Desperate people resort to desperate measures. Desperate ailments require desperate remedies.
But what could be the antidote for the ‘Blame Anwar' psychosis presently afflicting Umno and its media cohort?
Barely can a thing come dramatically unstuck or go disastrously wrong than the blame for it is placed at the Pakatan Rakyat supremo's door.
Things have gotten to the stage where the reflexive faulting of Anwar for whatever is misbegotten in Malaysia has become a sick joke.
Anwar must feel like the humourist Groucho Marx who said of a book he had received: "From the moment I received your book till I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
An Anwar reworking of this quip: "From the moment I heard my adversaries' accusations against me, I was suffused with laughter. Some day I intend to reply to them."
But a reformist aspirant to high political office like Anwar cannot afford the luxury of laughter nor of benign forbearance in a culture where not all voters have ready access to an array of media, some of which are fettered and others not.
In these straits, levity and fortitude on the part of the accused can be manipulated to seem like presumed guilt.
Anwar has to repel the attacks on his credit off his front foot rather than defensively parry them off the back. Expect then a flurry of explanatory statements and the filing of legal suits.
But the ‘Blame Anwar' psychosis has come to acquire a baleful momentum such that livid rebuttals and legal reprisals can only dent - not halt - the madding crowd.
It is a frightful affliction to be sure, disfiguring its perpetrators and their media apparatus to such an extent that it seems like a version of the screaming hysteria that rural maidens who come to work in industrial estates have been known to be prone to.
This mania has reached farcical extents with the opposition leader being linked to the incursion into Lahad Datu in Sabah by supposed legatees of the Sulu sultanate that has now resulted in 14 deaths, with two fatalities to our security forces.
Another six members of our security forces were killed yesterday in Semporna, in a skirmish with another band of intruders who suffered six dead.
What Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein (centre in photo) made out to be a little local difficulty in the eastern flank of Sabah has metastasised in a matter of weeks into the bloodiest skirmish on Malaysian soil since the Memali incident in Baling, Kedah, in November 1985 in which 14 followers of religious teacher Ibrahim Libya were killed, with four deaths to the raiding police party.
Anwar, too, blamed for instant citizens
If Umno's rabid mouthpiece Utusan Malaysia, and its electronic media poodle, TV3, are to be believed, the opposition leader is somehow connected to the machinations of present-day claimants of a Sulu inheritance to parts of Sabah.
In the early days of the Sulu intruders' incursion into Lahad Datu, one needn't have resorted to gazing at a crystal ball to predict that if things would come to a bloody pass, blame would be apportioned and Anwar would be fair game.
Some time ago, PKR deputy president Azmin Ali traced the outlines of this ‘Blame Anwar' psychosis when he predicted that the opposition leader would be held responsible for the citizenship-for-votes scam that the royal commission of inquiry into Sabah's illegals migrants had begun to unfold in January.
Azmin made that prediction after a couple of weeks of the RCI's unwinding of the revelatory spool concerning the legalisation of illegal migrants in Sabah that began a long time ago and spiked sharply in the immediate prelude to the state and parliamentary elections of 1994 and 1995 respectively.
At that time, Umno was gunning to topple Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) from its precarious perch on top of Sabah's political pecking order.
True enough, when ongoing revelations from the RCI strongly suggested that the trail of responsibility for the scam led to former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's office, the old dervish himself jumped up to finger Anwar as having been complicit. Anwar vigorously disavowed any connection to the scam.
A month ago, the parliamentary opposition leader mirthfully swatted at the accusations that had accumulated into a shoal, including responsibility for Israeli incursions in the Syrian civil war, as indicative of his adversaries having come off their hinges.
One supposes that so long as his supporters attribute to him a Herculean capability at cleansing Malaysia's Augean stables, it does not matter much if his enemies see in him the opposite: a satanically protean capacity for the bad.
But what could be the antidote for the ‘Blame Anwar' psychosis presently afflicting Umno and its media cohort?
Barely can a thing come dramatically unstuck or go disastrously wrong than the blame for it is placed at the Pakatan Rakyat supremo's door.
Things have gotten to the stage where the reflexive faulting of Anwar for whatever is misbegotten in Malaysia has become a sick joke.
Anwar must feel like the humourist Groucho Marx who said of a book he had received: "From the moment I received your book till I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."An Anwar reworking of this quip: "From the moment I heard my adversaries' accusations against me, I was suffused with laughter. Some day I intend to reply to them."
But a reformist aspirant to high political office like Anwar cannot afford the luxury of laughter nor of benign forbearance in a culture where not all voters have ready access to an array of media, some of which are fettered and others not.
In these straits, levity and fortitude on the part of the accused can be manipulated to seem like presumed guilt.
Anwar has to repel the attacks on his credit off his front foot rather than defensively parry them off the back. Expect then a flurry of explanatory statements and the filing of legal suits.
But the ‘Blame Anwar' psychosis has come to acquire a baleful momentum such that livid rebuttals and legal reprisals can only dent - not halt - the madding crowd.
It is a frightful affliction to be sure, disfiguring its perpetrators and their media apparatus to such an extent that it seems like a version of the screaming hysteria that rural maidens who come to work in industrial estates have been known to be prone to.
This mania has reached farcical extents with the opposition leader being linked to the incursion into Lahad Datu in Sabah by supposed legatees of the Sulu sultanate that has now resulted in 14 deaths, with two fatalities to our security forces.
Another six members of our security forces were killed yesterday in Semporna, in a skirmish with another band of intruders who suffered six dead.What Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein (centre in photo) made out to be a little local difficulty in the eastern flank of Sabah has metastasised in a matter of weeks into the bloodiest skirmish on Malaysian soil since the Memali incident in Baling, Kedah, in November 1985 in which 14 followers of religious teacher Ibrahim Libya were killed, with four deaths to the raiding police party.
Anwar, too, blamed for instant citizens
If Umno's rabid mouthpiece Utusan Malaysia, and its electronic media poodle, TV3, are to be believed, the opposition leader is somehow connected to the machinations of present-day claimants of a Sulu inheritance to parts of Sabah.
In the early days of the Sulu intruders' incursion into Lahad Datu, one needn't have resorted to gazing at a crystal ball to predict that if things would come to a bloody pass, blame would be apportioned and Anwar would be fair game.
Some time ago, PKR deputy president Azmin Ali traced the outlines of this ‘Blame Anwar' psychosis when he predicted that the opposition leader would be held responsible for the citizenship-for-votes scam that the royal commission of inquiry into Sabah's illegals migrants had begun to unfold in January.
Azmin made that prediction after a couple of weeks of the RCI's unwinding of the revelatory spool concerning the legalisation of illegal migrants in Sabah that began a long time ago and spiked sharply in the immediate prelude to the state and parliamentary elections of 1994 and 1995 respectively.
At that time, Umno was gunning to topple Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) from its precarious perch on top of Sabah's political pecking order.
True enough, when ongoing revelations from the RCI strongly suggested that the trail of responsibility for the scam led to former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's office, the old dervish himself jumped up to finger Anwar as having been complicit. Anwar vigorously disavowed any connection to the scam.A month ago, the parliamentary opposition leader mirthfully swatted at the accusations that had accumulated into a shoal, including responsibility for Israeli incursions in the Syrian civil war, as indicative of his adversaries having come off their hinges.
One supposes that so long as his supporters attribute to him a Herculean capability at cleansing Malaysia's Augean stables, it does not matter much if his enemies see in him the opposite: a satanically protean capacity for the bad.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.
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