I THANK all for their views as to what I should do after my retirement from frontline DAP leadership.
I may be anti-Hadi unless the PAS president Tan Sri Hadi Awang changes his ways but to call me anti-Islam and promoting Islamophobia is like calling Saudi Arabia anti-Islam and promoting Islamophobia for banning him and likening him to a terrorist.
I still remember Hadi slamming Saudi Arabia five years ago as among the Gulf states like Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain for believing more in Zionists than in Allah and Islam when the quartet of Gulf States added the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) to its terror list.
I do not regard Hadi as a terrorist but he seems to suffer from intellectual inadequacies if he regarded my suggestion that PAS should join Prime Minister (PM) Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s unity government as not a personal view but an official invitation from the DAP or that from the Anwar unity government itself.
His silence to the three proposals I had laid down for PAS to join the Anwar unity government show that he is not prepared to be a responsible, honest and respected Islamic leader.
I also noted Hadi’s attack yesterday (May 31) whereby he accused DAP of being a purveyor of secularism through the “Malaysian Malaysia” concept, but I merely want to point out that the first and the third PM of Malaysia – Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Hussein Onn – had stressed that Malaysia should not be turned into an Islamic state.
I do not want to be a person who makes wild and preposterous allegations and when challenged is unable to present an iota of evidence to substantiate the allegations or self-invite to join a government.
In a Facebook post yesterday, Hadi said that non-Muslims’ well-being will be threatened if they “cross the line” in their behaviour towards Muslims in Malaysia. He further noted that DAP has been nothing but a nuisance to a country ever since the party was founded and has “gone too far”.
I believe that no race or religion is under threat – not Islam or any other of the great religions of the world which have found a home in Malaysia.
But there are extremists who want the people to believe that a race or a religion is under threat by other races and religions, and this is why they are opposed to the objective to make Malaysia a role model to the world of inter-ethnic, inter-religious, inter-cultural and inter-civilisation dialogue, understanding, tolerance or harmony.
For Malaysia to be a role model for the world of inter-ethnic, inter-religious, inter-cultural and inter-civilisation dialogue, understanding, tolerance and harmony, there must unity and moderation among Malaysians, regardless of race, religion or region.
In the campaign for a reset and return to the original nation-building principles for a plural Malaysia (included in the ranks were the first three PMs of Malaysia who were UMNO presidents), we must not allow words to lose all meaning where extremism is regarded as “moderate” and being “moderate” becomes “extremism”.
Malaysia is now faced with a choice of destiny – whether Malaysians regardless of race, religion or region unite as Malaysians while retaining their separate ethnic and religious identities to become a first-rate world-class nation or we continue with our national decline to end up as a divided, failed, rogue and kleptocratic state in the next few decades.
This is why Malaysia needs Anwar as the 10th PM not only for the next five years but for the next 10 years. – June 1, 2023
