TIME'S UP, Chua Soi Lek

Announcing the expiry of its one-week deadline for MCA president Chua Soi Lek to apologise over his anti-PAS remarks bordering on Islamophobia, PAS Youth said today it was going ahead with the plan to organise a rally to deliver a memorandum to the Agong.

On October 24, some 200 people comprising representatives of PAS's Ulama and Youth wings, PKR Youth and Muslim NGOs gathered at the MCA headquarters in Kuala Lumpur to voice out against the party's continued attacks on Islamic values.

A memorandum was also sent to the party, giving its president seven days to apologise to Muslims over a spate of statements denigrating the Islamic value-system.

"We feel the memorandum was simply 'trashed' him and the MCA leadership," said PAS Youth secretary Khairul Faizi Ahmad Kamil.

Khairul added that the wing will go ahead with its plan for a mammoth rally at the National Palace in Jalan Duta to hand over a memorandum to the Agong in his capacity as head of the federal religion.

"It is time that the Yang Di Pertuan Agong be informed of MCA's continous insults on Islam," he said.

Chua and top MCA leaders have been on a warpath with PAS by launching an attack on Islamic criminal law proposed by PAS in Kelantan, in what is seen as the Chinese-only party's bid to regain lost support among Malaysian Chinese. The party hoped that raising the spectre of an Islamic state in the event of Pakatan Rakyat's victory at the coming polls would prevent them from voting for the coalition.

Chua had also earned condemnations for defending a statement by his party's women wing that Tuan Guru Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat encouraged rape of non-Muslim women, citing an advice by the Kelantan Menteri Besar in 2008 that Muslim women abide by the Islamic dress code and not dress provocatively, as part of measures to fight rape.

-Harakahdaily