Why we need Zahid and his kind

A cheeky look at all the hoo-ha over trivial matters

COMMENT

by Sammy Iskandar

Seputeh MP Teresa Kok is still making a big fuss over a threat to slap her even though the Home Ministry has stated that the government does not consider it a crime.

“A criminal offence can only exist when there is an element of a criminal act (actus reus) and a bad intent (mens rea),” Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said in a written reply delivered in Parliament.

Since Zahid is the Prime Minister’s right-hand man (sorry Muhyiddin) and since he has couched his statement in such impressive legal language, Malaysians have no choice but to agree with him. We must now regard the threat as a trivial matter and condemn Teresa for continuing to politicise it.

In fact, when you stop to think about it, the Malay-Muslim NGOs that are alleged to have made the threat actually did no such thing. They merely offered a reward of RM1,200 to anyone willing to slap Teresa. And, to date, no one has taken up the offer. Perhaps there are serious doubts about the ability of the NGOs to pay up.

Or perhaps the amount is too low when you consider the difficulty of accomplishing the feat. You can’t claim the reward unless you have video proof that your palm actually landed on Teresa’s cheek. Only an expert gymnast will be able to use one hand to administer the slap while the other hand simultaneously presses the record button on the video camera.

A much more serious crime is slapping bottoms, which is quite rampant in this country. Most of us know of at least one police report about it. It implicates a former minister who is no longer in the country.

Anyway, to get back to Teresa, she should refrain from hurling more insults at the Home Ministry over such a trivial matter. The government has already given her enough face by issuing two statements on the issue.

Of course we know the real reason she’s upset is that she has now been charged with sedition over that silly CNY video.

For this,she has only herself to blame. She should have known better than to make fun of the PM and the First Lady, who are both dead serious about good governance. There is simply no room for humour, especially with runaway inflation, uncontrollable foreign debt and the rising cost of jet-setting for the First Couple.

Another grave mistake was to produce the video in Chinese, a language that most Malays don’t understand. No wonder they’re upset. They could not make head or tail of it. Naturally, the only way to interpret it is to consider it as a subtle attempt to insult the Malays, their rulers, their political leaders and their religion.

This suspicion is confirmed by MCA leaders, who have said that the video was indeed insulting to race, religion and royalty. Concerned NGOs then demonstrated their disgust, and the government, ever respectful of public opinion, decided to go ahead with the sedition charge.

No-nonsense leadership

Anyway, the decision to take court action against Teresa is also a trivial matter. After all, the defendant is a member of the opposition. That is what the Sedition Act is for. So Teresa should stop being hysterical about it, especially when she is well aware that even the seizure of Bibles and the threat to burn them are not considered serious enough to warrant investigations.

The Home Ministry has more important things to do, and we should thank God that Zahid is in charge. His no-nonsense leadership should be emulated by other BN leaders.

How could he have risen to be the Number 2 if he were weak like the opposition leaders? Even gangsters keep their distance from him, for he knows them by sight. Quietly but surely, he has neutralised all the potential threats to this country since taking office. Without him, it is doubtful that we would have been able to resolve the Semporna kidnapping, for example.

Every day, we have terrorists trying to take over the country, kidnap our people, annex our states or hijack our planes, and we have Christians trying to take over the nation, install a Christian prime minister and convert everyone to their religion.

Our military chief has also warned of hi-tech cyber attacks that can disable the defence of this country.

Meanwhile, nearly billions of ringgit of Malaysia’s wealth have gone missing, purloined by modern-day pirates who stash them away in out-of-the-way caves they call tax havens.

Zahid has his hands full. That’s why we must thank agencies like Mais and Jakim for taking some of the burden off him.

Jakim has warned of serious threats against Islam by invisible enemies bent on undermining and humiliating the religion. It is precisely because these elusive lunatics are yet to be identified that Jakim cannot loosen its vigilance.

Therefore, instead of condemning, we should be encouraging religious officials when they raid weddings and funerals. Who is to say that depraved criminals bent on fomenting religious strife would not disguise themselves as brides and corpses?

Luckily, some Muslim NGOs have come to the rescue to provide a safety net for the government. The police and the army are over-stretched in their patriotic duty of harassing opposition politicians.

So these NGOs are indeed a blessing and those who speak ill of them are clearly misled.

One example should suffice. The case of the smearing of chicken blood on images of opposition leaders was taken out of context and over-reported by the press. The idea, undoubtedly, was to paint a bad picture of these NGOs.

Investigations showed there were many sides to the story. A plausible one was this: four chickens about to be slaughtered managed to wriggle free and ran like… well… headless chickens into an NGO crowd demonstrating peacefully nearby.

Somehow, the headless chickens collapsed onto some old pictures of DAP leaders, which the party’s workers neglected to take down after the last general election. So there was a bloody mess. Excited rookie reporters had a field day taking pictures and splashing them all over the Internet to taint the reputation of these peaceful NGOs.

Another theory was that it was just a sacrificial ceremony to ensure the demonstration was blessed and not haram.

Anyway, sometime later, another chicken managed to escape with its head intact. It fell into a puddle of red paint left unattended by irresponsible Malaysians and somehow found its way into Teresa’s constituency office, where it collapsed in a pool of blood and red paint.

And, believe it or not, a chicken egg also fell out of nowhere and landed on Teresa’s palm during a handshake.

Such incidents are not as strange as they seem. After all, we are a nation of chicken eaters.

Good laws

So, don’t believe all those things that the opposition blogs say about these NGOs. All Malaysians should support them in all the things they are doing, such as clamouring for the retention of the Sedition Act and ISA. These laws are good for the nation, especially the non-Malays because they are meant for the protection of their rights.

Unity bills proposed as replacement for the Sedition Act will cause more disunity, as Perkasa patron Dr Mahathir Mohamad has said. Pluralism, like liberalism and meritocracy, is a dirty word and should not be part of the Malaysian vocabulary. These concepts can cause racial inequality.

Instead, we should encourage cronyism, which would produce more non-Malay millionaires like Francis Yeoh, who has since apologised for a slip of his tongue.