Farish Noor: "Worse racism to come"?

Remember my posting Beautiful rojak rejected as Malaysians where I highlighted the most disgraceful attempt by a government minister to conduct ethnic facial landscaping in our media industry.

None other than our local Yusuf Goat-balls announced his intention to come up with a Malaysian Mein Kampf which will contain racist ‘guidelines’ aimed at reducing Eurasian faces from TV and billboards.

With such an offically announced policy of racist discrimination, our local Eurasians have been made to feel less Malaysian than some illegal Indons, southern Filipinos or Paki-Banglas. Thus they have instead become the aliens, or second class citizens of rojak pedigree.

Well, noted social scientist Farish Noor wrote in the Khaleej Times that:

“Despite the often-repeated cliché that Malaysian society is a multiracial melting pot, those who know the country know that mixing between the races has always been minimal. What is more, it would appear that the Malaysian authorities would like to keep it that way."

He lambasted the Yusuf Goat-balls’ race-based guidelines, that discriminate against local Eurasians, as typical of the moral and ideological morass that Malaysia is in at the moment, where the official discriminatory “call for the defence of racial and ethnic essentialism is symptomatic of the political uncertainty of the times.”

Farish Noor spoke of such similar discriminatory calls against Eurasian ‘faces’ by earlier Yusuf Goat-balls in Malaysian political history. But he reckoned this time the “latest knee-jerk reaction to racial and ethnic pluralism” has been even worse and indeed worrisome because it came at a time when Malaysian society is teetering on the brink of slipping into yet another politically driven racial/ethnic crisis.

He was obviously reminding us of the unmitigated racist conduct at the recent UMNO general assembly – unmitigated because the PM and DPM had allowed the unfettered seditiously racial utterances and misbehaviour.

Farish Noor lamented the disgraceful spectacle of “UMNO party's leaders taking to the podium, brandishing their keris and … of right-wing ethno-nationalists taunting and challenging their leaders to use those very same Malay daggers that they had unsheathed in public.”

He also pointed out “UMNO leaders rubbishing the notion of a ‘Malaysian Malaysia', dismissing the concept of a plural society as one that was confused, hybrid and mixed-up.”

Remember that Johor bloke who wanted the Malays (meaning UMNO members) to be the pivotal race in Malaysia, and sneered on multiethnic society as un-Aryan rojak.

Precisely because of this recent history of UMNO racism, he put Yusuf Goat-balls discriminatory policies in the context of a rising right-wing mobilisation in UMNO. And may I add to that the example of UMNO Youth’s demand for an UMNO Chief Minister in Penang - a demand that's driven by an ambitious young bloke wanting to find a ‘prominent role’ among the higher echelon of UMNO.

Farish Noor lamented that at a time “when practically all of Asia is on the move and Asian nation-states are caught in the mad rush to celebrate multiculturalism as their main selling point, our own leaders are bent on doing the opposite.”

He advised that “Malaysia's selling point is precisely the fact that it is a multi-racial melting pot where millions of Asians have come together, inter-married and produced a nation that defies ethnic and racial compartmentalisation. If Malaysia wanted to advertise itself to the world as a model of multiculturalism in action, it is precisely those ‘hybrid, mongrel' faces the country should be showing to the world.”

And he asked Yusuf Goat-balls to pause and remember the ethnic origins of some of Malaysia's leaders like Onn Jaafar, Hussein Onn and Mahathir Mohamad, who “have exhibited an uncanny proclivity to be multiracial themselves.”

He warned that, while Yusuf Goat-balls' disgraceful discriminatory policies might sound silly and be quickly forgotten, given the increasing racial polarisation, Goat-balls’ announcement portends more terrible things to come.

And Farish Noor is absolutely correct because we have already witnessed some examples like the bullying demand for the Penang's CM position, the surrender of Penang's waterboard chairmanship to a Malay by the sudden inexplicable resignation of his Chinese predecessor, fabrications that Penang Malays have been marginalised (since proven false when Penang Malay community were found to have fared far better than Malays of several other UMNO-administered states), unnecessary but ferociously vicious demolitions of Taoist and Hindu tenples, the bigoted demands and threats of the recent UMNO general assembly ... etc.

It's a period of instability for the nation when UMNO presidency changed hands, UMNO factions jostled for positions, and new ethnic warriors seek appointments of strategic importance and power within the party, with young ambitious turks believing they can leapfrog (or motorcycle or wave keris) to the top.

Notional 'enemies' must be selected for focusing the followers attention and wrath onto, and away from their leaders failures. Yesterday the Chinese were the targets, today the Eurasians, tomorrow ...?