PAS president Tan Sri Abdul Hadi Awang has rejected the possibility that the party joining the unity government under the leadership of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
Hadi said this in a clapback at UMNO secretary-general Datuk Dr Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki who had claimed earlier that the Islamist party could “purify” UMNO if PAS decided to join the unity government.
“You can see the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government, who is in it… How do you expect it to be pure? There are convicts, there are those who were previously accused of committing corruption, there are court clusters… How can we follow them?
“If we want to clean the filth, we cannot enter a container filled with filth,” he retorted at a press conference after the opening ceremony of the 69th PAS Congress at IDCC Shah Alam in Selangor today (Oct 20).
The “prisoner” mentioned by Hadi is believed to refer to Anwar himself who was once imprisoned for sodomy offences before being pardoned by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong in 2018.
Meanwhile, the “court cluster” is presumably the group of UMNO leaders who were charged with corruption when PH and Bersatu formed the government in 2018 under the leadership of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
In a post on Facebook earlier, Asyraf had cynically said that UMNO would once again be “purified” if PAS was to join the unity government.
Asyraf listed many “benefits” if PAS was to join the unity government, saying there will no longer be anymore “fatwas” or speeches from PAS leaders and supporters criticising any parties especially those whose ideologies differ from theirs.
He also said there will be no more issues about Islam being threatened or Malays being threatened, and neither will there be any more uses of derogatory terms, as well as labels such as “sesat” (deviant), “kafir” (infidel) and “munafik” (religious hypocrite) when they become “friends” again as how they were during the 22 months when both parties were part of Muafakat Nasional and “penyatuan ummah” (Muslim unity).
“There will also be no more parties in the government coalition with Malay Muslim members such as UMNO, Amanah and PKR that would be called a ‘DAP lackey’ or a ‘DAP bootlicker’,” he said. – Oct 20, 2023
Main pic credit: Malay Mail
