Give UMNO enough rope ...

There’s a saying ‘give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself’.

I believe this has applied most appropriately to UMNO. Mind you, not that the anti UMNO people (not necessarily only from the federal opposition) were giving out the rope, but by virtue of UMNO controlling the government and all its apparatus such as the police, MACC, Felda, civil servants, and I’m sad to say, the judiciary, etc, they have free rein of such a rope.

For years the not-so-mysterious deaths of many detainees in police custody were largely brushed aside or arrogantly ignored, sadly as I suspect, because the victims were mainly Indians.

Then there was a high profile Chinese case in Teoh Beng Hock. The authorities dug in, bunkered down, and every man jack pahlawan marshaled around the clarion call of Utusan to defend ‘Malay institutions’ against the untermensch (‘under-people’ or inferior race).

At that time, a ‘Malay institution’ in Utusan’s rabid terms meant a government organization such as the police, MACC or civil servant, who was criticized or condemned by the opposition or non-Malays for questionable conduct.

Of course if the government organization had not been criticized or condemned, that term ‘Malay institution’ would not have been necessary because then there would be no requirement to rally the heartland troops to prevent any further criticism, condemnation or investigation into the conduct which might even be criminal in nature.

So, the use of emotionally charged ethnocentric terms had been more to deflect, prevent or neutralize not just public condemnations but official probes, investigations etc (such as RCI) into the conduct of these ‘Malay institutions’. Jaga orang kita, the standard mentality of most Malaysians, not just UMNO’s.

Then, sadly, we have the drastic killing of Aminulrasyid Amzah, a mere 14 year old boy driving around in a car without a driving licence. As we had read in the newspapers, Aminulrasyid in his joy-ride was not only pursued by a number of police cars but machined gunned down as if he was Chin Peng or a feral armed drug dealer.

As I had posted in Home Minister must sack an unrepentant Selangor CPO is it police standing order to shoot at licence-less drivers?

Or perhaps even one with say, 250 gm of heroin to peddle? Question to ask in the latter scenario would then be, would such a drug peddler be deserving of being gunned down?

What kind of training have the police received with regards to discharge of firearms? What kind of values such as respect for the lives of even unarmed and non-hostile criminals have they been indoctrinated in?

The CPO (he disgusts me so that I can’t bear to allocate him a human name) urged: … all parties to “stop talking about the matter” as it has “gone to court. Let the court hear the case and decide what is appropriate.”

Yeah right!

Consider, if people had not talked about the matter, would the authority (not the police) have taken the investigation to this point when a police corporal is now charged with manslaughter, when originally, according to those police, Aminul was an alleged wannabe cop-killer for attempting to mow down innocent cops with his reversing death machine?

But it was typical of his variation on the Utusan's hordes besieging a ‘Malay institution’, and by the nature of the sad tragedy, a necessary variation because the criticizing horde in this sad case were no longer just Chinese or Indians but Malays, and the victim a 14 year old Malay boy. The bigoted term ‘Malay institution’ could no longer work – ta’laku lagi ler!

That unrepentant a$$h*le was also grossly insensitive to demand that the victim’s parent apologize to the police for allowing the boy to drive around without a licence.

I wrote:

It’s shocking that the CPO has the unmitigated gall to argue that Aminul’s family should apologize for allowing Aminul to drive without a licence, thus endangering the lives of the people of Shah Alam.

Did he mean that driving without a licence was a bigger injustice compared to killing someone for driving without a licence?

I wonder how such a person gets to become a CPO of one of the most important states in Malaysia? And I wonder when the Home Minister will finally find his backbone to sack this man!

And we know how useless the Home Minister has been, is and will be.

As I said, give a man enough rope …

Sadly, the idiots took it up and we see another not-so-mysterious death at the MACC building, this time not of a Chinese DAP member but an assistant director in a Custom department, a Malay man by the name of Ahmad Sarbani Mohamed.

So everyone learnt of a Malay man being killed in a building run by Utusan's ‘Malay institution’!

Then there was Johari Abu Bakar, not yet 17, shot dead by police on May 13th. Malaysiakini reported in Body of teen left for hours before 2nd post-mortem that:

Police claimed that Johari, a secondary school drop-out turned odd job worker, was shot dead after he opened fire at police.

Just like Aminulrasyid attempting to mow down police with his reversing killer machine?

They also claimed that the teen was hiding out in a budget hotel in Dengkil after stealing a Toyota Alphard in Kelana Jaya on May 7. His family is, however, suspicious of the circumstances of his death, claiming that the boy's body showed signs of bruising and that his arm was broken.

How do the tragic deaths of Aminulrasyid, Sarbini and Johari, and hitherto their lack of explanation affect the thinking of the Malay community? What do they now think of Utusan's 'Malay institutions'?

Give a man enough rope ...

Now we read Sakmongkol’s erudite article on how UMNO had sat on and crushes its own balls by not immediately distancing itself from the smutty attempt to smear Anwar Ibrahim’s reputation with a very dodgy sex video, and worse, by people of dubious characters – read Sakmongkol’s article in The Malaysian Insider titled Umno and its farcical morality.

He wrote: Now it’s too late The media frenzy that accompanied the revelation of the trio turned what initially could have been an advantage into a general rejection of the veracity of the story.

Surely logic alone would tell us whether a man like Thamby what-his-name could be trusted in such a salacious revelation.

Now even if we can prove that it was indeed Anwar who is the actor in the porn clips, general distrust and cynicism would destroy any balance of truth in the sex scandal. [...]

The public cannot find the stomach to tolerate the injustice forced on Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail and her family. What the government has done as a result of its own sluggishness and mental blockage is to allow itself to be regarded as a tyrannical bully.

Sweet justice? But let's face it - it's not just UMNO's inertia or, as Sak put it mildly, sluggishness or metal blockage, but actually its eagerness to embrace what it thought was a political winner, but which has since turned out to be a poison chalice.

Yup, give a man enough rope ...