The new (UMNO) Malay?

The Malaysian Insider - Malay courtesy under threat — Tunku Abdul Aziz.

MARCH 3 — The spectacle of Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng being subjected by some Malay thugs to public harassment and humiliation on February 26 as he was leaving the anti-Lynas rally at Padang Kota in Penang caused a great deal of genuine pain to the sensibilities of men and women of goodwill in this nation.

Is this what the notion of “the new Malay” is really all about? Have they totally abandoned the natural courtesy and graciousness of their forebears? What has happened to the “adat”, or have they forgotten that too?

We may not like his politics but was that appropriate behaviour towards another human being? Lim is the head of government and must be shown all the courtesies attendant upon that position. That, in my book, is the norm of a civilized society, and anything less is unacceptable.

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The above article (extracts only) has Tunku Abdul Aziz bemoaning the loss of the renowned Malay courtesy, as was seen in the Himpunan Hijau rally at Esplanade, Penang. Apart from the violence perpetrated by UMNO Youth, Perkasa and Suara Anak-Anak Malaysia and Komtar Traders Association led by its vice president, wannabe-Melayu (UMNO version) Abdul Ghani Mohammed Jiman, the PDRM was mysteriously absent at a time when CM Lim GE was threatened with verbal abuses and rude displays of near-physical violence.

The Malay saying which goes: Biar mati anak, jangan mati adat (Rather our child dies than our tradition) depicts the traditional Malay attitude towards civilized behavior, just as the Arabs would (in their old traditions) never turn a stranger away from their homes.

Because traditional Malays would instill in their children this value of civil courtesy, the word they hate to hear about their offspring is biadap (ill-mannered, impolite, uncouth, uncivilized, barbaric, savage, uncultured and in the best case scenario, uneducated).

But Tunku Abdul Aziz should have been aware that in mid 1996, the greatest demonstration of Malay (or rather, UMNO Malay) discourtesy or unmitigated biadap-ness to an international audience was exhibited at Asia Hotel in KL.

UMNO Youth violently & venomously violated the second international conference called the ‘Asia Pacific Conference on East Timur’ (Apcet II).

In an earlier post Political violence - the nature of the beast I quoted Dr Syed Husin (former deputy president of PKR) giving evidence at a court hearing a case against police illegal detention of Apcet II participants:

… the 300-strong BN angry mob broke down the doors and invaded the conference hall carrying sticks and chairs in their hands.

One of them who had in his hand a food-container half-filled with water, emptied the contents all over me. He shouted at me saying, ‘Get out! Get out!’. It was mayhem.

I was personally assaulted by three persons. They used force and pulled my hands and body. They kept insisting that I should leave the hall.

Dr Syed recognised one of the thugs who thuggerishly stormed and wrecked Apcet II as Saifuddin Nasution, then No 3 in the UMNO Youth leadership hierarchy, but now PKR’s current sec-gen and a member of Anwar Ibrahim’s inner coterie.

Naturally, under a combined operations by UMNO Youth hooliganism and police complicity in being not around during the violence (déjà vu recently in Penang?) but appearing after the UMNO Youth's 'shock & awe' to apprehend and illegally detain the victims, Apcet II had to be abandoned. This was when the acting PM, Anwar Ibrahim boasted of how UMNO's organized violent disruption led to the cancellation of the international conference, crowing:

“Our mission was to stop the conference and we did just that.”

As I wrote in March 2006 in a post Apcet II Disgrace - all for an alien nation!:

What was in aid of?

Just to please a neighbouring country who was abusing the human rights and indeed the lives of a group of people of a country it should not have swallowed in the first place to incorporate into its Nusantara ‘empire’.

Many young Malaysians, including those UMNO young hooligans who participated in that act of unmitigated mob violence, seemed to have forgotten that the same neighbour had once lusted after our country and wanted to swallow us up too. We should be more sympathetic to our fellow target victims instead of resorting to violent mob rule to please an alien country.

* Update: Since then, and in recent times, Indonesians have repetitively threatened Malaysians and even smeared our Embassy in Jakarta with faeces.

Sure, it’s a big gorilla that would have pressured us to stop the Apcet II conference. It tried to do that with Apcet I in Manila, and while the Filipino government succumbed to the pressure, the Philippines courts did not, ordering the government to back off from a legitimate and peaceful seminar. Likewise too with Apcet III in Bangkok, which ran beautifully undisturbed by thugs.

Only Malaysia saw fit to suck up to its neighbour. And for what?

It’s not as if it’s a Muslim nation, and therefore Islamic solidarity was called for! It’s not as if it’s a Malay nation and therefore Malay solidarity was natural [it’s mainly a Javanese dominated society who persecuted the Malays in Aceh, and whose Majapahit ancestors chased Parameswara, later to be Sultan Megat Iskandar Shah, to Malacca].

It’s not as if that nation has done anything for us, except tried to invade us once, endowed us with their SW Monsoon poisonous haze and their illegal migrants. And it’s a country we nearly (again) went to war with recently over some gas fields. It’s a country we had a hacking battle with!

So OK, we brown-nosed those Javanese, because ‘some of us’ fantasized there’s some form of persaudaraan berakar sama [brethren of same origin], between them and us, by preventing a regional group of peaceful NGOs from seeking a peaceful, yes, peaceful resolution to a murderous situation in a neighbouring nation, where vulnerable East Timorese were massacred by Indonesian troops.

What was the damage for that thuggish behaviour for a foreign country which didn’t even appreciate or remember what the UMNO young goons plus associates had done?

(1) We abused OUR own citizens for an alien nation.
(2) We manhandled one of OUR respectable senior scholars for an alien nation. He might/may be from the Opposition, but he's from OUR Malaysian Opposition, not of an alien nation.

* that respectable senior scholar subsequently joined up with his Apcet II oppressors Anwar Ibrahim and Saifuddin Nasution to form PKR. It seems there’s no accounting for his inability to recognize a leopard never changes its spots wakakaka.

(3) We wrecked a Malaysian hotel for an alien nation.
(4) We abused our peaceful international guests in a violent manner for an alien nation.
(5) We disgraced the good name of OUR nation for the benefit of an alien nation.
(6) We then abused the Apcet participants by having the police detain them, the victims – and for what?
(7) We put them in an Abu Ghraib-ish cell! And we have the cheek to condemn the Americans?
(8) We showed the world how violent, abusive and repressive we could be, all for the benefit of an alien nation.

And it’s an alien nation that has constantly showed us disrespect and aggression from time to time! [Padan muka wakakaka]

Those UMNO people ought to get their bloody priorities right!

But most of all, we or more correctly, those UMNO (and now PKR) goons, as Tunku Abdul Aziz has now lamented, had totally abandoned the Malay adat of natural courtesy and graciousness of their forebears for an ungrateful alien nation – thanks mightily to manmanlai.