Najib and the Utusan Trap of Hate

by Nathaniel Tan

Sticky: Don’t forget, Sunday 16th August at Sunway: bettermalaysia.com! :)

I read brother Guan Sin’s post on Utusan with sadness.

First and foremost, surely you realise this is a trap. The provocativeness of Utusan is not just to shore up Malay chauvinism - it is to instigate anti-Malay sentiment.

Needless to say, ‘heroes’ of the non-Malays will start getting their knickers in a twist, but this is exactly the scenario Utusan is hoping for: proving once again that the non-Malays are out to get the Malays.

“We’re just defending our own rights what” is not an excuse that I believe works.

Eye for an eye, fighting fire with fire - surely we are looking at a blind world gone up in flames.

Victory over hate (read: Utusan) can only be achieved with love.

The BN game preaches division, we must spread unity. Unity will not be achieved by championing anyone’s rights - whether ‘ours’ or ‘theirs.’

I concur that things look to be getting bad. As we prepare to weather the storm, don’t forget: counter hate with love.

To non-Malays, this means it is a time to affirm the rights and speak out for the welfare of our Malay brothers and sisters - not a time to insist ‘they’ get too much, and ‘we’ too little.

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Let’s do some political meditations.

I’ve always said Najib is playing a smart game, cultivating a big 1Malaysia teddy bear image.

Let us not forget though, that there is no doubt he could have stopped all this Utusan race-mongering with a single phone call.

His choosing not to causes me to hold him single-handedly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the country.

I can’t help but feel that he is playing games. Letting mad dogs lose on one hand, while trying to look the mediator on the other - all the while though, it’s himself pulling the puppet strings, at the very least implicitly.

Toying with the state of Malaysia’s ethnic relations just for political gain sure seems low down to me.

As I have said basically since I started blogging: I’m pretty convinced these strained race relations will never start disappearing until BN in its present shape does. Such extinction of race based politics may not solve all of our problems, but I reckon it’d be a heckuva good place to start!