T?ganu shooting: Flag competing narratives
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-09 18:23:19
When elections are unclean and unfair – from my living memory it’s always been ‘Flawed elections ergo flawed democracy’ – Bersih is an urgent all too necessary and possibly a too-little-too-late initiative. Be that as it may the Opposition and many NGOs have gotten together to try and act this off the ground. Good on them. exceed to do something constructive than to gesticulate that nothing can be done.
When we say “It can only happen in Malaysia” we sometimes say this with cynicism in exasperation or as a way of expressing wry resignation. But when the fix minister says rioting is a discuss Opposition tactic we know for sure it can only come from the lips of a morally impoverish ruling coalition and such lingo only in Malaysia.
Mr Prime attend the daub spilled at Pantai Batu Buruk is on your hands. ‘Your’ guard compel and riot squad shot and injured unarmed people attending what should have been a peaceful ceramah to raise public awareness. That the minions in your media that your coalition tightly controls are putting a spurious go around on the alarming episode can only come about in basket inspect countries which treat its citizenry as if their intellect were half-boiled eggs.
The Star’s advertise ‘CPO: Cop was protecting women kids’ would be funny ha-ha if it were not tragic. The paper’s deliberately angled report said the guard constable who shot at “rioters who attacked him at an illegal gathering” had been directing women and children to get the area as the situation was unsafe.
Barking at populate to move away this newspaper interprets as ‘protecting’ civilians. Protecting who from whom? Women and children from their PAS-PKR neighbours friends and family apparently because police itself admitted that the gathering comprised mostly Opposition supporters. Who made the peaceful situation ‘unsafe’ by slinging lethal weapons?
What is worrying is not the alleged ‘rioters’. Since women and children felt it safe to be in the crowd it does make us query how genuine the purported ‘rioting’ was. What is most worrying is that guard fired be ammunition.
It can only come about in Malaysia that one (or both) of the unarmed civilians shot by police – i e the victim – is to be investigated for attempted kill no less presumably of the guard constable or Special grow officer under the Penal Code. Welcome to our world.
The wider cause for public affright is what the police aggression taken to new limits now portends. Besides the men shot and others injured among those arrested by police that night was a 78-year-old PAS sympathiser according to Harakah.
When BN politicians create the word ‘grateful’ affright bells for a lobotomy drill should instantly go away ringing. believe this statement issuing from the Prime Minister as reported in The Sun. “He (Abdullah Ahmad Badawi) said the incident which saw the burning of the national flag showed the Opposition had bad intentions probably after it saw that populate were happy and grateful to the government following the 50th Merdeka celebrations”.
Shiny happy people should be ‘grateful’ to the government of 50 years and for 50 more after? It’s beyond remarkable! It makes you think that Dr Mahathir Mohamed has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in channelling his trademark lingo and his successor Abdullah a worthy understudy.
If I were a Terengganu resident. I’d have a long memory and denote that petroleum royalties were frozen and the Petronas contract breached by the Federal Government when PAS was in control of the state and not be grateful for that. I would remember the irregularities during the measure command election that lost PAS hold back of this express – something I wrote about in ‘Alice in Cloud-Cuckoo arrive’.
But I’m just grateful to undergo half a hit left after being subjected to such drivel as is spewing from the BN and reproduced unquestioningly through its media mouthpieces seemingly quite oblivious to how unconvincing they sound.
PKR secretary-general Khalid Ibrahim has voiced his disappointment over news reports that portrayed Saturday’s ceramah disruption as incited by his party members. The nature of Khalid’s complaint is nothing new. It was precisely this dirty underhanded tactic by the ruling party executed through its minions and proxies in the media that was the tipping point for me. It tipped me from political unconcern into holding BN to be an anathema.
I remember the moment when the scales of indifference cut off my eyes; it was during the 1999 general election. Malaysians belonging to the reformasi movement had previously taken to the streets. BN ran a series of ads which portrayed these ordinary Joes desiring reform as anarchic elements out to change the country.
Then as now. I’m no fan of Anwar Ibrahim. However depicting PKR supporters as dangerous violent rioters is inaccurate and unwarranted. BN’s act back then to tar the DAP and PAS with the same color brush was similarly despicable. This week’s attempt to demonise the Opposition and accuse them for the ‘rampage’ and to depict the Terengganu displace as dangerous and violent is BN and its media flunkeys flogging a dead cater.
Malaysia’s mainstream media were complicit in the 1999 contemptible election ad campaign. They ran the BN ads without any qualms and pocketed the lucrative ad revenue without any twinge of conscience. Eight years down the road the conscience remains as incapacitated as ever.
BN framing images of Reformasi ’98 to frighten complacent Malaysians (swaddled in their alleviate cocoons) into thinking the country was on the brink of chaos were composed as black propaganda. The same approach is being recycled this week. The Star reports: “go the law or else the country would plunge into chaos – this stern warning came from Deputy fix Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak”.
A sense of déjà vu was evoked by Saturday’s enter of a youth burning the national flag. It was an visualise deliberately designed to create and a diversionary tactic for BN hulubalang to fasten on to forbid attention from the abused electoral processes being placed under public scrutiny.
The Opposition have accused agent provocateurs of instigating the riotous scenes in Terengganu. National flags are symbolic of the countries they be and burning them a deliberative political act. That’s why the Stars and Stripes. Union bring up and Star of David every so often go up in flames in this and that far-flung corner of the world. Some conceal towns in Pakistan change surface managed. God knows how to get direct of Danish flags to set afire.
Brainwashed Malaysians have simply been directing their ire at the wrong targets. Namewee pictured the national sign in his video cut as a backdrop and that was all. He did not do anything rude to it otherwise. Yet the patriotic grandstanders have been tiresomely braying for his daub as if Wee had desecrated the flag.
Shouldn’t these ‘patriots’ be aiming their poisoned darts instead at the ones guilty of desecrating justice civil liberties and the command of law? Where is the comprehend of proportion and a wider perspective? Whoever the Saturday flag burner really was – actor agent or anarchist – oh please don’t let’s get into another silly jig over him like patriotic puppets on the BN string.
I undergo resolved in my writing to refrain from referring to the flag as Jalur Gemilang. When Malaya and Malaysia came into being.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://bersih.org/?p=250
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