Armenians, communists and an ignorant Khairy Jamaluddin

At the recent launch of Kua Kia Soong’s book ‘Patriots and Pretenders, PKR vice president N Surendran would give a speech where he compared the current persecution of PAS deputy president Mat Sabu to that suffered by Orhan Pamuk in 1995.

Pamuk, the first Turk to win a Nobel Prize, had stated that up to a million Armenians and Kurds had been killed in Turkey. Outside Turkey, these killings by the Ottoman Empire are historical fact. In Turkey, they are a taboo subject and is denied to this day. Unless you are Orhan Pamuk, a writer who was ranked 4th among the world’s foremost intellectuals.

Pamuk was charged, had the charges dropped, had the charges filed again and was finally convicted with a fine.

Clearly what was referred to in comparing the two cases was the act of persecuting an individual for having a different view or opinion of history than the government wants.

This is precisely what is happening in Mat Sabu’s case. Whether you believe Turks killed Armenians, or who was a hero and who was not in Bukit Kepong, is not the point. We are dealing with the right of an individual to his opinion.

Brash

It was at this point, proving the old adage that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, Khairy Jamaluddin rushed in, accusing Surendran of smoking marijuana and of comparing Mat Sabu to Orhan Pamuk.

These sort of rushes to judgment, poorly-constructed thought processes, lack of knowledge on the subject matter and general accusatory and unconstructive attitudes is symptomatic of BN, their MPs and their Ministers.

And coming from 35-year-old Khairy, who prides himself on his Oxford degree, the flaws are even more glaring. Do politics wreak such havoc on people? Take the way, Khairy seized on a PAS preliminary invitation to debate the Bukit Kepong issue to push himself into the limelight.

On Twitterjaya, for the world to see, Khairy insisted PAS and Mat Sabu were cowards for refusing to debate him, yet the invitation was not as he claimed.

“…we invite you to join our discussion program which we suggest to be held at the end of September. If YB (Khairy) has any other dates as suggestions, we welcome it. …(we suggest) the time to be at 9 pm, at Balai Islam Kota Bharu… sponsored by the Kelantan state government. The other participant, God willing (insyahallah) we are working to get Mat Sabu.

"If you agree we will send the official invitation and the working papers,” PAS leaders read out the e-mail 'invite' to the press to rebut Khairy's claims.

To Khairy, that meant its was Mat Sabu and no other. And when Mat Sabu, who had yet to be informed by his own party, decided to pass the challenge to PAS Youth chief Nasrudin Tantawi, Khairy had a fit! How dare Mat Sabu snub him, the Umno Youth chief and son-in-law of ex-premier Abdullah Badawi?

Trolling low

But why should Mat Sabu troll so low, why shouldn't the PAS No. 2 insist on his counterpart in Umno, the deputy president Muhyiddin Yassin, who incidentally has been significantly quiet on the matter. Who's bacul or coward now?

“This is the work of a soon-to-be-former Umno Youth chief who is looking for a life line to gain publicity. His grassroots support otherwise known as ‘father-in-law’, is deteriorating so he is soon to be a former chief,” said PAS MP for Shah Alam Khalid Samad in a succinct response.

Certainly, the jostling for power by staying in the limelight even if it means mouthing dumb nothings helps to explain the incompetence of the BN administration that is ruining Malaysia today. Five more years of these inept fellows and there may be little left to save.

- Malaysia Chronicle