God-given powers?

Extract from TMI - Forget hudud, look into economy, Kelantan folk tell PAS

TMI photo

As the Kelantan government prepares to debate amendments to its Shariah laws this Wednesday to again pave the way for the reintroduction of hudud, the spotlight has been cast again on this conservative Malay heartland. [...]

But against the backdrop of an increasingly uncertain national economic outlook and the fallout from one of Kelantan’s worst floods in modern history, more local Kelantan folk are calling for their leaders – and the rest of the country – to shift their focus from hudud to bread-and-butter issues. [...]

While life in sleepy Kota Baru appears to have returned to normal, there are still signs of December’s disastrous floods at every corner, from the muddy watermark stains on the walls of shophouses and homes, to the reduced supply of food items such as fish and certain vegetables.

“The suffering from the floods this time has affected everyone,” said Rosnita Nordin, a retired civil servant who was spending her weekend morning shopping at the local market in Kota Baru.

“Already the prices for fish have gone up because so many of our fishermen have lost their boats and their homes. There’s a bit of uncertainty on how things will be in the future,” she said.

Economic and infrastructure development, or the lack of it, has always been one of the fiercest points of contention against PAS rule.

Instead of focusing on the priorities of economics and livelihood of the rakyat, why is PAS still so bent on the issue of hudud?

Will that bring an immediate relief to economic and livelihood problems? If PAS believes it can, pray let us know how and by when?

Will that bring an immediate end to corruption and injustice? No need for PAS to answer, because we can see the opposite effect in hudud-ruled nations.

Or is the truth more about a fiercer (and thus more effective) form of control over the masses?

For answer, read extracts of Malay Mail Online's ‘Arrogant’ JAWI again renews pursuit of Borders manager

Aside from the continuing its years-long prosecution of her, Chief Sharie Prosecutor (KPS) Mohamad Adib Husain also took the unusual step of serving the notice of the appeal directly to Nik Raina at her place of work in the Mid Valley shopping mall.

"Last Friday, I received notice that the Ketua Pendakwa Syarie (KPS) has appealed to the Shariah Appeal Court against the order of discharge not amounting to acquittal (DNAA) granted by the Shariah High Court."The KPS served the notice of appeal at Borders Gardens ignoring the fact that my firm LHAG (Lee Hishammuddin Allen & Gledhill) are solicitors on record. The KPS breached the rule that they should not communicate with my clients directly," Nik Raina’s lawyer, Rosli Dahlan, told Malay Mail Online when contacted.

According to the lawyer, JAWI's actions showed "arrogance" in deliberately wanting to intimidate Nik Raina by serving the notice directly to the bookstore manager instead of the lawyers representing her in the case.

"To intimidate", that's why!

A couple of years back, I wrote the following lines:

Quite frankly, I have never heard of any theocratic state which has shown itself to be tolerant, balanced or compassionate, not even in medieval theocratic (Buddhist) Tibet.

Invariably, lowly educated or/and young clerics and religious enforcement officers, given almost unrestrained powers, would sense an uncontrollable compulsion to prohibit, persecute (not prosecute, though that'd come subsequently), and punish - if anything, just to show their powers, and to invoke fears (which they possibly mistake for respect).

Yes, those clerics love to invoke fears, either by using god's name or by using state sanctioned religious laws!



This was amply and notoriously demonstrated in the infamous raid of Zouk nightclub by JAWI officers some years back, where and when we witnessed how supposedly trained JAWI religious officers behaved like savage predators. 

Some people just cannot handle power, and as I have just mentioned, would feel an overriding compulsive and sometimes addictive need to exercise or rather, abuse that power.

And that’s exactly what occurred at the Zouk nightclub, where a religious departmental campaign to curb or stop un-Islamic, un-Malaysian behaviour, or that viewed as offensive to Asian values, degenerated into a disgraceful un-Islamic show of unfettered power and oppressive dominance by empowered officials.

Instead of counselling those young (and supposedly) social degenerates, the JAWI officials were the social degenerates themselves, who exploited their position of religious power to humiliate and terrorize the victims.





Those co-called moral police immorally forced the young sweeties caught in the nightclub to urinate right in the open in front of their hot, hungry, lustful and ogling eyes.

But I wonder whether we could still argue in the favour of those religious department officers by claiming they were diligently scrutinizing those young wayward women for any signs of deviant behaviour, for example, like peeing while standing up.

As one observer SI Azhar commented angrily to BBC:

"If the reports were true, the officers [who] committed those acts were no better than hypocrites, trying to uphold good values of Islam but themselves never follow[ing] it. You have ashamed us fellow Malays and Muslims. Just tell me, how can we encourage non-Muslims to embrace Islam with this kind of attitude?!"

The BBC report also informed us:

... allegations have surfaced about misconduct by Malaysia's religious police during a raid on a top Kuala Lumpur nightclub last month.

More than 100 plainclothes officers from the Federal Territories Islamic Department (JAWI) detained young Muslims at the Zouk nightclub.

Female detainees complained of sexual harassment by officers and the incident has led to a heated debate about the department's future.

Eyewitnesses have now told the BBC that officers assaulted and severely beat members of the club's staff.

The sources also said that non-Muslim patrons, including tourists, who were outside the officers' jurisdiction, also reported being threatened with violence.

"Up to 150 of them came in," one witness said. "They didn't identify themselves, they didn't show any ID cards. They just forced their way in and started pushing people around."

In the days after the raid it emerged that dozens of young women were held for up to 10 hours without access to a toilet, long after male detainees had been released.

A number of women said religious officers ordered them to pose in their nightclub outfits while others were asked lewd questions about their genitalia. [...]

Their barbaric bad behaviour is guaranteed to happen again because the system provides near unbridled power to officials but who lack knowledge in depth, intellectual capacity or good character to handle such authority.

Abuses are likely to occur when power is not moderated by knowledgeable and scrupulous responsibility.

Thus the problem lies in the unauthorized and abusive exercise of power by those in authority on their unfortunate victims, namely, the power to religiously-legally dominate the victims, to make them do what the authority so desires, sometimes to stretch the exercise of power as far as the oppressors' imagination permits.

Recall the Gombak case in 2006 - we read in NST about the lustful leery lascivious behaviour of a Jais officer who caught an unfortunate woman for khalwat.

The poor sweetie had gone to Jais office in Gombak the day after her embarrassing encounter with Jais, in a vain hope to 'settle' the case amicably. However, she claimed she got more than she bargained for.

She was molested and forced to perform oral sex on said Jais officer as an inducement to let her off the hook. She also alleged the officer used criminal force to outrage her modesty by caressing her breasts and kissing her on the lips.

So much for these 'warriors' of Islam who had on a number of occasions resorted to violence even on minor infringements such as khalwat - read this. Obviously those officers love to flex their muscles.

Hence it isn't too surprising after all that we see the current persistent harassment of Nik Raina of Borders.

In January 2009, when Lim Guan Eng was in Kuala Terengganu to campaign for PAS in a by-election, he was grilled by reporters on the hudud issue.





According to Malaysiakini’s Hadi, Guan Eng grilled over hudud, Lim Guan Eng firmly asserted:

"If any problems occur, we will resolve it through musyawarah, that is through discussions. All three parties must hold discussions and if a consensus is not reached, it must be discussed again.”

"This means, should PKR and PAS agree to implement hudud and DAP disagrees then it cannot be implemented. Everything must be discussed until all three parties agree.”

But Malaysiakini's journalist Andrew Ong pointed out, that as Lim GE talked for 5 minutes on the Pakatan agreement for consensus before implementation of hudud, Pak Haji Hadi Awang was noticeably uncomfortable.

[Was he squirming or rolling eyes or sneering? Wakakaka]

Andrew said the all too obvious body language forced Terengganu PAS chief Mustafa Ali to leap in to salvage the situation. Mustafa stated that hudud was not an issue in the Kuala Terengganu by-election as the results would not have any impact on the state or federal government.





That was then, but what about now?

As I had blogged in Anwar Ibrahim misleading on PAS hudud intention, Karpal Singh was less than impressed by Anwar's assurance to the non-Muslim voters in Kuala Terengganu that there was no need to reject the hudud proposal as it was only applicable to Muslims. He had also glibly dismissed Karpal’s remark that the PAS' proposed legislation was unconstitutional.

But we then read in Malaysiakini's Karpal: Anwar's statement on hudud misleading that Bhai shot down Anwar’s statement as a fallacy! In other words, it was Grade 1 bull!

I recall before the demise of Lim Kean Siew, the well-known Labour Party politician and subsequently MCA leader, he remarked with a cynical laugh about (perhaps even sneered at) MCA’s ignorance on the significance of Dr Mahathir proclaiming Malaysia as an Islamic nation, stating (words to the effect, that’s the best I can do) “they don’t know what an Islamic nation means, and just what they are getting into!”


Lim Kean Siew

So, MCA has been just as culpable and complicit in Dr Mahathir’s Islamic Malaysia, and thus in no f* position to point any finger at anyone, until it does so at itself, first!

But we should consider PAS' hudud intent as a blessing in disguise because it has revealed to us the intent and impulse of an increasingly arrogant PAS.

Perhaps like the scorpion, it has decided to sting its carriage across the river BUT before even the ferrying has begun, let alone reaching the other shore.

'Tis its 3-P nature, that of Prohibit, Persecute and Punish.