Wasn't this man touted as a future PM?

FMT - Nazir wants Huckle’s fellow inmates to mete out justice

PETALING JAYA: Nazir Razak, in an Instagram post today, bemoaned what he sees as an overly lenient punishment for convicted UK paedophile Richard Huckle.

He hoped Huckle’s fellow inmates would mete out the appropriate justice.

“Is this enough punishment??? He abused children aged between 6 months and 12 years, kept a diary of his activities and posted pics and videos,” the chairman of Malaysia’s CIMB Group Holdings Berhad said of Huckle, who was on Monday handed 22 life sentences for 71 counts of child sex offences.

“I urge his inmates to mete out more just retribution,” Nazir added.

I am gobsmack shocked by Nazir Razak's mentality in his call for illegal violent vigilante justice. I'd expect that of low level mob, people who are less educated, ill informed and act on violent impulse without mindfulness of civilised society's due process.

How can this man who was once touted as a potential future PM allowed his emotions to so run away in his call for vigilante actions of the worst kind?

Most certainly Huckle is a most vile beast, and society must punish him, not so much as a punitive action per se but principally to protect the public, especially children, by confining him away from his victims.

A second aim of social punishment is deterrence but for a modern civilised society, it should not adopt punitive extremism a la the Old Testament's 'an eye for an eye ...' mentality.

The Old Testament code of punishment existed in a different era, several thousands of years ago, and in a different society, of clannish tribesmen, people who adopted ferocious savage ways in order to survive in a harsh competitive environment.

Huckle has already been sentenced to umpteen life sentences and it'll be a miracle if he ever sees the sky again from outside the prison walls.

Another possible punishment for vile unrepentant sex offenders is chemical castration. On this, FMT reported some Instagram users calling for castration, but we must not advocate castration in the manner of physical severance of his organs as Hong Kong gangsters have been known to do to wayward Romeos by restraining them and then using household scissors to snip off the genitalia in situ. That's why they have been considered as gangsters, thugs, hooligans, mobsters.

We Malaysians are (I hope) a civilised society, not savages. Let's leave such barbaric justice actions like what Hongkie hoodlums had done to our neighbours, where in India suspected rapists had had their penises hacked off with cleavers and axes by angry mobs, though one cannot help but wonder whether those suspicions were well founded or exploited by opportunistic batu api competitors (which had happened in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and we are only too familiar with), and in Philippines a la the antics of a Pinoy politician.

But I fear what Nazir Razak had Instagram-ed would find accord with and be embraced by quite a few Malaysians, especially those who support capital punishments and flogging on the flimsiest of offences.