Bernard Dompok who has long wanted to do what Yong Teck Lee did.Leave the BN and sit on the fence.But for the moment the cosy position is keeping him comfortable in BN.Others present were Donald Mojuntin,Yong Teck Lee and Edward Khoo.

Lim also claimed he had dinner with Kadazan leaders from DAP and PKR.Visibly missing was Jeffery Kitingan and other PKR leaders.

Lim also met up with Sabah political bloggers and have coined a new word ...deavatarise, whatever that mean.Maybe, James Cameron should check whether he has committed copyright infringement.

Visited Kota Belud and had lukewarm reception.Picture says a thousand words.



Quoted Chinese prostitutes and Indian beggars as scourge of Najib's administration.Reminded the Kadazan of BN failure keeping its promise......keeping the rotation of chief minister alive.Says Kadazan got only 9 months, Chinese 4 years and Malay 11 years.Visited 'Double Six' Mausoleum to stir up more Kadazan sentiments.Says it is time Kadazan reflect what went wrong that the rights of Kadazan have been trampled on and the people marginalised.

Who is stirring racial sentiments, Mr Lim? You or UMNO?

Asking Sabahans whether they have been granted full citizenship rights as Malaysians.Not sure what he meant by that.Only stupid Sabahans would react to such shit-stirring.We are happy to be part of Malaysia.Certainly, far better than being part of the Philippines.

Says Sabah is poorest state in Malaysia.Parroting what Sabah leaders are saying to get more Federal funds.We can't say we are rich and expect Federal to give us more money.Sabah politicians are much smarter than you Mr Lim, they keep harping of being poor to get more money from the Federal government.We are certainly much better and richer than tiny Malacca and your son's kingdom, Penang.The last time I was there this so called 'Pearl of the Orient' has become the 'Dumps of the Orient'.Bad roads,bad traffic jam and rubbish everywhere.

Says very impressed with wannabe Raja Petra type blogger Ronnie Klessen.This former purveyor of fun fairs and member of PKR is very active political blogger in Sabah.

Mr Lim, Sabahans are simple people, the true 1 Malaysia.Why bring your dirty shit stirring politics here.

You accused UMNO of being racist.Look at you stirring selected community hoping to raise racial issues for your selfish agenda.

Debunking The Wang Ehsan

Hantu Laut

'Royalty' or 'Goodwill'? The UMNO boys like to call it 'Wang Ehsan'.Tengku Razaleigh thinks otherwise even at the expense of being sacked from UMNO.One man who stood by his principle.

The BN government says Kelantan is not entitled to oil royalty payment.On the other hand, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, founding chairman of Petronas, whom I presumed knew better, insisted that Kelantan is entitled to such payment by virtue of the Petroleum Development Act.The relevant section which Razaleigh refering to is reproduced below.I presumed, the section become relevant in relation with the agreement signed by the state with Petronas.

4. Cash payment by the Corporation.

In return for the ownership and the rights, powers, liberties and privileges vested in it by virtue of this Act, the Corporation shall make to the Government of the Federation and the Government of any relevant State such cash payment as may be agreed between the parties concerned.

Full text of the Act here.

One of the reasons given by the Federal government that disqualify Kelantan from receiving the oil royalty was that the oil fields were beyond the state's three-mile territorial waters.The oilfields in Sabah, Sarawak and Terengganu are well beyond the three-mile limit.

Are there no more honest people in government that can stand up and show sense of probity. Be honourable enough to admit that what Razaleigh claimed is true.

I am very familiar with most of the oil fields in the west coast of Sabah.From Semarang off Labuan to the North Furious rig west of Kudat.Being a blue water angler my fishing trips take me close to some of the rigs.The whole stretch of the west coast are dotted with rigs at various distances from the mainland, ranging from 25 to 50 nautical miles from the mainland.None are inside the 3-mile limit.Yet, Sabah along with Sarawak and Trengganu get paid 5% oil royalty.

What example are our leaders setting by this blatant disregard of probity and disrespect for written agreement which Razaleigh claimed was signed between the Kelantan state government and Petronas and by virtue of Article 4 of the Petroleum Development Act entitled Kelantan to the 5% royalty payment.

If the Federal government, the legislative makers of this nation can dishonour an agreement with its own state and at its whim and fancy what chance has ordinary citizen like us against the might of government and big corporations.

I wonder what kind of advises Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak gets that every time he announces a policy he loses more credibility and rebuff him from the people.The many unpleasant things that happened recently have ridiculed his 1 Malaysia effort.His government has become a government of "contradiction in terms"

Instead of spinning the untruths, it would be better for him to own up and admit that his government refused to pay Kelantan the oil royalty because it is govern by the opposition and giving them lots of money is like putting a noose around his government's neck.Former Prime Minister Mahatir Mohammad did that to Terengganu. Holding back payment when PAS ruled Terengganu and channelling it directly through Federal agencies.

If Kelantan is entitled to the money than the Federal government, if fearful of putting the money in PAS's hands, should directly pump it into developments in Kelantan instead of giving all kind of lame excuses which only make the people angrier and more determine to kick them out of office.

If Kelantan did sign an agreement with Petronas and by virtue of the Petroleum Development Act than that money is due to Kelantan as of rights, not Wang Ehsan.

Busting The Myth "The Singapore Malays"

Hantu Laut

It's a tough job separating truth from urban legend.

Preceding the article by Ben Bland I posted here, I did a search on other case study of Singapore Malays, to do what the popular TV series on Discovery Channel "The MythBusters" do to disprove the myth. In this case, busting the myth that the Malays in Singapore are on equal ground as the Chinese and Indian Singaporeans and are more successful and doing far better in every aspect than the Malays in Malaysia, purportedly spoiled by the government's affirmative action.In other words there is no discrimination against the Malays in Singapore.

This article will show and prove to you that discriminations in Singapore are far worse than the ones perceived in Malaysia.

To start with, the Malays in Singapore is a small minority and the Chinese in Malaysia is a big minority.That itself gave the Malay Singaporean a disadvantage, politically and economically.

In reality, the average Chinese Singaporean is quite colour blind.

In a tight and competitive society almost everything boils down to materialism.Chinese Singaporean are more concerned with education and material possessions rather than worrying about the colour of your skin.

Discrimination in Singapore, is not within its society but institutionalised, the same thing that some Malaysians are accusing the Malaysians government of doing to non-Malays.

Some 13 years ago the then Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew triggered a debate about Malay loyalty in a televised comment he made before an audience of university students. Lee said the government has taken two opinion polls prior to and following the visit of Israel President Chiam Herzog to Singapore.The poll found the number of Malays who were against the visit dropped sharply from one poll to the next, while the proportion of non-Malays who didn't oppose the visit rose marginally.Lee said "in certain circumstances the Malay Singaporeans reacted as Malay/Muslim rather than as Singaporeans"

In an article in The Far Eastern Economic Review YearBook 1998 Lee said it came down to a question of loyalty "Are we sure that in a moment of crisis, when the heat is on, we are all together heart to heart? I hope so. But we ought to have a fallback position and quickly fill up all the missing hearts if some go missing." Lee certainly doubting the Malay loyalty in the event of war with Malaysia or for that matter Indonesia.

Lee' son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong once commented in an open forum on why Malays do not hold sensitive positions in the armed forces.For example, there are no Malay fighter pilots because their religion might conflict with their duty to Singapore.His statement provoked backlash of criticism from the Muslim community.

At a Singapore 21 forum in September 1999 Lee said "If, for instance, you put in a Malay officer who's very religious and who has family ties in Malaysia in charge of a machine gun unit, that's a very tricky business.

"We've got to know his background. I'm saying these things because they are real, and if I didn't think that, and I think even if today the Prime Minister doesn't think carefully about this, we could have a tragedy."

So, if the non-Malays, including people like Lim Kit Siang think the Malays in Singapore are on equal ground as non-Malays and politicised it for political mileage than he is kidding himself.It is clear that the Singapore government does not trust its citizens of Malay descent and openly discriminated against them in certain areas.

In Februaray 1999 Indonesian President B.J Habibe lashed out at Singapore racist policy and said institutional discrimination against Chinese in Indonesia had been abolished, but Singapore still blocked advancement by Malays in its armed forces.``In Singapore, if you're a Malay, there is no way you can become an officer in the military.``The real racists are there, not here,' he was quoted saying.

In the seventies up to the late eighties the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Army did what they called 'country studies' of various countries and regions of the world where US forces are likely to be deployed.The study also includes ethnic compositions and the societal position of each ethnic group in the country concerned.

Singapore was one of the countries that came under the scrutiny of the US Army country study and had a section on Singapore Malays which I have reproduced below.

The Malays

The Malay made up 15 percent of Singapore's population and were, like the Chinese and the Indians, descendants of immigrants. They or their ancestors came from peninsular Malaya, Sumatra, Java, and the other islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Java was much more densely populated than peninsular Malaya, and its people had a significantly lower standard of living. From the mid-nineteenth century to the period just after World War II, many Javanese migrated to Singapore, attracted both by urban wages offering a higher living standard and by freedom from the constraints of their native villages, where they often occupied the lower reaches of the economic and social order. Singapore Malay community leaders estimated that some 50 to 60 percent of the community traced their origins to Java and an additional 15 to 20 percent to Bawean Island, in the Java Sea north of the city of Surabaya. The 1931 census recorded the occupations of 18 percent of the Malays as fishermen and 12 percent as farmers; the remaining 70 percent held jobs in the urban cash economy, either in public service or as gardeners, drivers, or small-scale artisans and retailers. The British colonialists had considered the Malays as simple farmers and fishermen with strong religious faith and a "racial" tendency toward loyalty and deference; they preferentially recruited the Malays to the police, the armed forces, and unskilled positions in the public service. In 1961 more than half of Singapore's Malays depended on employment in the public sector. Although the colonial stereotype of the Malays as rural people with rural attitudes persisted, Singapore's Malay residents were for the most part no more rural than any other residents. Malay identity was couched in religious terms, with Malay being taken almost as a synonym for Muslim, and most Malay organizations taking a religious form.

After independence, the government regarded the Malay preponderance in the police and armed forces as disproportionate and a potential threat to security and acted to make the security forces more representative of the society as a whole, which meant in practice replacing Malays by Chinese. The government's drive to break up ethnic enclaves and resettle kampong dwellers in Housing and Development Board apartment complexes had a great effect on the Malays. Evidence of the convergence of Malay patterns of living with those of the rest of the population was provided by population statistics, which showed the Malay birth and death rates, originally quite high, to be declining. In the 1940s, Malay women had married early, had many children, and were divorced and remarried with great frequency. By the 1980s, Malays were marrying later, bearing fewer children (2.05 per woman for mid-1986 to mid- 1987), and divorcing less frequently. By the 1980s, a large proportion of Malay women were working outside the home, which was a major social change. Many young women in their late teens and early to mid-twenties were employed in factories operated by multinational corporations, which, unlike the small-scale Chinese shops and workshops that had dominated the economy into the 1960s, paid no attention to ethnicity in hiring. Even Malay fishing communities on the offshore islands, which appeared to preserve the traditional way of life, were in the 1980s losing population as young people moved to Singapore Island, attracted by urban life and unskilled jobs that offered higher and more reliable incomes than fishing.

Although very much a part of Singapore's modernizing society, the Malays conspicuously occupied the bottom rungs of that society; their position illustrated a correlation between ethnicity and class that presented a major potential threat to social stability. With the lowest level of educational attainment of any ethnic group, the Malays were concentrated at the low end of the occupational hierarchy and had average earnings that were 70 percent of those of Chinese. Malays had a higher crime rate than other groups and in 1987 accounted for 47 percent of the heroin addicts arrested. The 1980 census showed that 86 percent of the Malay work force was in the clerical, service, and production sector; 45 percent of all employed Malays worked on assembly lines, largely in foreign-owned electronics factories. Only 8 percent of all professional and technical workers (including schoolteachers), and 2 percent of all administrative and managerial personnel were Malays. Malays dropped out of the competitive school system in large numbers, and those who continued past primary school were concentrated in vocational education programs. In 1980 they made up only 1.5 percent of all university graduates and 2.5 percent of students enrolled in higher education.

In sharp contrast to neighboring Malaysia with its policies of affirmative action for the Malay majority, Singapore's government insisted that no ethnic group would receive special treatment and that all citizens had equal rights and equal opportunities. The potential threat, however, posed by the overlap between Malay ethnicity and low educational achievement and occupational status, was clear. Demonstrating the Singaporean propensity for discussing social affairs in terms of "race," both government spokesmen and Malay intellectuals tended to attribute the Malays' economic position and educational performance to something inherent in the Malay personality or culture, or to their supposed "rural" attitudes. The ways in which lower income and ill-educated Malays resembled or differed from the very many lower income and ill- educated Chinese, who had very different cultural backgrounds, were not addressed.

In 1982 the prime minister defined Malays' educational difficulties as a national problem and so justified government action to improve their educational performance. The colonial government had provided free but minimal education, in the Malay language, to Malays but not to Chinese or Indians, on the grounds that the Chinese and Indian residents of Singapore, even those born there, were sojourners. In the colonial period most English- language schools were run by churches or missionaries, and many Malays avoided them for fear of Christian proselytization. Although after independence schooling in Singapore was not free (fees were generally low, but the government felt that people would not value education if they did not pay something for it), Malays continued to receive free primary education. In 1960 that benefit was extended to secondary and higher education, although the free schooling was offered only to those the government defined as Malay, which excluded immigrant Indonesians whom the Malays regarded as part of their community. Throughout the 1960s and most of the 1970s, most Malay children continued to attend schools that taught only in Malay, or, if they taught English at all, did so quite poorly. Opportunities for secondary and higher education in the Malay language were very limited. Although many Malays were employed in the public service or as drivers or servants for foreign employers, in almost all cases the language used at work was the grammatically and lexically simplified tongue called Bazaar Malay.

Throughout the 1970s, relatively few Malays knew English, a language that became progressively more necessary for high-paying professional and technical jobs. Substantial numbers of the Chinese knew no more English than the Malays, but they found employment in the extensive sector of Chinese commerce and small-scale industry where hiring demanded command of a Chinese regional language and personal recommendation. The former Malay economic niche in the military and police forces was eliminated in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the large number of Malays who had been employed by the British armed forces at British naval and other military facilities lost those secure and well-paying positions when the British withdrew from Singapore from 1970 to 1975. Such factors as poor command of English, limited availability of secondary and post secondary education in Malay, and the loss of public-sector jobs accounted for much of the low economic position of the Malay community in 1980.

In 1981 Malay community leaders, alarmed by the results of the 1980 census that demonstrated the concentration of Malays in the lower reaches of the occupational hierarchy, formed a foundation called Mendaki, an acronym for Majlis Pendidikan Anak-anak Islam (Council for the Education of Muslim Children). Mendaki (ascent in Malay), devoted itself to providing remedial tuition classes for Malay children in primary and secondary school, offering scholarships for living expenses and loans for higher education, attempting to encourage parents to take a more active role in their children's education, and holding public ceremonies to honor Malay students who excelled in examinations or graduated from academic secondary schools or universities. Government support for Mendaki took the form of financing the organization through a special voluntary checkoff on the monthly contribution of Muslim workers to the Central Provident Fund, and through unspecified other public donations.

Throughout the 1980s, both the number of Malay students in selective secondary schools and institutions of higher education and the proportion of Malays passing and scoring well on standardized examinations slowly increased. As with the changes in birth rates, it was difficult to separate the effects of such government-sponsored programs as those of Mendaki from other factors, including increased female participation in the work force, residence in apartment complexes rather than kampong housing, exposure to television and radio, smaller family size, and better teaching in the schools.

The use of a voluntary checkoff on the monthly Central Provident Fund contribution as a means of raising Malay educational funds was characteristic of Singapore in the 1980s. Malays, like other Singaporeans, were assumed to have regular employment and salaries, and their distinctive Malay and Muslim concerns were efficiently and equitably addressed through a computerized government program.

The above study is a little out of date now but is still reflective of the Singapore government policy of sidelining the Malays in the military hierarchy.

Being a small minority and not a source of economic threat to Singapore's overall society the Malays need not be discriminated in other areas.The social structure and economically driven Chinese and Indians took care of it socially without resorting to conspicuous discrimination.

Most high paying jobs in Singapore would require proficiency in English and Mandarin and that would immediately exclude most Malays from applying for the job.In the private sector other than factory line workers, clerical, office boys and drivers, other jobs require the applicant, apart from English, to know Mandarin or the main Chinese dialect in Singapore. Out of the window goes the Malay applicant.

To say the Malays in Singapore are more hardy, more successful and stand on equal ground is a myth.

Zaqy Mohamed question in parliament about the under-performance of Malay students may not be totally the responsibility of the government but it does show that the Malays in Singapore are not exuberantly more successful, politically and economically, than the Malays in Malaysia.

It's an urban legend.

Also read:Where Bears Roam Free

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Singapore Government Dodges Malay Education Issue Again

The Asia File

Ben Bland

Contrary to popular perception, Singapore does actually have a working Parliament, in which ministers are occasionally asked questions, some of which are not plants or attempts to crawl up the arse of a minister.

In Parliament yesterday, one such incident occurred, when Zaqy Mohamed, vice-chairman of the ruling People's Action Party's youth wing and an ethnic Malay MP, asked the education minister what was being done about the persistent educational under-performance of Malay students compared to Singaporeans of other ethnic backgrounds.

The problem is a serious and persistent one. Figures from the Education Ministry show that while Singaporean exam results have increased across the board over the last decade, the stark disparities between the city-state's main three ethnic groups remain.

In 2008, just 59.3% of Malay students achieved 5 passes at O-level, the exams taken by 15 and 16-year-olds, compared to 86.2% of Chinese and 73% of Indians.

The disparity, which appears to be particularly sharp when it comes to Maths and Science, seems embedded from a young age. While 89.6% of Chinese and 72.9% of Indian kids taking the Primary School Leaving Examination achieved A*-C grades in Maths, only 56.3% of Malay kids managed the same feat.

The only area where Malay students seem to come out on top, according to the government figures, is in terms of mother-tongue ability. 98.6% of Malay students taking the PSLE achieve an A*-C in their mother-tongue exam compared to 98.4% of Chinese and 96.7% of Indians.

But despite the clear message of this data, the government, which tiptoes around racial issues because of fears of ethnic disharmony, does not appear willing to confront the problem.

In response to Zaqy's question, the education minister Ng Eng Hen said only that the performance by Malay students had been "stable" over the last decade, with some improvements in Malay and English.

While Zaqy wanted to know "what more can be done to help Malay students progress at the same rate, if not better, compared to their peers from the other race groups", Ng offered only vague platitudes, as he side-stepped the issue.

"Parents and families, of all races, can support students by ensuring that they attend school regularly, motivating them to work hard, and adopting good habits like reading widely," the minister said. "Community and self-help groups can also help families deal with problem issues related to finances, jobs and relationships, in order to create a more supportive home environment."

In other words: nothing to do with me, mate.

It's not surprising to see the government dodging this intractable and controversial issue again. The question is whether the PAP's seeming indifference is motivated more by its over-arching self-help philosophy or by the fact that a Chinese-dominated party in a Chinese-dominated nation is not too bothered by the underperformance of the Malay minority.

Also read:Spare the Rod, Spoil the Country

Malicious Intent

Hantu Laut

It's a small price to pay to boost the Prime Minister's and nation's image overseas.The RM20 million is a pittance for those who knows about business and branding but for those who doesn't you could end up like this writer here.Ignorant,presumptive and bias.

Big companies and rich nations do it all the times.Malaysia should not be an exception.

Obviously, either the amount is to big for Mr Bozo to comprehend or a mind too clouded by hatred, suspicion and bias to be objective.

Those political buffoons ,bozos and clowns would not have risen to that level if they were indeed what the writer says they were.

The company that allegedly offered similar services to dictators and corrupt leaders worldwide is here.It's certainly not the inglorious company that provides conduit for corrupt world leaders to redeem themselves as imagined by the writer.

Its senior team came from respectable background that includes ambassadors, business leaders, journalists and government leaders.Its list of renown clientele span the globe from governments to huge conglomerates.Bill Gates would certainly not use it if it has shady dealings.

In classical music it would be called "divertimento", a piece of music that is meant to be entertaining rather than serious.... a chamber orchestra rather than a philharmonic.

Reeks of political patronage of the worst kind.An overkill.

A reader of Malaysian Insider who writes as well.I must admit it is a good read.

Amusing and bemusing.

Malaysia Bashing Down Under

Hantu Laut

Is Najib that stupid to conspire another frame-up of Anwar Ibrahim with a second sodomy when the universal court of public opinion have unambiguously decided that he was innocent in the first one?

Wasn't there a complainant this time and a court hearing of the case is fair and justified?Are there none of our judges with the conscience to give him a fair trail?

The Australians seem to know better judging from the article below.

Anwar Ibrahim is definitely the top salesman.

Outdated political thuggery embarrasses Malaysia

February 23, 2010

Dumb autocrats use the army, goon squads and guns to repress the opposition. Smart autocrats use the law courts to do it. Indonesia's Soeharto was a dumb autocrat. Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad were smart autocrats.

The Lee-Mahathir model keeps the outward facade of a functioning democracy, with elections, a parliament and supposedly independent courts. Behind it, the systems are gutted to guarantee the ruling party remains ruling.

In Singapore, where Lee's People's Action Party has been in power for 50 continuous years, the government simply sues opposition politicians for defamation. A tame court hands down ruinous damages, opponents end up in bankruptcy, jail or exile.

When a meddlesome foreigner, the deputy director for Asia of Human Rights Watch, Phil Robertson, said last month that ''Singapore is the textbook example of a politically repressive state'', the government just shrugged and said: ''Singapore is a democratic state with a clean and transparent government.''

The army is in its barracks and there are no goon squads smashing through people's front doors at 3am. It's all legit, see? The foreign investors and governments play along. So what if the ruling party holds 98 per cent of the seats in parliament? It has an elected parliament, and surely that's good enough.

Lee quit the prime ministership in 1990 and now holds a personalised cabinet post of Minister Mentor. But his system lives on. His handpicked successors as prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, and now Lee's son, Lee Hsien Loong, have been every bit as smart as the old man himself in preserving the appearance of legitimacy.

In Malaysia, Mahathir was never as subtle or as smooth as Lee. But Mahathir was still a smart autocrat who kept control through his puppetry of the judicial system. The pivotal moment was in 1988 when Mahathir complained that the courts were ''too independent''.

He purged the chief judicial officer, the Lord President, and suspended the five chief justices of the Supreme Court. The court system has never given any further trouble to the Barisan Nasional, or National Front, since. Together with its predecessor, the BN has ruled Malaysia continuously for 54 years.

It's infinitely smarter to use legal instruments to purge judges than to use guns against protesters. A judicial massacre makes lousy TV. You won't see one live on CNN. So it remains hidden from international view. Yet it can be every bit as repressive. So when Mahathir faced a power struggle in 1998 with his deputy prime minister and heir apparent, the charismatic Anwar Ibrahim, he naturally turned to the courts to purge his younger rival.

In a blatantly political fix-up, he had Anwar arrested and charged with sodomy, a shocking crime in a predominantly conservative Muslim country. Even today it carries a maximum penalty of 20 years' jail. The police Special Branch concocted evidence and coerced witnesses. Anwar emerged from his police cell to appear in court with a bruised face, inflicted, it was later learnt, when the chief of police beat him.

The verdict was never in question. The courts convicted Anwar of sodomising his aide and speechwriter, Munawar Anees. The former deputy PM spent six years in jail. Munawar, now living in the US, has since said he was coerced into giving evidence against Anwar. ''My detention by the Malaysian Special Branch taught me how it feels to be forcibly separated from one's wife and children,'' Munawar wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month.

''How it feels to be searched and seized, disallowed to make phone calls, handcuffed, blindfolded, stripped naked, endlessly interrogated, humiliated, drugged, deprived of sleep, physically abused. What it's like to be threatened, blackmailed, hectored by police lawyers, brutalised to make a totally false confession.''

With Malaysia under tremendous international pressure from Anwar's admirers, including America's Al Gore and Britain's Gordon Brown, and with Mahathir retiring from the prime ministership in 2003, a review court overturned the sodomy sentence. Anwar was released in 2004.

He was allowed to return to politics in 2008 to lead the opposition to the BN. He committed the crime of doing so with some success. In March 2008, under challenge from Anwar, the BN won a national election, but was shocked to lose its prized majority of two-third of the seats in parliament.

The new BN Prime Minister, Najib Razak, reacted exactly as Mahathir had to a challenge from Anwar. Four months after the ruling party's election setback, Anwar was once again charged with sodomy. Once again, it's a blatant political case. The newspaper The Star called the case ''Sodomy II''.

Why is Anwar such a threat?

''At the moment,'' says Carl Thayer, an expert at the University of NSW, ''there is no other leader who can hold together the opposition coalition of an Islamic party with a Chinese party, who is capable of being prime minister, and who has experience and international recognition that Anwar has.''

The case is a joke. It exposes the Najib government as desperate and underhanded. It makes Malaysia a subject of international ridicule. While under Mahathir this form of legal manipulation might have been smart autocracy, in today's world it just looks like Malaysia is playing around with its national future.

Peter Hartcher is the Sydney Morning Herald's international editor.

This article appeared in Australia's The Age.

Australian Shitty Protest... Cheapo Toilet Rolls

Hantu Laut

If this has been in less developed economy they would be quick to condemn the country concerned as protectionist, closed door mentality and not subscribing to free-market economy.In other word, afraid of competition.

When Malaysia did the dawn raid to bring Guthrie home, paying market price for the shares on the London Stock Exchange in September 1981, the angry British called it nationalisation of foreign assets.

Look! What the Aussies are crying over........cheap rolls of toilet paper from Indonesia and China.

Howdy mate! It's fair dinkum, Aussie's toilet paper.

Australian Workers Union Angry Over Cheap Indonesian Toilet Paper

A large Australian workers union has written to the federal government threatening to launch a full-scale campaign over cheap toilet roll imports from Indonesia and China.

The union, known as the CFMEU, says that a large shipment of cheap toilet rolls poses a serious threat to jobs and the local manufacturing industry, Australian Associated Press reported on Monday.

The rolls are due to be sold at almost half the usual retail price, leading one major manufacturer in South Australia to predict 1500 jobs will be lost.

The union has requested an urgent meeting with the attorney-general, asking him to overturn the decision allowing the import.

“Exporters from China and Indonesia are hurting the tissue-making industry by selling product at a lower price,” CFMEU secretary Michael O’Connor said in a statement.(UNSPUN)

DAP,The Hidden Hand ?

Hantu Laut

This case of odd alliances has no room for dissentiants.Disagreeing or criticising its leaders is perilous.Criticising DAP leaders would be more lethal.The de facto leader had become defective leader. It is Lim Guan Eng and Lim Kit Siang that call the shots now. Anwar obeyed.

Zahrain Hashim's “chauvinistic, dictator, and communist-minded” must have hit a raw nerve.

The DAP is now front runner of becoming head honcho of Pakatan Rakyat and a power to be reckoned with.It is the most stable among the three coalition partners and most likely to perform better than its two other partners in the next general elections.It is assured of the bulk of Chinese votes.

PKR may become victim of Anwar's folly and suffer a blowout in the next GE (General Elections).

The Perak debacle, dubbed the 'power grab' and its execrable negation is DAP power politics, using its other coalition partners as front line to fight a war of attrition against the BN government for loss of the DAP government in Perak.

Former Menteri Besar Nizar was an accidental menteri besar, compelled by requirement of the Perak state constitution which prohibits non-Malay to hold the post.Otherwise, Perak, similar to Penang, would have a Chinese menteri besar, which was what Lim Kit Siang had thought would be the case in the beginning, out of his ignorance of the requirement under the constitution. He insisted all DAP lawmakers to boycott the swearing in of Nizar as MB but relented after discovering his mistake.

Onslaughts on the BN government and the Sultan of Perak militated the people's acceptance of the legality of the takeover.DAP's iteration of unconstitutional power grab by the BN would go on and intensify as the 13th General Elections draws near.It must constantly keep fresh in the court of public opinion that the Perak power grab was engineered by Najib.It's unlawful and unconstitutional.

It was fine and not unlawful when Anwar Ibrahim tried to lure BN lawmakers into his net.Only Karpal Singh was against the idea, the rest including the holies in PAS waited for the promise that never came.Sept 16 stood as Anwar's day of damnedest lie.

DAP had become the most powerful force in the Pakatan coalition and have successfully used its partners to strengthen its position.

Recent events have shown the power and influence that DAP wields in Pakatan.Three PKR's lawmakers at loggerhead with Lim Guan Eng have been shown the sacrificial altar.

Lim's sworn opponent, PKR's Zahrain Hashim left the party before he could be sacked.Two more PKR's MPs,Tan Tee Beng and Zulkifli Nordin are in trouble for the same reason, criticising Lim Guan Eng's style of management.Both, voiced their support for Zahrain who had declared himself as independent.

Both, Tan and Zulkifli are expected to face the disciplinary board soon.Rumours abound that the 2 MPs may leave PKR and stay as independents.

Are the Lims truly the hidden hands and power behind the throne?

Is Anwar Ibrahim a lame duck?

Leave your comment in the comment box.

Malaysia's Opposition Coalition in Crisis

Defections and other problems probably mean the opposition will lose its ability to block legislation requiring a two-thirds vote

It is beginning to appear that the two-year experiment with a viable opposition in Malaysia is just about over. Malaysian Insider, a Kuala Lumpur-based online news site, reported that as many as 10 members of Pakatan Rakyat, the unwieldy coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim, could be about to defect.

Even if they don't, the opposition is flailing. Anwar's own trial for consensual sex with a former male aide continues and, given Malaysia's malleable court system, is expected to result in his conviction although appeals could take as long as two years before he is sent to prison. In the latest development, High Court Judge Mohamad Zabidin Mohd Diah said he could decide by himself whether he was sufficiently neutral to continue to hear the sodomy case. He dismissed Anwar's appeal against his hearing on the matter Wednesday afternoon.

The question is where the opposition goes from here. Anwar has been unable to groom any successors, partly because the disparate nature of the three parties in the opposition makes it difficult for anybody to bridge the ideological gap. If he is jailed, it is questionable how long his martyrdom might last. When he was arrested on similar charges in 1998 – which were beyond a doubt trumped up to get rid of him – he led massive rallies in Kuala Lumpur against the government. But once he was imprisoned, the protests ultimately died away.

The major effect of the two-year opposition run appears to be a historic realignment of political parties, with Parti Islam se-Malaysia, with its roots in the rural, poor, fundamentalist northeast of the country. PAS has moved to consolidate its growing power in urban areas, particularly the area surrounding Kuala Lumpur as ethnic Malays are turned off by the continuing money politics and corruption in the United Malays National Organisation. And, say political observers in Kuala Lumpur, ethnic Chinese and Indians are turning to the party as well because of the corruption in their own coalition components.

In addition, too many of the opposition members were simply not prepared to hold office or to govern once they got there, analysts say. Some were disgruntled UMNO members who crossed to the opposition before the March 2008 elections on the opportunistic belief that Anwar, a charismatic leader, could actually gain control of the parliament. Now, the insiders say, since Anwar failed in his attempt to lure enough UMNO members to defect to the opposition, and with Anwar in the middle of a debilitating trial he seems sure to lose, they are looking for ways to cross back.

Problems within the Pakatan coalition, said a senior aide to Anwar, "have been simmering and with the case now in full force, it makes sense for the dissidents to add pressure on all fronts to create as much disunity and instability as possible.”

Whether 10 MPs will defect is uncertain. "I think it's possible,"said the aide. "But I'm sure there is a lot of horse trading going on."

Anwar returned to Penang on Feb. 16 to seek to shore up the coalition, the aide said. Anwar acknowledged in interviews with the local press that he had picked some of the wrong candidates in the 2008 elections.

"I selected the candidates for the parliamentary seats. PKR was new then. We had to field them,"he told reporters.

There has been a steady leakage from the coalition, made up of Anwar's Parti Keadilan Rakyat of urban Malays, the largely Chinese Democratic Action Party, and PAS for months. Last week, Zahrain Mohd Hashim, an MP from Penang state, quit with a blast at Lim Guan Eng, the DAP head of the Penang state government. Malaysia Insider reported that others are to hold a press conference this week to announce their departure from the opposition. Read more.

Read also:Malaysia's Brain Drain
It's Not Just Politics and Racial Discrimination.

Malaysia's brain drain appears to be picking up speed. According to a recent parliamentary report, 140,000 left the country, probably for good, in 2007. Between March 2008 and August 2009, that figure more than doubled to 305,000 as talented people pulled up stakes, apparently disillusioned by rising crime, a tainted judiciary, human rights abuses, an outmoded education system and other concerns. Read here.

Gay Australian MP "I Want To Get Married"

Aust politician Ian Hunter with partner Leith Semmens in 2006.

A SOUTH Australian Labor MP has made an impassioned plea to marry the man he loves, accusing the Rudd Government of standing in his way.

Labor MLC Ian Hunter today told parliament it was wrong for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to continue to impose his personal beliefs on the rest of the community and disallow gay marriage.

Mr Hunter has been openly gay since he was elected to parliament and been in a relationship with his partner Leith for almost 20 years.

Gay marriage is not allowed in Australia but permitted in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden and Spain.

SHOULD MARRIAGE BE RESTRICTED TO HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES? Have your say in the poll to the right of this page and in the comment box below.

Some states in the U.S. including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Maine have also allowed the union.

Mr Rudd has previously stated the Federal Government will look at partnership registration.

Mr Hunter however said he was no longer willing to "accept the crumbs from the table" and this view was out of step.

"I want to get married," he said.

"But I can't - I can't marry the person I love, not in my own country."

Mr Hunter said no one had ever been able to provide him with a reason why marriage should be confined to a man and a woman and he would not accept the argument that he may soon be able to register his partnership in future.

"I want to get married ... Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of my not being married to my partner Leith," he said.

"Yes I could travel to Massachusetts or South Africa and get married.

"But I want to share my marriage with my family and my friends - like we all do.

"I want to get married and you, Mr Rudd, are stopping me.

SUCKS!

Here's good old luscious Mrs Robinson who loves sex the old-fashioned way and says all gays are mentally sick.

Anti-gay MP stands down from politics

Written by Richard Clarendon

Monday, 04 January 2010 15:21

Iris Robinson, the Northern Ireland MP who called gays an "abomination", has announced she is standing down from politics due to depression. The UK’s Pink News reported that Robinson, the Democratic Unionist MP for Strangford and wife of Northern Ireland's first minister, Peter Robinson, released a statement yesterday saying she could no longer meet the demands of her job The 60-year-old was labelled a bigot for a series of outbursts last year in which she made offensive comments about homosexuality. In 2008, she told the Belfast Telegraph that homosexuality was "comparable" to paedophilia. She also told a radio show that homosexuality was a mental illness and could be "cured". Robinson escaped a police prosecution for the comments. In the statement, she said: "Over the years, I have undergone a long series of operations and, though I have never talked about it publicly, I have also battled against serious bouts of depression. "Only those who have faced similar challenges in life will know the ordeal faced by those who are profoundly depressed, and the distress caused to those around them as they grapple with personality-changing illness. One in four of the population struggle with mental illnesses at one level or another, yet few talk about it openly.”

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know (Wo, wo, wo)
God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
(Hey, hey, hey...hey, hey, hey)

Read more.

The Singapore Solution

How did a sleepy little island transform into a high-tech powerhouse in one generation? It was all in the plan.

By Mark Jacobson

Photograph by David McLai

If you want to get a Singaporean to look up from a beloved dish of fish-head curry—or make a harried cabdriver slam on his brakes—say you are going to interview the country's "minister mentor," Lee Kuan Yew, and would like an opinion about what to ask him. "The MM?Wah lau! You're going to see the MM? Real?" You might as well have told a resident of the Emerald City that you're late for an appointment with the Wizard of Oz. After all, LKY, as he is known in acronym-mad Singapore, is more than the "father of the country." He is its inventor, as surely as if he had scientifically formulated the place with precise portions of Plato's Republic, Anglophile elitism, unwavering economic pragmatism, and old-fashioned strong-arm repression.

People like to call Singapore the Switzerland of Southeast Asia, and who can argue? Out of a malarial swamp, the tiny island at the southernmost tip of the Malay Peninsula gained independence from Britain in 1963 and, in one generation, transformed itself into a legendarily efficient place, where the per capita income for its 3.7 million citizens exceeds that of many European countries, the education and health systems rival anything in the West, government officials are largely corruption free, 90 percent of households own their own homes, taxes are relatively low and sidewalks are clean, and there are no visible homeless people or slums.

If all that, plus a typical unemployment rate of about 3 percent and a nice stash of money in the bank thanks to the government's enforced savings plan, doesn't sound sweet to you, just travel 600 miles south and try getting by in a Jakarta shantytown.

Achieving all this has required a delicate balancing act, an often paradoxical interplay between what some Singaporeans refer to as "the big stick and the big carrot." What strikes you first is the carrot: giddy financial growth fueling never ending construction and consumerism. Against this is the stick, most often symbolized by the infamous ban on chewing gum and the caning of people for spray-painting cars. Disruptive things like racial and religious disharmony? They're simply not allowed, and no one steals anyone else's wallet.

Singapore, maybe more than anywhere else, crystallizes an elemental question: What price prosperity and security? Are they worth living in a place that many contend is a socially engineered, nose-to-the-grindstone, workaholic rat race, where the self-perpetuating ruling party enforces draconian laws (your airport entry card informs you, in red letters, that the penalty for drug trafficking is "DEATH"), squashes press freedom, and offers a debatable level of financial transparency? Some people joke that the government micromanages the details of life right down to how well Singapore Airlines flight attendants fill out their batik-patterned dresses.

They say Lee Kuan Yew has mellowed over the years, but when he walks into the interview wearing a zippered blue jacket, looking like a flint-eyed Asian Clint Eastwood circa Gran Torino, you know you'd better get on with it. While it is not exactly clear what a minister mentor does, good luck finding many Singaporeans who don't believe that the Old Man is still top dog, the ultimate string puller behind the curtain. Told most of my questions have come from Singaporeans, the MM, now 86 but as sharp and unsentimental as a barbed tack, offers a bring-it-on smile: "At my age I've had many eggs thrown at me."

Few living leaders—Fidel Castro in Cuba, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe come to mind—have dominated their homeland's national narrative the way Lee Kuan Yew has. Born into a well-to-do Chinese family in 1923, deeply influenced by both British colonial society and the brutal Japanese occupation that killed as many as 50,000 people on the island in the mid-1940s, the erstwhile "Harry Lee," Cambridge law degree in hand, first came to prominence as a leader of a left-leaning anticolonial movement in the 1950s. Firming up his personal power within the ascendant People's Action Party, Lee became Singapore's first prime minister, filling the post for 26 years. He was senior minister for another 15; his current minister mentor title was established when his son, Lee Hsien Loong, became prime minister in 2004.

Lee masterminded the celebrated "Singapore Model," converting a country one-eighth the size of Delaware, with no natural resources and a fractured mix of ethnicities, into "Singapore, Inc." He attracted foreign investment by building communications and transportation infrastructure, made English the official language, created a superefficient government by paying top administrators salaries equal to those in private companies, and cracked down on corruption until it disappeared. The model—a unique mix of economic empowerment and tightly controlled personal liberties—has inspired imitators in China, Russia, and eastern Europe.

To lead a society, the MM says in his precise Victorian English, "one must understand human nature. I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I'm not sure he can be. He can be trained, he can be disciplined." In Singapore that has meant lots of rules—prohibiting littering, spitting on sidewalks, failing to flush public toilets—with fines and occasional outing in the newspaper for those who break them. It also meant educating his people—industrious by nature—and converting them from shopkeepers to high-tech workers in a few decades.

Over time, the MM says, Singaporeans have become "less hard-driving and hard-striving." This is why it is a good thing, the MM says, that the nation has welcomed so many Chinese immigrants (25 percent of the population is now foreign-born). He is aware that many Singaporeans are unhappy with the influx of immigrants, especially those educated newcomers prepared to fight for higher paying jobs. But taking a typically Darwinian stance, the MM describes the country's new subjects as "hungry," with parents who "pushed the children very hard." If native Singaporeans are falling behind because "the spurs are not stuck into the hide," that is their problem.Read more.

Those Awful Aussies

Hantu Laut

After reading Pasquale's take on the bunch of nosey Aussie lawmakers demanding Malaysia to drop the sodomy case against Anwar Ibrahim, it kind of intrigues me as to the reason for such interference. If the proverbial "birds of a feather flock together" is any true than among the 50 or so Australian lawmakers there must be faggots and homophile who wanted to impose their will on another sovereign nation where such sexual anomaly is a criminal offence.

Homosexuality, sodomy and zoophilia may be accepted in Australia but it is not in Malaysia and is considered a criminal act.

Michael Danby the spokesman of the group said "A lot of people know Anwar Ibrahim, a lot of people have been to Malaysia, and a lot of Australian parliamentarians think it's a shame that this is happening for the second time to the leader of the opposition in what is a developing democracy,"

Wonder whether Mr Danby and his colleagues knew what Anwar does behind closed doors and on what basis they made their own judgement of his innocent?

According to Pasquale here the Australians must first stop the mass murder of Aboriginal people and foreign students before interfering in other people's business.

Are they still killing Aborigines?

I am not sure of that but killing Indian students seem to be a new past time for Australian new bush rangers.A few Indian students have been bludgeoned to death in apparent racist attack.Some Indians could have been mistaken for Abos.

These rich Indian kids came to Australia to study and being rich they also brought with them some bad habits, their affluent lifestyle the Indian way.Expensive clothes,posh cars and extravagance lifestyle which the low-life Aussie couldn't understand and tolerate.

Black people are supposed to be poor and lead the low-life.The low-life Aussies have no clue where those goddam black asses came from (because low-life Aussies have no concept of the outside world), thought those Indians had made it good robbing and stealing from white men.

This reminded me of the early days when Britain exported its convicts to Australia hoping to make it the biggest penal colony on the face of the earth.It didn't turned out that way.The country is just too beautiful to give it to the scums of the earth.Today, Australia is an extension of the British Empire.

In 1788 six shiploads of convicts arrived Port Jackson in Australia.The Abos were not pleased to see the British convicts land on their soil.They thought they are bad news....and they were right!

It's the beginning of terrifying times for the Abos.

In 1802 when the Brits landed in Tasmania there were 20,000 Abos living on the island for almost 12000 years,undisturbed,unperturbed and completely cut off from the mainland.Eighty years later there were none.They were wiped out by the great British past time......sport hunting and white man's diseases.

Those hardened criminals dumped on Tasmania took care of the Abos.They see the Abos as wild game and to be hunted down.Tied them to trees and used them for target practice.They shot more Abos than the Tasmanian tigers then.One brutal bush ranger (what they called this wandering criminals those days) said "I shoot an Abos as easily as I shoot a sparrow and I get a lot of fun from this sort of sport"

Another even more brutal bush ranger killed an Abo man, seized the dead man's wife, cut off his head and fastened it round the wife's neck and drove the weeping woman to his farm to be his slave.

Wherever the Brits and other Europeans landed the first thing they do is to enslave the natives, if they resisted, decimate them, it's a good holistic approach.It happened in Africa, America and almost in India but there were too many Indians and the Brits didn't have enough bullets to shoot them all.

Malaysians and Singaporeans were lucky, they didn't have to cut our heads or penises to get compliance, they have begun to be civilised.We were spared the terror that befell the Red Indians,African and the Abos.

The 50 Aussie lawmakers must have forgotten to read the Bible, the impenitent sins of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah and divine retribution.

Today, God's mill have come to a grinding halt, we need human laws to take care of such indiscretion and Malaysia is doing exactly that.

Is Anwar Ibrahim innocent?

It is for the Malaysian court to decide not you 50 bumptious Aussie lawmakers.

So, shut up and mind your own business.

Malaysia's Killing Season.

Hantu Laut

The killing season is here again.Every festive season Malaysians would go on a rampage on the nation's highways killing and maiming themselves and other road users.

The Asia-Pacific region has the highest road fatalities in the world taking 44 percent of the world total where only 16 percent of the total world vehicles are found.Malaysia gets top marks for this shameful state of affair.It has got the highest fatalities per capita in the world.Certainly, not something to be proud of.

If Malaysians work as aggressively as they drive, this country would have a quantum leap in its economic development and we need not wait until the year 2020 to be a developed nation.Unfortunately, many Malaysians are only aggressive at the wheels but not at the workplace.

It has become part of their daily ritual to break the law whenever the 'mata-mata' is not around. The car instead of being a vehicle of convenience had become a vehicle of death and destruction.

In Kota Kinabalu, about 2 weeks ago, three doctors were killed and one seriously injured when the car they were in slammed into the back of a bus, overturning the bus and killing one passenger.

Speeding, overtaking using road shoulder to beat the queue, overtaking on double line,jumping the red light and other breaches of the law are common occurrences on Malaysian roads.

If stupid is too harsh a word to describe Malaysian motorists sense of road courtesy than stupid it would be.It is common for Malaysians to give way to those that break the law, the queue jumpers.Try queue jumping in the West, you'll swear by your grandmother's grave that you wouldn't do it again.

Another cause of fatalities are overloading, especially in small towns and rural areas.

A while ago, two Kancils collided head on, there were 15 passengers in the two cars.In this recent accident where 4 people were killed, there were 6 passengers in a Proton Wira.How the hell can you accommodate seven people in a Kancil?

It's about time the government enforce strict adherence that vehicle can only carry the maximum number of passengers specified by the manufacturers and makes it illegal to exceed the allowed limit.

Poor maintenance is another death call for Malaysian motorists.Some can afford to buy the car but have not enough money to maintain it thus jeopardising its road worthiness.

Adding to the problem is wrong enforcement by the police.Police mount regular road blocks not to educate motorists on the needs to observe the law and drive safely or check the road worthiness of the vehicles, they are only interested in checking 'road taxes', whether paid or not.

Every festive season the police would also dispatch hundreds of policemen to have their 'Ops this' and 'Ops that', to try reduce fatal road accidents but these "Ops" have turned out to be an exercises in futility.In its current "Ops Sikap" the death toll to date stands at 28 deaths out of 938 accidents.

The source of this tragic situation are no other than the driving schools and JPJ (Road Vehicle Dept).Bad schooling and corruptions.

A complete overhaul of the driving schools in this country and wiping out corruptions within the department responsible for issuing driver's licence are long overdue.Those who failed their tests and pay 'coffee money' through their tutors to get their "KOPI O" licences are the bad drivers and are more likely to be involved in accidents.

Good driving habits start at school, therefore, it would be good idea if the name and permit number of the driving school be registered on the driver's licence to enable the authorities to identify the bad apples.Driving school that produced high accident rate among its students should be struck off.

Related articles(updated):Shock for motorists using emergency lane

The Jihad Against the Jihadis

How moderate Muslim leaders waged war on extremists—and won.

By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 12, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Feb 22, 2010

September 11, 2001, was gruesome enough on its own terms, but for many of us, the real fear was of what might follow. Not only had Al Qaeda shown it was capable of sophisticated and ruthless attacks, but a far greater concern was that the group had or could establish a powerful hold on the hearts and minds of Muslims. And if Muslims sympathized with Al Qaeda's cause, we were in for a herculean struggle. There are more than 1.5 billion Muslims living in more than 150 countries across the world. If jihadist ideology became attractive to a significant part of this population, the West faced a clash of civilizations without end, one marked by blood and tears.

These fears were well founded. The 9/11 attacks opened the curtain on a world of radical and violent Islam that had been festering in the Arab lands and had been exported across the globe, from London to Jakarta. Polls all over the Muslim world revealed deep anger against America and the West and a surprising degree of support for Osama bin Laden. Governments in most of these countries were ambivalent about this phenomenon, assuming that the Islamists' wrath would focus on the United States and not themselves. Large, important countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia seemed vulnerable.

More than eight eventful years have passed, but in some ways it still feels like 2001. Republicans have clearly decided that fanning the public's fears of rampant jihadism continues to be a winning strategy. Commentators furnish examples of backwardness and brutality from various parts of the Muslim world—and there are many—to highlight the grave threat we face.

But, in fact, the entire terrain of the war on terror has evolved dramatically. Put simply, the moderates are fighting back and the tide is turning. We no long-er fear the possibility of a major country succumbing to jihadist ideology. In most Muslim nations, mainstream rulers have stabilized their regimes and their societies, and extremists have been isolated. This has not led to the flowering of Jeffersonian democracy or liberalism. But modern, somewhat secular forces are clearly in control and widely supported across the Muslim world. Polls, elections, and in-depth studies all confirm this trend.

The focus of our concern now is not a broad political movement but a handful of fanatics scattered across the globe. Yet Washington's vast nation-building machinery continues to spend tens of billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are calls to do more in Yemen and Somalia. What we have to ask ourselves is whether any of that really will deter these small bands of extremists. Some of them come out of the established democracies of the West, hardly places where nation building will help. We have to understand the changes in the landscape of Islam if we are going to effectively fight the enemy on the ground, rather than the enemy in our minds.

Once, no country was more worrying than bin Laden's homeland. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, steward of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, had surpassed Egypt as the de facto leader of the Arab world because of the vast sums of money it doled out to Islamic causes—usually those consonant with its puritanical Wahhabi doctrines. Since 1979 the Saudi regime had openly appeased its homegrown Islamists, handing over key ministries and funds to reactionary mullahs. Visitors to Saudi Arabia after 9/11 were shocked by what they heard there. Educated Saudis—including senior members of the government—publicly endorsed wild conspiracy theories and denied that any Saudis had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Even those who accepted reality argued that the fury of some Arabs was inevitable, given America's one-sided foreign policy on the Arab-Israeli issue.

America's initial reaction to 9/11 was to focus on Al Qaeda. The group was driven out of its base in Afghanistan and was pursued wherever it went. Its money was tracked and blocked, its fighters arrested and killed. Many other nations joined in, from France to Malaysia. After all, no government wanted to let terrorists run loose in its land.Read more.

Anwar's Dilemma

Hantu Laut

In my article here I predicted more departure of PKR's MP.

Malaysian Insider today reported that 5 more PKR's MPs are expected to leave the party.

Loss of confidence in Anwar Ibrahim's leadership and him sucking up to Lim Guan Eng's political antics has been the main reason for the dissatisfaction among PKR elected representatives.

A defining moment for PKR.The turmoil would continue and depletion of its lawmakers is expected in the coming months.Total of 10-12 MPs are expected to leave the party.

These are people hurriedly picked to contest in the March 2008 General Elections without vetting their credentials to determine suitibility to the job. A good number have no political experience and were the results of indiscriminate selections.

Leadership develops over time.Those accidentally thrown into the limelight without any trait of leadership in them will find themselves in a quandary, not knowing what to do.

Desperate to cling to the coalition and not wanting to upset the other coalition partners Anwar has allowed people like Lim Guan Eng free rein and ignored his own MP's dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

Leadership not salesmanship is what a good leader needs.

Update:
Also Read:Khalid Ibrahim talked cock.

Malay Racial Identity Fear

Allah row reflects Malay racial identity fear

By Vaudine England
BBC News, Kuala Lumpur

Some have questioned whether faiths can peacefully co-exist in Malaysia

Malay, Chinese and Indian Malaysians, thrown together by a colourful past, have often managed a mutual accommodation of each other's different faiths and cultures.

But the recent argument over the use of the word "Allah" has provoked strident - and divergent - views both within the Muslim community and outside it.

So too has the labelling of Indian and Chinese Malaysians as "pendatang", or immigrants, by a senior ruling party member, Nasir Safar.

He lost his job as adviser to the Prime Minister Najib Razak 12 hours later.

Meanwhile, the cancellation of a concert by US singer Beyonce, the arrest of young unmarried couples for "close proximity" and the caning sentence given to a mother for drinking beer have all attracted international attention.

Such rows call into question whether Malaysia is a state in which different races and faiths live in equality and comfort with each other, or whether the country is becoming more conservatively Muslim at the expense of others.

Change of direction

The results of the 2008 elections ramped up the tension.

The ruling coalition still won, but with a much reduced majority in the worst result in 50 years.

Many Muslims were angry non-Muslims were allowed to refer to God as Allah

Norani Othman, a professor at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS) at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, says that after independence, there was a national emphasis on consensus-building and equality.

That was adapted, after race riots in 1969, to more overtly pro-Malay policies.

As Muslim nations around the world struggled to modernise, yet not lose touch with their traditional roots, the influence of Islamist parties expanded.

In Malaysia, that pitted the ruling United National Malays Organisation (Umno) against the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS) with the result that the 1980s saw a deliberate process of Islamisation.

What were once affirmative action policies geared to help Malays "catch up" with other Malaysians became policies enshrining Malay primacy or ascendancy, and being Malay meant being Muslim.

Institutions deemed to conform with Islamic principles and values were created - Islamic banks, Islamic insurance, Islamic university - there was even talk of "Islamising knowledge".

The list of matters judged to be under the jurisdiction of Islamic laws has expanded over the decades.

Just as the so-called race riots of 1969 were in fact a sign of systemic breakdown, as Australian academic Clive Kessler argues, so do the current tensions pose a direct challenge to Malaysia's founding aspirations of a diverse and democratic nation, argues Prof Othman.

Malay-ness

The trend, she says, is clear: "It is one of a steady increase in religious authoritarianism and intolerance, emanating from many key sectors and influential levels of Malaysian Muslim society."

National citizenship training has sparked recent controversy, with some critics saying it was contributing to an apparently unstoppable rise of race and faith-based exclusivity.

Participants report they are told that the only thing left for the Malay community is power, because they are a majority, and that any loss of power could mean they become something like an American Indian in their own country, one source said.

Shoring up that power involves "the projecting of the Other, the non-Malay, as always conspiring or wanting to take over", she said.

That siege mentality is expressed in the claim that non-Muslims using the word Allah might convert Muslims - even when figures suggest that Islam is the fastest growing faith in the country.

A new group called Perkasa - meaning strengthen - is avowedly pro-Malay. Critics call it chauvinistic.

Its founder, Ibrahim Ali, says: "If the Malays are not happy, then it will become a problem."

Rising stars such as Idris Haron, MP for Melaka and a member of Umno's Supreme Council, has supported party colleagues who describe non-Malays as "immigrants".

"Yes the fundamental structure of the country is race-based," says Mr Haron.

"It is the Malaysian way of life that a Malay must be a Muslim," he says - and that Malays are rightfully "the top priority when it comes to political development".

Mr Haron argues that the Chinese and Indians in Malaysia live far better than they would in other countries, thanks to Malay tolerance and generosity.

One Malaysia?

But the determination of one's rights according to one's race and religion profoundly worries not only Malaysia's many more liberal minds - it bothers the strategists behind the ruling coalition too.

They know that loyal non-Malays no longer see them as representative of a pluralist centre of Malaysian life.Read more

Gong Xi Fa Chai

One Down More To Come

Hantu Laut


"Good riddance Zahrain.No loss to Pakatan" say Pakatan leaders.

What more can they say.

Malaysian Insider is now officially the spokesman for PKR.This news portal has never been accurate in its prediction of the political development in this country.

Quote: "Fact is, PKR should count itself fortunate that Zahrain decided to take the plunge and leave the party as it has never had the stomach to tick off or kick out members. It has always been a case of a disgruntled few leaving and denouncing the leadership since its early days as Parti KeAdilan Nasional in 1999.

For PKR, Zahrain’s resignation is an opportunity to spring-clean the party and get rid of the selfish who are just there because they are loyal to Anwar. PKR needs men and women of principle and those who won’t wilt or cry because they don’t get attention or money".Unquote

The Malaysian Insider full editorial here.

PKR strategic director Chua Tian Chang said that Zahrain was facing disciplinary action to explain why he should not be sacked.

Tian Chua, you are not very good at face saving.That's a lot of baloney.PKR didn't dare sack him because every MP you lose is a gain for the BN irrespective of whether they join the BN or not.

Watch Zulkifli Nordin, he is next to go.Azan Ismail is another one on the exit list.

The crack in PKR is widening.Anwar Ibrahim is not an effective leader.He will lose most of the disgruntled Malay elected representatives before the year end.

Other than Penang, PKR led Selangor is another case of Pakatan's dictatorial style of government.A government headed by a vengeful leader.

Menteri Besat Khalid Ibrahim refused payment and ask payment to be returned to YBK just because the foundation refused to appoint him as Chairman.

His indulgence into this brand of politics would come with a high price.Loss of more elected representatives and the loss of Malay support in Selangor.

But than Khalid doesn't need Malay support.That's what he probably think.

No Wisdom In Old Age:Karpal Singh Should Be Cited For Contempt

Hantu Laut

What has become of this country? Have we become the wild and woolly? The land of barbarians.

Now, you can show disrespect for a judge in a court house.Courtesy of Pakatan Rakyat, the government in waiting that many Malaysians think they deserve.

Since the dawn of a new era, the born again democracy, it's free for all, even in the court house where judges are held in high esteem, uncouth and contemptuous behaviour insulting a judge has become accepted form.So called freedom..... masking a culture of 'kurang ajar'. Boundless effort to ridicule the judiciary.

Our judge Mohd Zabidin has stayed cool, calm and collected in spite of being called a liar.He could have cited Karpal Singh for contempt and send him straight to jail.He was smart not to fall into the trap.That's what exactly Anwar and his lawyer wanted. To sell to Malaysians that the judiciary is corrupted and controlled by the executive.

Karpal unruly behaviour was nothing but an attempt at disrupting and delaying the court proceeding.They are using every trick up their sleeves to delay the case.Attack on the judge was designed to make him look bias to serve the court of public opinion.

I hope when our lordship return on the 18th he would cite the uncouth or aptly what the Malay would call 'kurang ajar' Lion of Jelutong' for contempt and send him straight to jail.

A judge who feels someone is improperly challenging or ignoring the court's authority has the power to declare the defiant person in contempt of court. There are two types of contempt, criminal and civil. Criminal contempt occurs when the contemnor actually interferes with the ability of the court to function properly - for example, by yelling at the judge or calling the judge a liar. This is also called direct contempt because it occurs directly in front of the judge. A criminal contemnor may be fined, jailed or both as punishment for his act.

Disorderly, contemptuous, or insolent behavior toward the judge or magistrates while holding the court, tending to interrupt the due course of a trial or other judicial proceeding, may be prosecuted as "direct" contempt. The term "direct" means that the court itself cites the person in contempt by describing the behavior observed on the record. Direct contempt is distinctly different from indirect contempt, wherein another individual affected by a court order may file papers alleging contempt against a person who has willfully violated a lawful court order.

Need I say more?

Singh is King

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Hantu Laut

Doggone PERC report! Only barking dogs makes an issue out of such nescient and outlandish report.

Kit Siang wants Najib to respond to the PERC report that Malaysia is veering towards instability.Najib may be everything his enemies say but he is not that stupid to be upset by such report written more for its political agenda rather than its factuality.

Anyone can write a report.Raja Petra Kamaruddin is very good at it. He writes every day through his optical illusions on dirty politicians and dirty politics in this country.

His magniloquent claims of knowing everything happening in the police force and boasted that the police force report to him and not to the IGP is a mixture of lofty ideals and knowing everything but the kitchen sink.

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Malaysia Today claims to have few million hits a day but never put a site meter to prove it.

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Raja Petra, the princely populist,writing from his hideout somewhere in the fifth dimension (Mr Mxyzptik lives here too) claimed the police torture his son physically and mentally to get at him.

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In his statutory declaration he claimed to know who and who were present when Altantuya was blown to smithereens in the forest.

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He claimed to have a good time with some Polish women and posted photos to prove he is telling the truth.A picture paints a thousand words, he thinks.

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He posted in his Malaysia Today photos of him with some beauty queens.Photos below.


You can see the two photos.Guess which is the fake one?

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It is the Sun that revolves around the earth and not the other way round.

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If you are a moron, surely, you would believe everything you read.