By Haris Ibrahim,Reading Steadyaku47′s ‘The Chinese must stop blaming the Malays’ and RPK’s ‘Malay unity at its best’ day before yesterday left me greatly troubled.
Chinese blaming the Malays for everything that’s gone wrong in the country?
Malays ‘kecik hati’ because they feel the Chinese are not real friends of the Malays?
I do spend time on the ground and I have to say I don’t get this sense.
If anything, most people, and this necessarily includes the Chinese, are now more aware than ever before that it is the elite Malays in UMNO, their cronies and their cohorts in BN who have enriched themselves and in the process singularly left this nation in near ruins.
And that the majority of Malays, like most of the nation, are the victims of, first, 22 years of misrule by Mahathir and now, more plunder under Najib.
This is the sense I get, both from the rural and urban Chinese that I get to speak with.
Chinese blaming the Malays?
No.
Melayu kecik hati with the Chinese?
I read RPK’s piece again yesterday morning to see if I had missed anything.
Umno succeeded in making the Malays become kecik hati because they feel the Chinese have now demonstrated that they are not real friends of the Malays.
RPK’s exact words.
Not that the Chinese are not real friends of the Malays, but that UMNO has succeeded in making the Malays feel that way.
The two, in my view, are not the same.
I tried calling RPK yesterday evening but could not get through.
So I called a senior journalist, asked if he had read RPK’s piece and what he made of it.
He said RPK had hit the nail on the head, but had perhaps stated it rather clumsily.
According to him, the UMNO-controlled media might be sowing concerns amongst its Malay readers and viewers with its spin on how DAP, which is painted as a Chinese party, will be the principle benefactor if Pakatan comes to power.
How PAS, to keep DAP and the Chinese in Selangor happy, sacked the defender of Islam, Hassan Ali.
And on and on and on.
The message in the spin is subtle.
But, it seems, effective.
We need to counter this.
And fast.
2 comments:
not only umno and all it's media.. but all politicians in this country should also be blamed for unable to unite all people in this country..
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite - Nelson Mandela
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