Politicizing MH370

Anwar Ibrahim just can't help himself in politicizing the tragedy of MH370.

He claimed the Malaysian (presumably ATC) radar system should have been able to detect MH370's movement when it made a turn back to westward from its original track towards Beijing.

CNN reported Anwar saying: “They had the capability to detect any flight from the west — or from the east to the west coast, from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.”

Well, they didn't, having lost MH370 at the IGARI waypoint when Malaysian ATC handed MH370 over to Vietnam ATC, but obviously Anwar knows more than the Malaysian air traffic controllers.

The cause for ATC losing SSR (secondary surveillance radar) contact had already been traced to MH370's transponder being off. 

But WTF because Anwar then said what he had wanted to, which was: “I find it shocking that (the government officials) are not able, that they were not able, or they give some very scanty sort of information.”

“The problem is credibility of the leadership. They are culpable because there is a general perception that they are not opening up, that there is an opaque system at work.”

Okay, we all know Hishamuddin and gang have not been doing well for two reasons:

(a) Other than guesses and speculations, they don't know what had happened to MH370, nor does any other government in the world.

Well, how about Anwar Ibrahim? Can he please tell us what has happened apart from claiming the air traffic control radar could have done something that air traffic controllers said couldn't?

Talk is cheap lah!

(b) Hisham and his gang have been contradicting each other for the reason they aren't clued on the issue, with some clowns (one in particular, wakakaka) trying to show he knows more than others.

But does Anwar with his insistence on the super-supra-capability of our ATC radar system, even when air traffic controllers said otherwise, give you any confidence he does?

One week ago, Mike Smith, an Australian crisis management expert and chief executive of Inside Public Relations, and someone who had worked in both Airservices Australia (its nationwide ATC system) and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) had said that in the initial stages of the crisis MAS had actually handled the crisis quite well, but the public relation situation went to shits (kaytee's words, not Mike Smith's) as more government officials began to open their big fat mouths publicly (my choice of words again, wakakaka).

He asserted that a fundamental rule of good crisis management would be for one person, or a limited number of people, to release the information to the public.

Mike Smith stated: "In the first couple of days, the airline was doing that job pretty well, but once it became an international issue, an international hunt, an international crisis, it was really up to the Malaysian government to take control and to have an emergency crisis control point - to manage the information and make sure it was distributed responsibly and truthfully."

He said that after that, other parties had started to comment publicly, and "finger-pointing, rumours and innuendo" had started to emerge.

"This seems to be coming from Malaysian officials, whose motives we can only speculate about."

I dare say it's no different from the PKR party situation where in recent times and associated with the Kajang Betrayal, we get conflicting statements from a number of PKR party leaders, each obviously having what Smith had alluded to: "... whose motives we can only speculate about."

Anwar had also attempted to show how the current government is ballsing up the MH370 tragedy by comparing it to the Japanese Red Army hostage crisis in 1975.

For a start, there is no necessity to tell us what we and most people in the world already know, of the PR debacle that is the Malaysian authority, but wait wait, he was talking to CNN lah.

Secondly and more tellingly, there's hardly any comparison on two vastly different issues. How does MH370 missing aircraft compares to the Japanese Red Army hostage crisis?

Even Singapore's handling of Silkair crash and SIA's Taiwan runway disaster should not be used as comparison because those two events obviously weren't like the MH370 missing aircraft case.

There's no doubt Anwar is politicizing the MH370 saga.

I suspect he has done so in view of mounting criticisms of Dr Wan Azizah's lamentable earlier lie that Anwar does not know Captain Azaharie, when the missing pilot is the uncle of Anwar's daughter-in-law?

Don't know Azaharie, the uncle of your daughter-in-law, and one of your most ardent supporters? How shocking, and which following criticisms required Anwar to come out quickly to acknowledge their family relationship.

Yeah, I also remember that once PKR dismissed Saiful Bukhari as merely one of the thousands of coffee boys in PKR, when he had already gone on a number of overseas trips with Anwar Ibrahim.

But whatever memory deficiency PKR leaders may be suffering from, let us please stop politicizing MH370, as the families of the missing crew and passengers have already much to grieve over, without the additional benefit of Anwar's amazing knowledge of the extraordinary capabilities of Malaysia's ATC radar system or his bizarre and unrelated historical lesson on the Japanese Red Army hostage crisis of 1975.

And just in case someone is going to ask or say: No, I don't hate Anwar, wakakaka.