On the Wreckage of the Malayan Lockean State, No More Deals
May 27, 2011 by shuzheng
… especially to say ‘No’ to Nakhaie Islam, Bangsa Mahathir, Malaysian First
Inside Malaysia: Nakhaie Ahmad, above, progenitor & theological soul mate to the Sheridan Shakirs, the Lisa Ngs & the Mariam Mokhtars; only different gods.
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Nakhaie Ahmad’s Plot for an Arabian God-State
Nakhaie Ahmad has brandished the penultimate weapon in Malay politics and in its inter-ethnic relations to keep half a population underfoot: European jurisprudence applied to Arabian Muslim law. He has yet to say how the Malay shall profit from shackling ‘non-Muslims’ in such an Islamic state, untung in their language.
At Malaysian Insider (MI), where a report on his remarks is reproduced, the Anglophile Sheridans, Mariams and the Jesus Ah Hoes, emigrating to Malaysia Today, are speechless in the face of Nakhaie’s demands and threats. As a result, most of them can only say to Nakhaie, ‘fcuk you’, but couldn’t bring themselves to show their god-fearing self-righteous indignation to spell a word right.
After which, they resumed blaming Umno for Nakhaie’s existence, as they had blamed Umno for Ibrahim Ali and for Perkasa, conveniently ignoring a historical fact. That is, today’s most radical Malay factions, who are simultaneously Islamic, Arabic and fascists were nurtured elsewhere then imported into Umno.
PAS is natural progenitor; Anwar Ibrahim is a legacy. Nakhaie had before joining Umno held PAS office, so says MI; Ibrahim is a Kelantan MP thanks to PAS; Anwar was already cultivating the image of an Ayatollah before entering Umno; Mahathir Mohamad’s Islamic country (not Islamic state) idea was seeded in PAS, but he would use it to put the Chinese and Indians in their places because he hated them more than he does PAS; and Islam became Umno’s lynch pin so as to secure its place in Sabah and so as to pad up the electoral rolls in its favour, exactly the way PAS would have wanted it.
Today, DAP sleeps with the same PAS because they are no different at a fundamental level – their ideologies foreign; their own, individual lives gweilo; their gods imported from the Middle East.
This is also to say Pakatan’s leaders, their biases for foreign, western, Arab goods, had made possible the like of Nakhaie to hang the noose around the neck of the Chinese (and Indian). For the purpose of the Islamic state, Nakhaie calls the Chinese ‘non-Muslims’ although his intentional meaning is ‘non-Malays’, the exact same interchangeable phrases employed by Lim Guan Eng, by Haris Ibrahim et al, today crusading against Ibrahim and the Utusan paper.
By using the term non-Muslim when Nakhaie means Christians, he joins Guan Eng to drag the Chinese and Indian Hindus into a Islam-Christian war, a war 10,000km away, between Arabs and White Europeans. Why are the Nakhaie Arabian Malays and the Guan Eng Cina Anglophiles, one coconut, one banana, bringing into Malaysia other peoples’ fights if not for…?
Well, so much for Elizabeth Wong’s ‘beyond race’ politics…. Eli, Tian Chua, et al – those puny little yellow bananas subsisting in a puny, sweaty, little jungle swamp called Malaya – have very global outlooks. It makes them feel good, progressive, or you might say liberal – gweilo.
More important than that, here is Nakhaie’s answer to Lim Kit Siang: “Want to be Malaysian First? Islamic law ta’da Melayu First. Mana ada? Malaysian First is Islam First, Bodoh! Even your orang putih inspiration, Thomas Jefferson, will agree with us.” (More later.)
Casting doubt into the ‘loyalty of non-Muslims’ (MI’s phrasing) is old baggage. Before that they used questions of Chinese, rather than non-Muslim, loyalty to hammer at the existence of the Chinese. What’s new, that is, new to Malaysian politics, is the construction in Nakhaie’s argument that loops back to the same, tired conclusion, and this is as old as Malaysia: either the Chinese go down on their knees or they get thrown into the South China Sea.
But loyalty to whom? MI doesn’t even bother to ask (reporters are a dumb lot, if you want to know); it presumes what Nakhaie presumes.
In that question, Nakhaie’s slip shows. Sometimes he means loyalty to Islam, sometimes he means Malays, sometimes to a ‘contract’, and occasionally he means loyalty to the government of Malaysia. Sometimes he means all four simultaneously. But, in the end, it really doesn’t matter to his argument. Whenever he sees fit, Nakhaie chooses the terms of loyalty, and it isn’t just him. Sometimes it is Umno; sometimes PAS; sometimes Anwar Ibrahim; sometimes Anwar’s Abim; sometimes Perkasa. Regardless who defines loyalty, the end-game is the same: how to fix the Chinaman, Mariam Mokhtar’s racist label for the Chinese she’d plagiarized from a gweilo named Steinback. (She didn’t know that though.)
When the Ming Chinese first docked in 1438, minus-plus a year or two, in a river swamp with no name they should have expelled all the subsequent pendatangs, Parameswara included. Each Chinese armada comes with 20,000 people; it’s that easy. But they didn’t because it is not in the nature of Chinese culture to enter another land, sequester everything, and then give yourself fancy titles like lord, governor, and governor-general in order to justify local rule on the basis of some imported law. Gweilos do that; that’s why they are called imperialists.
In a previous era (Mahathir’s time, for example) and in an earlier language, expulsion from Malaysia meant and was framed primarily in terms of loss of citizenship, or denial of it to the Chinese (and Indians). In short: it has to do with the damn IC, the destination station in Nakhaie’s arguments over gunboat inter-ethnic relations. Namewee was one of the most recent Chinese to be threatened over the IC – expulsion from Malaysia.
Today, the Chinese answer to this 50-, 60-year-old worn piece of threat is simple. Take out the IC and/or the passport from Nakhaie’s mouth, he would be spitting in the air. He would have nothing to threaten anybody with. Nobody, not especially the Chinese today, feels menaced by such talk anymore. And a million or so have already shown Nakhaie how not to be intimidated: so, one of these days Lim Kit Siang’s grand-daughter will write on the wall of her father’s government mansion in Penang: “Betty Lim was here. Not anymore.”
Nakhaie: you’re a has-been; go spit into the grave prepared for the old man Mahathir Mohamad.
A Malay Lockean State vs the Chinese, Indians
What’s worth having a second look is Nakhaie’s construction of his argument for an Islamic state because it reflects on some of the grave mistakes committed by well-intended people (Hindraf, KITA) who could otherwise make a difference in inter-ethnic relations, hence politics, hence the betterment of Malaysia.
The starting point in Nakhaie’s construction is the presumption of a contract.
This is pivotal. Whether such a contract is written or unwritten, social or political in nature, is inconsequential to the argument’s conclusion.
Briefly, any person taking up a citizenship, any citizenship, is a signatory of the contract – and the IC is akin to the lien on a property, the proof of the contract. Such a person is therefore bound by it, with obligations and duties under the contract terms. It is a state-citizen contract, and the constitution is only part of the terms, not all of it. Hence, Nakhaie uses the term ‘civil rights’ to denote a core part of the contract obligations, some constitutionally stipulated, others not. The state’s duty include protection of its people and grant of perpetual residency within its laws.
In the larger picture, civil rights are only a part of and not the totality of ‘human rights’, the latter of which is broader in scope, covering, most importantly, equality of state treatment, for example, in the provision of mother tongue education for all citizens regardless of social or political status.
Islamic states, such as Saudi Arabia and rest of the 57-member OIC, cringe and then throw up at that equality provision. Men and women are never equal; the Muslim body of the ummah and kafirs are never equal. Never, never, never, regardless of what good Muslim Bangsa boy Haris Ibrahim may tell his illiterate English-speaking DAP sympathizers. (A fundamentalist Christian version of ummah-kafirs would be the Church or Body of Christ vs heathens.) Hence, the OIC, Malaysia included, came up with its own plagiarized 1990 version called the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam.
Note the common phrase ‘human rights’ used by both the OIC and by the west, the latter in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Both the civil and human rights regimes are pure western concepts, the products of Europe’s so-called Enlightenment era, roughly from the 16th Century to the 18th. Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826, imported Enlightenment ideas into America, used them to draft the American independence declaration, and then, disingenuously, grabbed the first presidency on the supposed basis he was the ‘founder’ – all because he drafted a text he stole from John Locke. (This explains how Anwar Ibrahim enthralls his western audiences by invoking Jefferson at every opportunity. It is equivalent to an orang putih giving speeches in the Dewan about the wonders of Parameswara, whatever he may be or whatever wonders he may possess.)
Ahmad’s Penultimate Weapon
Back to Nakhaie: Plagiarizing from Jefferson, he gave it a Muslim twist in the way the Cairo Declaration twisted the UDHR progenitor, 42 years earlier. Nakhaie did it in two ways.
First, he made the Malaysian state an Arabian state – whether this is constitutional or not is irrelevant – but it changes the contractual terms from the western, white man, Jeffersonian kind into a ‘Madinah’ version that Nakhaie invoked. He probably invented it. Whatever it may be, Madinah is Arabian jurisprudence however perverse, contorted or badly made up. Nakhaie calls this jurisprudence Islamic by citing Jews because if there are Jews then there are Muslims. And, conveniently, he, like Mahathir before him, could then equate the Chinese in Malaysia to Jews in Madinah.
People forget: the state or nation-state is new creation, very new. Madinah (or Medina) can’t be a state because statehood is a wholly western construct, built from the debris of WWI so as to put people of one ethnicity or nationality (eg. Poles, Slavs, German-Aryans, French, Anglo-Saxon) under one political and administrative jurisdiction within a fixed, marked, physical territory. Until the Pakistanis and Indians begin arriving, Britain was a purist nation-state, all white, Christian, Anglican as state religion, locked away by sea from the rest of Europe. More likely, therefore, Madinah was a tribal deal; one group of agrarian people riding donkeys around an oasis, others on camels, adopting the occasional desert occupation called looting.
Anyway one looks at it, such as state is un-Melayu as opposed to un-Malay, a latter word adopted by the Constitution. It is especially un-Malayan, a mixed population that eats rice, build temples in thanks to a good harvest, that is, if they have time, fish out of little sampans, loyalties vague because a kingdom and its subjects are movable. In this region of the Far East, a kingdom is movable property. Thus, when the Europeans begin arriving at the river mouth with no name, guns, spears at the ready, the kingdom, or whatever was left, simply moved. Not a trace left today.
Second, Nakhaie made explicit over what’s implicit in Jeffersonian civil rights: that is, punishment for contract violation. And note, the state never breaks the deal; it’s always and only the citizen who does.
Nakhaie’s proposal to expel Chinese for contract violation amounts to, in Jewish or Christian terms, excommunication. That’s physical expulsion by ecclesiastical authority in order to deprive a person all rights of membership to a religious body. Arab Muslims, the ones on camels and doing the looting, take it further: they expel the head from the body of the apostate.
In any case, expulsion has a strong gweilo flavour, again very un-Melayu, un-Malaysian and un-Asian. (For a specific case in this un-Malayness, consider Lina Joy. The Melayus just won’t let her go; so to keep her Malay, they go to extreme lengths to retain her Islamic paper credentials, a problem of identity stemming from the Constitution. The Chinese carries no such angst around; some Foong or Fong, young mother of Chen Yimin in Penang, converts to Islam and nobody gives a toss for her.)
Nakhaie copying Jefferson makes him identical in political world view to Lim Guan Eng and Anwar Ibrahim, all three applying western jurisprudential notions of equality and justice but in different ways and for different ends. This explains why the trio leave behind a flavour that they, PAS, PKR and the DAP, are fundamentally not very much different among themselves – Anglophile in numerous aspects of their sensibilities. It also explains why they work so well with each other.
(Side note: For the American independence declaration, Jefferson had himself copied nearly wholesale the ideas and near exact words from John Locke, 1632-1704, the man with the infamous ‘inalienable rights of man’ that would morph into ‘human rights’.)
The Jeffersonian contract argument is full of holes, and this shouldn’t detain us. (Only the idiocy in the like of Haris Ibrahim, Anwar, and Guan Eng, third-rate minds schooled in the English language, in the La Salles, could have fallen for it.) More important is this: By building on top of Jefferson, Nakhaie’s Islamic copycat version equates a Malaysian state to an Islamic state to an Arabian state and to a Malay state.
This is a critical assumption. By making four kinds of states synonymous, the formula becomes vulnerable to manipulation into even more permutations that make (western) law, hence rights, fallacious. (Aspects of the permutations and fallacies were discussed earlier, above.) Malaysian equals Islam is already arguable. After which Nakhaie will have even more trouble making a case out of saying Islam is a form of state in the modern sense of the term, or Malay equals Muslim, hence an Islamic state, or hence a Malay state, and after that to prove that a Malaysian state equals a Malay state. He has first to locate the Parameswara kingdom to make it a state; where on earth is that piece of property?
The Islamic state resists clear definition in large part because it is specific to a culture, Arabian in this case. But the Arabian is not the Malay, nor Chinese (in spite of Ridhuan Tee), nor Indians. Hence Indonesia, motherland of the Malaysian Melayu, finds impossible to turn itself into an Islamic state which would make Islam the sum total of its national, ethnic and personal identity – a irreversible one at that. Simply stated, the historical Melayu was birthed not in Madinah; Muslim today, perhaps; but Arab Islamic? Under Nakhaie’s proposal, however, the Malay is forced in life, in the present day, to be Arabian, with all the solitary, poor, nasty and brutish ramifications that go with the desert camel existence. (For a superficial perspective, have another look at Hadi Awang in full Arabian garb: is that Melayu?)
There is another, underlying reason why Nakhaie is today on to the Islamic state thing again: Islam, like the other Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism, is adverse to rationale. If people like Nakhaie thought it is persuasive and rock solid in its appeal, to Malays in particular, they would have gone ahead with the project. Why bother telling the Chinese? Non-Muslim, in his words.
Old products of the European Enlightenment era (the American, French and other constitutions) are periodically taken out for dusting in order to serve as a reminder into their doctrinal supremacy. If supreme, therefore, not to be questioned. They have to be aired in the open if they are to be relevant globally. Chinese political thought, on the other hand, remains in the grave of their masters because modesty dictates that you don’t tell other people how to run their lives. Gweilos, the west in particular, have no such qualms. Nor PAS ulamas who bang on hotel room doors at midnight while Umno reporters from Utusan peep in, looking for wet stains on mattresses.
Doctrinal dogma has this implication: if Nakhaie finds his Islamic state persuading nobody then he must turn to brute force to apply it.
As a consequence, Guan Eng’s Christianity and Ibrahim Ali’s Islam have come down to exchanging blows: to apply brute force, there’s only so much space to accommodate one supreme being. Nakhaie is saying to Guan Eng: Our Islamic state is not ready yet, and you want to muscle in? To that concern, therefore, the Ibrahim camp says, ‘let’s get cracking on the Constitution before that Chinaman becomes the prime minister‘. Worse for the Ibrahims, some Muslims have said a Christian prime minister is constitutionally possible.
By categorizing the Chinese and Indians non-Muslims, Nakhaie’s presumes that the Chinese (or Hindus) would back a Christian state if the Islam state fails to persuade. Again he is wrong.
Najib Razak was himself erroneous in a similar fashion when talking about political or religious moderation on Wesak Day. Buddhism and especially Chinese culture in the extreme is moderate. This is also to say the Chinese chauvinist is intrinsically, in essence, moderation because Chinese philosophical or Confucian political thought is not linear with the western form of left-right extremities. There is no such thing as Middle Malaysia, or middle ground, or something in-between if a system, any kind of system, is circular in nature.
Not so however with the Abrahamic religions; they are a straight train either to hell or heaven. Quranic and actual biblical political cultures are not for reasoning with; take it or you’ll be punished. That’s god’s law, they say. Nakhaie’s arguments for an Islamic state has exactly that flavour, boiling down to expulsion of the Chinese.
Guan Eng’s Christian pastors illustrate the same unyielding dogmatism in their religious state ideas: ‘Of course,’ they say, ‘we are not out to usurp Islam‘, omitting to add, ‘because we don’t have the power.‘ Nor do they say, ‘let’s discuss‘ the matter. Instead evangelist commentators like Josh Hong, hogging the pages of Malaysiakini, say the Christians were ‘led to the slaughter‘, suggesting there is only one victor, and force is the only arbiter, and compromise is not possible because compromise requires reason and persuasion. In other words, it requires intelligence. Instead, the Joshies and the Ahmads rely on absolute authority to push through their agendas.
Nakhaie repeats the same point in oblique but obvious terms. To ‘non-Muslims’ he says, ‘take it, that is, what we, Muslims, give you or we might just throw you into the sea.‘
The Jewish-Arab conflicts go down the same street heading into the sea.
What the State Gives, It Can Also Take Away
This way of looking at the Christian and Islamic states reveal a fundamental nature in the Lockean-Jeffersonian civil and human rights regimes. (a) These can morph into cruel regimes, especially if they are majority elected. (b) Political rights is for the state to grant, even if they are constitutionally enshrined.
But, what the state gives, it can also take away.
P. Uthayakumar’s Human Rights Party (HRP) fails to see this on the assumption it has nothing to lose. So they stretch out their hands to plea, sometimes to shout for the rights of Indians as citizens and as humans, forgetting that if they stretch out their hands far enough Nakhaie Ahmad might just chop them off.
In any Jeffersonian kind of state, especially one applied in the name of god, rights are first accrued to the state then dispensed under contract at its will. Applied in Malaysia, it means half the population becomes beholden to the other, Malay-Muslim half.
Hindraf, HRP’s progenitor, could have lead the way to reinvent political society outside the western-Arab civil rights framework. This new way of doing politics reasserts a local culture native to this region and its people.
But, assaulted by being called racist by the Anglophile racists, Hindraf’s renaming its political mission as HRP, which leads it backwards into playing by the old rules. Hence, its endless pleadings: for rights to jobs, land, schools, temples, and so on – all of which hands over to the state even more leverage than it has.
These pleadings are fruits of the deal with the state which Hindraf leaders confuse as terms to demand for political support. These are collectively like fruits of the IC that Mahathir’s so-called social contract dangled in front of the Chinese. And the proof that such a deal doesn’t work is in the state of country today, in Barisan and in Pakatan which is, in effect, a Barisan copy reshuffling the terms in their own order of priorities.
Any Lockean kind of a deal, whether the Jeffersonian or the Madinah kind, ultimately fails because … what the state gives, the state can also take away. This, in Malaysia more than anywhere else. Without, hence, the leverage to influence the terms and hampered by absence of economic clout, Hindraf must turn inwards – forget the rights contract, grow your own fruit trees – the journey of a thousand li begins at the foot below. It’s a long journey; the Chinese understand this intutively: 5,000 years hadn’t been for nothing.
Nakhaie makes the same point conversely clear. Says he: “In attempts to get vote and support of non-Muslims, we have been very gracious in giving them their civil rights.”
What’s to happen if the non-Muslim vote is no more needed? And who is the ‘we’ Nakhaie speaks of in, ‘we have been very gracious…‘?
Here, Nakhaie is suggesting that the individual Malay is no longer a mere member of an ethnic or a political group. The Nakhaie Malay is the state representative so that in any inter-ethnic intercourse and relationship he has to be superior to the kafir, the Chinese, the Indian, or the non-Muslim.
As a state representative, the Nakhaie Malay is co-signer in the civil rights contract so that his son’s entitlement, say, over scholarship or a government job is provided not any more on the basis of ethnicity or merit. Rather, the boy’s entitlement is entered into a set of human or civil rights to which the Chinese (or Indian) are supposed to have agreed to, willingly, once they accept Malay, as opposed to Malaysian, citizenship. The Chinese (or Indian) agreed to the Nakhaie’s entitlement over and above themselves.
This – the Malay individual as an extension of the state by virtue of being Muslim – is Nakhaie’s Madinah version of the Jeffersonian political ideal. (Eli, Sarong Eli, you like this scenario? This is your ‘beyond race’ politics. No?)
It is hardly an extraordinary idea, in that the Malay-Muslim acts for the state. Rather, it is very Arabian, meaning tribal. Nor is this new: in numerous biblical passages,’ God’ in his agreement with Jews or Christians permit them to take men as slaves and women for sex (what else?). In the bible are the beginnings of civil and human rights political wheeling-dealing with some unknown, unseen, presumed authority they’d call Lord, God, and so on.
The IC: A Life Time Achievement Award
Images like the above gives the impression that getting the Malaysian IC is an accomplishment for the Chinese or Indian, like it is a life-time achievement award – “I’m proud to be Malaysian” says Kongsamkok, now settled in Australia – to be won from a Malay state that decides the winners, at a price. A high price.
The IC at a price: It was a beginning in the corruption of the Malaysian soul, in Malay-Chinese-Indian relations, extending to economic life today. Mahathir Mohamad, not Melayu, not Chinese, not Indian, more Pakistani than Malay, led in the cultivation of this point of view that evolved into a Malay state policy all because he couldn’t stand for the Chinese and all because a Malay (not Melayu) elite, English taught, in schools named Raffles or St Xavier, were picked by a colonial administration to take over their role, first by learning the ways of the white man: know you are lord and master. They learned how to be racist.
Old Malayan men, pining for the old days, say the old days weren’t racist; it was heavenly. These men – you find them all over Malaysiakini – suffer from Parkinson’s disease and forget easily: Mahathir is an old man, from the old days and, like them, he too was schooled in a La Sallle.
It could have been so different… But, continuing Mahathir’s line, Nakhaie Ahmad now says, let’s give state an Arabian work-over, a Madinah version: here are your civil rights!
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No Thanks for the IC
Nobody, neither Chinese nor Hindu, can or should live or work under this kind of terms.
The Chinese answer to Nakhaie is to walk away from the deal, unsigned, some ICs returned. This situation is incredulous: no other immigration authority in the world uses its function to make miserable the citizenship of its people. When almost a million Chinese emigrate, they threw off the most important ransom the state has on their lives and on the surrender of allegiance from one ethnic group to another: the IC. It was never a loyalty to a state because a state such as Malaysia is a composite, not some kingdom along the banks of river with no name.
Hindraf’s answer to Nakhaie has been to talk tough, while carrying placards of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama, the same people who worked with, produced and promoted the Lockean rights regime. If only this works (and note that the policeman has no problem tearing up Obama’s face). But it doesn’t because Uthaya’s Indians are working within the regime rules that leave them with no leverage and a set of terms that can be annulled at god’s pleasure. Their god.
All is not lost, however, because, if Nakhaie’s Islamic state deal is doable where he is concerned, then he won’t have to launder it in public.
He or Umno could just as easily change the constitution to ease their objective of an Islamic state, if that’s what they want. And, how could either Anwar or PAS refuse their duty to Allah? Also, they would have no need to look at the Chinese (or Indians) each time Nakhaie talks of Islamic state as if agreement from the Chinese is necessary to make good a threat. An Islamic state project is dependent on agreement by unbelievers, the kafirs? That’s wild….
The IC along with the passport was the weapon of choice to intimidate the Chinese 50, 60 years ago into surrendering their humanity. Mahathir in his time also used it. That’s useless now.
But, to substitute the IC with the threat of the Islamic state instead, Nakhaie faces this problem: he drags all the Melayus into the deal. And once this happens, the inevitable question arises: do the Melayus or Malays want such a state? That is, the real Malays really, really wanting an Arab Islamic state? Because if they did, Malaysia would have been an Islamic state in August 1957 as Pakistan did 10 years earlier.
The secular Chinese, without Jesus Christ, a portion Buddhists, all total 6-million strong, are the only ones left to stand between the common Melayus and the ulamas and pastor marching Arabian Islam or orang putih Christianity into the Malaysian consciousness. There is no consequential difference if either one came into being as a state, respectively through PAS/Umno and through DAP/PKR. Lim Guan Eng stoning a heathen for adultery with a Christian is no different from Nakhaie whipping a Muslim girl for spending a night with a boyfriend; both their victims merely wanted love only humans can give but those self-proclaimed messiahs, caliphs and gods said, ‘No’.
Nakhaie using the Islamic state weapon against Chinese could eventually find his own dagger stabbing Malays. Poor daughter of Ibrahim. And poor wife of Ramli: they just might put her in a pit then throw stones at her.
The Melayu, therefore, is safer with the secular Chinese than with the Nakhaies or PAS or the DAP Hannahs. (Sakmongrel, without him realizing, implies as much although he confines himself to economics which is elementary and wrong. But you get the point.) For example: only in societies with Abrahamic faiths do they criminalise consensual sex; Chinese and Hindus don’t. DAP’s evangelist politician Teresa Kok is on record to demand jail for Bung Mokhtar because he quietly took a second wife and even though this is syariah business, none of hers. PAS supports whipping if done by them; here passage 8.
If a common Melayu is safer among Chinese or, in some cases, vice versa, then it would also suggest the Indian might be safer among the Melayus. This mutual, reinforcing ethnic dependence breaks the political gridlock in constituencies fought over by PKR/DAP/Gerakan and Umno/PAS, or between them. For mutual help to work, Ibrahim Ali must be true to being Melayu, not Pakistani; the Chen family must stay Chinese. Otherwise the point in it all – the defence and support of one ethnicity for another – is lost. This is the beginning of harmony, the exploitation of differences to serve a common good.
Hence, reason and ethnicity would dictate how a Melayu would stand up for a Chinese or a Chinese for an Indian.
A Malay would champion the return of Chen Yimin to his father because she was born into a Chinese society and she belongs there. The Melayu will have the gratitude of all Chinese, not just the Chen family, because the decision is honourable. The Chinese will not contest any of the PSD scholarships – let them all go to the Malays, some to Indians – because the Chinese understand there’s a price to go with dependence. But let the Chinese have another New Era College; it is their money anyway. The Chinese must stand with the Melayu not to be whipped or punished in any form for sleeping with the boyfriend; only Arabs and the orang putih say it is wrong. The true Melayu fatherland Indonesia is not Pakistan nor Kerala; it is especially neither gweilo nor Arab not even in historical religious culture. A Hindu temple belongs to Hindus; no municipal Malay goon, whether hired by an Arab Khalid or a gweilo Ronnie, can touch it without Hindu permission in writing, in Tamil. The Chinese could offer help to the Indians to manage their Tamil schools, merge their properties, keep the curricula separate, accept all ethnic groups, but lock out all governments if they can’t assist. All Indian dead are native to Indians; if a turbaned Malay need Muslims to bury then go to Pakistan; there, it has many dead, in body parts.
The clarity of racial or ethnic division offers a sound basis for living together in peace, employing reason and persuasion as an arbiter. When this happens then the Melayu, not the Malay, can stand up for the Chinese and the Chinese for the Indians and the Melayu, after which politics will inadvertently re-organise from ground up.
Calling Nakhaie’s Bluff
In the circumstances, here’s to call Nakhaie’s bluff and say to him:
Get to the point, boy. If you want the Christians lynched, if you want to go after the pastors and Lim Guan Eng, then do so. Why are you so much like Guan Eng, making enemies of Buddhists, Hindus? Non-Muslims, did you say? The Christians are 10 percent of the population, and they are the ones you want most. True? Yet you talk of involving all ‘non-Muslims’ and so add 40 percent of an entire national population to, as you say, your ‘enemies’?
Don’t you see, the Chinese, i.e. the extremists that the pendatang Mahathir Mohamad calls them, don’t care for Lim Kit Siang, his family, and their Christianity. Stone them if it pleases you. Take away their passports if that’s what you hope to do. But grow up, Nakhaie.
And, next time, if you want to again threaten the Chinese, try to employ something original – not steal ideas from some dead white male - and use something more effective. Passports, IC, contracts, government, minister jobs, now Islamic state; they don’t work, boy! Don’t you read the newspapers? When Chua Soi Lek said the Chinese shouldn’t expect Cabinet posts if they don’t vote MCA, it wasn’t a deal-offer. It was ethics. Know how that works?
You see, Nakhaie, you play the old, silly Mahathir game: throw out some chickens and you could snare the dragon. But you didn’t know this, did you? Dragons don’t eat chickens.
Worse than that, it shows you’re insincere whereas the Chinese, real Chinese ethics, value little else in life than a man’s virtue to keep his honour. Know what that is?
Here is a better idea since your ultimate purpose in your threat is to to keep Najib Razak on his job anyway: work with the Chinese (and the Hindus), the real Chinese, not the Anglophiles. Otherwise, we say the same to you as we had told Guan Eng when he tried to trip us on a Wesak day: fuck off.
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