Former premier and Perkasa patron Mahathir Mohamad turned the gun on his successor Prime Minister Najib Razak, blaming the latter's weak administration for the current spate of religious and racial rows.
But Mahathir's critics pointed out that that the 85-year old was also the inspiration behind many of the nasty outbreaks of bigotry that have further divided the ethnic groups and also deterred foreign investment into the country.
In fact, many had suspected his hand in the latest onslaught against Christians in the country, where the Umno-owned Utusan newspaper had quoted two blogs accusing the DAP of plotting to replace Islam as the official religion with Christianity. One of the blogs is well-known to be closely aligned to him.
But Mahathir feigned ignorance.
“In my time, there was none of this. I got support from all Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, no demands,” Mahathir told reporters on Sunday.
“The government is weak because last time I got two-thirds majority, now there is no two-thirds majority, weak."
DAP leaders have denied the allegations and want the police to probe both Utusan and the bloggers for false reporting.
Don't wish to harm the country
Meanwhile, Mahathir declined to state if he believed if it was true the DAP was eyeing such a move.
“I’m not that interested in bringing up issues concerning religion unless there’s clear proof. If we give responses just like that, it will only end in argument. I haven’t studied it completely, so I don’t want to make statements. I do not want to harm the country with unsubstantiated opinions,” he said.
Utusan had on Saturday front-paged an article entitled Malaysia, a Christian country? based on postings by Big Dog and Marahku blogspots.
The bloggers claim that DAP should be charged with sedition for trying to change the country’s religion so that a Christian prime minister could be installed.
Mahathir had earlier also warned Najib not to call for snap polls until next year as many people still did not understand the "Malaysian situation".
Racist game over, Mahathir
Dr Mahathir Mohamad's 'Malay Dilemma' was an instant hit among the emergent Malay state capitalists in Umno since it provided the instant recipe for them to rally populist support for their bid for power just before May 13, 1969.
It was the time-tested recipe for opportunistic politicians to use 'race' as the rallying cry for political support. Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' was of course the model of such a political route.
Since the demise of Hitler and his race-steeped ideology and the price paid in blood by the freedom loving peoples of the world, racism, racial discrimination and other forms of intolerance have been outlawed in the world community.
If not for the duplicity of the arms-dealing countries that control the world media as well, racism and racial discrimination prevalent in our country would have been exposed long ago. Today, we only hear the occasional grumbles from disgruntled foreign investors who are frustrated by the New Economic Policy.
The very existence of racially-based political parties – Umno, MCA and MIC – is an anachronism way past their sell-by date. Where else in the world today can one find political parties that are restricted to only one race? Politicians from these BN parties – least of all, Dr Mahathir - should be the last to lecture anyone on racism.
Mahathir repeats the lie of 'official' historians that Umno, MCA and MIC came together at Independence because of the failure of multi-ethnic parties. My new book 'A People's History of Merdeka' (to be published this year), using documents from the British archives sets out to demolish this myth and to set the record straight.
For all their faults, at least the DAP, PKR, PAS and other multi-ethnic parties in this country have the courage and the principles to eschew 'race' in their political organization and national policies. Their opportunism in their appeal to voters is a separate question altogether.
It is sad to see Mahathir in his twilight years still clinging to his race-tinged perceptions, waving the keris and being the patron to the far-right Malay-supremacy group Perkasa, oblivious to the intellectual trends since the Age of Enlightenment.
I have always said that we will only truly be a united nation when we ban race-based political parties from our midst and ratify the Convention on the Eradication of racism and Racial Discrimination.
It was the time-tested recipe for opportunistic politicians to use 'race' as the rallying cry for political support. Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' was of course the model of such a political route.
Since the demise of Hitler and his race-steeped ideology and the price paid in blood by the freedom loving peoples of the world, racism, racial discrimination and other forms of intolerance have been outlawed in the world community.
If not for the duplicity of the arms-dealing countries that control the world media as well, racism and racial discrimination prevalent in our country would have been exposed long ago. Today, we only hear the occasional grumbles from disgruntled foreign investors who are frustrated by the New Economic Policy.
The very existence of racially-based political parties – Umno, MCA and MIC – is an anachronism way past their sell-by date. Where else in the world today can one find political parties that are restricted to only one race? Politicians from these BN parties – least of all, Dr Mahathir - should be the last to lecture anyone on racism.
Mahathir repeats the lie of 'official' historians that Umno, MCA and MIC came together at Independence because of the failure of multi-ethnic parties. My new book 'A People's History of Merdeka' (to be published this year), using documents from the British archives sets out to demolish this myth and to set the record straight.
For all their faults, at least the DAP, PKR, PAS and other multi-ethnic parties in this country have the courage and the principles to eschew 'race' in their political organization and national policies. Their opportunism in their appeal to voters is a separate question altogether.
It is sad to see Mahathir in his twilight years still clinging to his race-tinged perceptions, waving the keris and being the patron to the far-right Malay-supremacy group Perkasa, oblivious to the intellectual trends since the Age of Enlightenment.
I have always said that we will only truly be a united nation when we ban race-based political parties from our midst and ratify the Convention on the Eradication of racism and Racial Discrimination.
This can be done through a Race Relations Act and Equal Opportunities Commission. It would be the mother of all transformations!
It is time Malaysians told racists in our midst: “The game's over.”
As someone has said, “Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.”
It is time Malaysians told racists in our midst: “The game's over.”
As someone has said, “Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.”
In his essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," the French philosopher Albert Camus depicted suicide as an abdication of one's responsibility to confront the absurdities, disappointments and frustrations that accompany human existence. Our inherent freedom, Camus believed, confronts us continually with the question of whether life is worth living. To answer in the negative is to reject that freedom.
What, then, are we to make of those who commit suicide in the name of freedom? I do not, of course, include suicide bombers in this category, since their purpose is to kill others in a method of murder which necessitates their own death. I am thinking of those who take only their own lives as a political act.
I am thinking of such individuals as Jan Palach, the Prague student who, in 1969, set fire to himself in public to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that crushed a brief flourish of political freedom the year before. I am thinking, too, of Szmuel Zygielbojm, an exiled Polish Jewish activist who, in protest at Allied indifference to the Holocaust, gassed himself in his dingy London flat in 1943. More recently, and far more obviously, there is the example of the young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation has entered the popular imagination as the trigger for the current revolutionary upheavals across the Arab world.
And then there is the subject of this article, an Iranian intellectual who chose suicide on April 29 by throwing himself from the balcony of his Tehran apartment. His name, well-known to those who follow the struggle for human rights in Iran, but with nowhere near the mass recognition of a Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel, was Siamak Pourzand.
Unlike the three previous examples I gave of political suicide, in which those who died were either young (Palach was 20, Bouazizi was 26) or in middle age (Zygielbojm was 48) the 80-year-old Pourzand was clearly in his final years. A prominent journalist and critic before the Islamist seizure of power in 1979, he had endured more than three decades of vicious harassment at the hands of the regime, including kidnapping by the security police and several years in the regime's notorious Evin Prison, an incarceration that catastrophically impacted his personal health. Somehow, he managed to evade the sentence of execution that is imposed with gruesome regularity -- three hundred in the last year alone -- upon the regime's domestic opponents.
After all that suffering, why did Pourzand, one of Iran's great men of letters, a one-timecontributor to the prestigious French journal of film criticism, Cahiers du Cinema, pass the death sentence on himself? We will never know the answer, although we can glimpse the tortured thoughts swirling through his head in this achingly beautiful tribute by his daughter, Azadeh:
I heard you grabbed onto the edge of the balcony for a second before finally letting go. Is it because you were regretting having jumped down the balcony? Or is it because for a second, you thought you heard me knocking on the door? The thought of you holding on to the edge of that balcony for a second before you let death take over is killing me, like a sharp thorn it is penetrating my eyes.I miss you so much, Dad. I have been missing you for years. But, at least I could pick up the phone and hear your voice every day. But now what? Who is going to call me and leave those silly and funny messages for me every day? Who? Are you really gone? I cannot believe it. Did this really happen? Did you really throw yourself off that window? What went through your mind when you threw yourself off the 6th floor and floated in the air until that damn moment when you let the earth kiss your head? Did you think of us? Did you send me a goodbye kiss? I think I felt something on my cheek some time that night. Was it you? Was it? Tell me it was.
In an earlier passage, Azadeh declared:
I don't blame you, not even for one second. You had all the rights to seek freedom this way. Just know that the thought of your shattered head on that ground, your beautiful smile and all the things you have ever told me are both making me stay strong and die a hard death every second right now.
There's that word: freedom. The only thing we can know with certainty is that Pourzand chose to end his life. So was this desperate act of an elderly defeated man who could take no more? Or will Siamak Pourzand be remembered as Iran's own Jan Palach: a man who committed suicide not during the first hopeful flushes of democratic protest in 2009, but, in the manner of his Czech counterpart, two years later, when the deadly weight of Iran's regime seemed immovable, yet was eventually overturned?
As Albert Camus might have argued, the resolution of that dilemma lies in the realm of human freedom. Specifically, in the Iranian people again finding the strength and confidence to overcome the fear that the regime, in order to maintain power, methodically engineers throughout their society.
I am not naive enough to believe that international solidarity alone will spur the Iranians to renewed action. At the same time, the knowledge that ordinary people around the world identified with them was, as Vaclav Havel and others have testified, an enormous boost to the Czech dissidents who carried Jan Palach's legacy. Siamak Pourzand's inheritors are no less worthy.
In his essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," the French philosopher Albert Camus depicted suicide as an abdication of one's responsibility to confront the absurdities, disappointments and frustrations that accompany human existence. Our inherent freedom, Camus believed, confronts us continually with the question of whether life is worth living. To answer in the negative is to reject that freedom.
What, then, are we to make of those who commit suicide in the name of freedom? I do not, of course, include suicide bombers in this category, since their purpose is to kill others in a method of murder which necessitates their own death. I am thinking of those who take only their own lives as a political act.
I am thinking of such individuals as Jan Palach, the Prague student who, in 1969, set fire to himself in public to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that crushed a brief flourish of political freedom the year before. I am thinking, too, of Szmuel Zygielbojm, an exiled Polish Jewish activist who, in protest at Allied indifference to the Holocaust, gassed himself in his dingy London flat in 1943. More recently, and far more obviously, there is the example of the young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation has entered the popular imagination as the trigger for the current revolutionary upheavals across the Arab world.
And then there is the subject of this article, an Iranian intellectual who chose suicide on April 29 by throwing himself from the balcony of his Tehran apartment. His name, well-known to those who follow the struggle for human rights in Iran, but with nowhere near the mass recognition of a Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel, was Siamak Pourzand.
Unlike the three previous examples I gave of political suicide, in which those who died were either young (Palach was 20, Bouazizi was 26) or in middle age (Zygielbojm was 48) the 80-year-old Pourzand was clearly in his final years. A prominent journalist and critic before the Islamist seizure of power in 1979, he had endured more than three decades of vicious harassment at the hands of the regime, including kidnapping by the security police and several years in the regime's notorious Evin Prison, an incarceration that catastrophically impacted his personal health. Somehow, he managed to evade the sentence of execution that is imposed with gruesome regularity -- three hundred in the last year alone -- upon the regime's domestic opponents.
After all that suffering, why did Pourzand, one of Iran's great men of letters, a one-timecontributor to the prestigious French journal of film criticism, Cahiers du Cinema, pass the death sentence on himself? We will never know the answer, although we can glimpse the tortured thoughts swirling through his head in this achingly beautiful tribute by his daughter, Azadeh:
I heard you grabbed onto the edge of the balcony for a second before finally letting go. Is it because you were regretting having jumped down the balcony? Or is it because for a second, you thought you heard me knocking on the door? The thought of you holding on to the edge of that balcony for a second before you let death take over is killing me, like a sharp thorn it is penetrating my eyes.I miss you so much, Dad. I have been missing you for years. But, at least I could pick up the phone and hear your voice every day. But now what? Who is going to call me and leave those silly and funny messages for me every day? Who? Are you really gone? I cannot believe it. Did this really happen? Did you really throw yourself off that window? What went through your mind when you threw yourself off the 6th floor and floated in the air until that damn moment when you let the earth kiss your head? Did you think of us? Did you send me a goodbye kiss? I think I felt something on my cheek some time that night. Was it you? Was it? Tell me it was.
In an earlier passage, Azadeh declared:
I don't blame you, not even for one second. You had all the rights to seek freedom this way. Just know that the thought of your shattered head on that ground, your beautiful smile and all the things you have ever told me are both making me stay strong and die a hard death every second right now.
There's that word: freedom. The only thing we can know with certainty is that Pourzand chose to end his life. So was this desperate act of an elderly defeated man who could take no more? Or will Siamak Pourzand be remembered as Iran's own Jan Palach: a man who committed suicide not during the first hopeful flushes of democratic protest in 2009, but, in the manner of his Czech counterpart, two years later, when the deadly weight of Iran's regime seemed immovable, yet was eventually overturned?
As Albert Camus might have argued, the resolution of that dilemma lies in the realm of human freedom. Specifically, in the Iranian people again finding the strength and confidence to overcome the fear that the regime, in order to maintain power, methodically engineers throughout their society.
I am not naive enough to believe that international solidarity alone will spur the Iranians to renewed action. At the same time, the knowledge that ordinary people around the world identified with them was, as Vaclav Havel and others have testified, an enormous boost to the Czech dissidents who carried Jan Palach's legacy. Siamak Pourzand's inheritors are no less worthy.
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