If Kelantan can have alcohol, why can’t MAS?

MAS serving alcohol seems to be a issue to PAS, but the government in Kota Baru collects alcohol revenue.

COMMENT

It’s not uncommon for people to be fixated on vices they’ve been denied.

So we must forgive our friends in PAS, who recently protested the availability of alcohol on MAS flights because, as everyone knows, serving alcohol on MAS flights would bring the hand of God to strike the airline down and may also be the reason behind tornadoes in Kedah and what have you. After all, the will of the divine moves in mysterious ways indeed, and it seems that the supreme power is not fond of alcohol or stewardesses not wearing head scarves.

But lo! Kelantan actually serves alcohol, despite what some PAS lawmakers seem to believe. Alcohol is gazetted as a right of the non-Muslims in Kelantan and cannot be taken from them unless they’re harming other people. In fact, the revenue is even deposited in a separate account as Muslims cannot benefit from the sale of prohibited things. It seems this escaped the notice of the PAS lawmakers who petitioned MAS’ senior vice-president of communications.

Or perhaps Temerloh MP Nasrudin Hassan, Pasir Mas MP Nik Mohamad Abduh Nik Abd Aziz and their cohorts were perfectly aware of the situation, and were only trying to score political points with the more devout of their party’s support base. God forbid! Such learned men surely would know that alcohol is available in Kelantan. Surely, had the issue been a bugbear in the state government, alcohol would have been banished completely from Kelantan ages ago.

But this really does make you wonder why it’s such a huge issue to these people. After all, alcohol being served on flight very much follows the Islamic jurisprudence that PAS used to justify the availability of alcohol in Kelantan itself. If memory serves, stewardesses actually deny you alcohol if they find you too inebriated and are becoming disruptive, which is a great notion as many people lean towards the rambunctious once they’ve consumed too much of the stuff.

Besides, if the notion that you are paying for alcohol with your plane ticket is the problem, remember that the key word is “all-in”. This seems to be hard to grasp for some parties in this issue as “all-in” does mean alcohol is an option within the cost, but it is not necessarily the cost. For all we know, someone could drink an entire wine bottle’s worth of orange juice on the flight and be completely happy about it without having to drink a single drop of liquor.

The point, friends, is that whether alcohol is served or not, consuming it is a personal choice. Should you claim to be devout and are sipping away at the jolly juice, well, that is something between you, the maker, and the religious authorities, but this doesn’t mean everybody on board must be denied his choice of drink because some people have a problem with the idea of alcohol. That is, after all, the idea of basic democracy; everybody’s voice must be represented, and just because you shout louder and beat your chest like King Kong, doesn’t necessarily mean you should get your way.