When you know the PAS people very well then you will know that although they talk about Islam non-stop they are just like any other politicians with their sex scandals and scams. And they will make deals if it is financially or politically to their benefit. So it is no surprise what is happening in Permatang Pauh. For the right amount of money PAS people, too, can be bought. And once bought they can do a U-turn and change their vote from nay to yay.
THE CORRIDORS OF POWER
Raja Petra Kamarudin
My phone has not stopped buzzing the last 24 hours since the announcement of the Penang PAS youth movement press conference scheduled for 1.00am Wednesday and then the postponement soon after that. After all, a press conference that is to be held at 1.00am and then the sudden cancellation soon after that is not exactly normal.
Many of those who buzzed me thought that I would have the answer to this mystery. Hell, even someone from Military Intelligence contacted me. Why are they contacting me? Isn’t Military Intelligence supposed to know what is going on?
It is a sorry day for Malaysia when the Military Intelligence needs to contact a Blogger all the way in Manchester to find out about what is going on back in Penang.
If I were a suspicious person I would suspect that some last minute horse-trading and behind the scenes negotiations were going on at the highest echelon of PAS. And this can only be about the PAS boycott of the Permatang Pauh by-election.
I was told by the Military Intelligence chap that PKR and DAP are boycotting the Rompin by-election. Could this be what the horse-trading is about? If PAS boycotts the Permatang Pauh by-election then PKR and DAP are going to boycott the Rompin by-election. Hence if you tat then I will tit — a classic case of tit-for-tat.
Hmm…this is what I would call tits galore.
If I were a suspicious person I would suspect that the Penang PAS youth movement was being pressured to call a press conference to announce that it was calling off the boycott of the Permatang Pauh by-election and that it is now going to support PKR.
Well, then PKR and DAP would call of the Rompin by-election boycott as well so no more tits for your tats.
If I were a suspicious person I would suspect that PAS was going to say it agrees to disagree with PKR and will not insist for PKR to apologise for what it said about the PAS President, Abdul Hadi Awang. They will call a truce and commence fighting next week regarding the Hudud issue and the insult to the PAS President once the by-election is over.
I know this makes PAS sound very unprincipled. I know this makes PAS sound like it is more interested in politics than Islam. I know this makes PAS sound more like a political party than a perjuang Islam.
Hell, but PAS is a political party. And the job of political parties is to win elections and get into power. Later, once it gets into power, it can focus on saving your souls and in making sure you all go to heaven. Hell, and we all want to go to heaven.
But alas, PAS cannot help you get into heaven. It cannot even guarantee that its own leaders will get into heaven. PAS is a political party and its leaders are mere politicians. And politicians, never mind from which party they come from, are only interested in power and will do anything to get into power, by fair means or foul, because in politics the end justify the means.
And we have been seeing what PAS is capable of doing this last one year, in particular over the last few days in Permatang Pauh.
I remember when PAS first came to power in Kelantan in 1990. A good friend of mine from Semangat 46 approached me and asked me whether I was interested in a logging concession in Kelantan. My friend told me he has been authorised by the Timbalan Menteri Besar to look for buyers.
The deal was simple. I make an official offer to the state, which the EXCO would approve, and then the other half has to be paid under-the-table to the party. Which party, I asked, PAS or Semangat 46? Semangat 46, of course, but there would be no problems with PAS. The EXCO members, many who are from PAS, would all be kowtim.
I was a businessman at that time but logging and timber was not one of my business activities. So I declined the offer. A number of my Chinese friends from Terengganu, however, did the deal, and they migrated to Kelantan to do their new timber business and grew very rich from it.
Later my Chinese friends told me it is better to do business in Kelantan under PAS than in Terengganu under Umno. The Umno people are greedy, they told me. They take all the meat and leave us the bones. The PAS people are more reasonable. They just take a little bit from the top.
This was about 25 years ago so many of those people are no longer around. In fact, one of the biggest dealmakers has since died. So I will not mention his name but Kelantanese know who these people are without me needing to mention their names.
So things are not so squeaky-clean in PAS either. It is just that most of us have known this for the last 25 years but would rather not say anything about it. In fact, there was one PAS lawyer who became a millionaire by scamming the kampung people’s land.
What happened was that the kampung people took loans from MARA and charged their land as security. Many could not pay their MARA loans and received letters of demand. They then went to this PAS lawyer for legal help.
The lawyer then advised the kampung people to sell their land to pay off their outstanding loans. He offered to help find buyers for the land and to get the buyers to pay off the MARA loans.
The land was valued at a much higher price than what the kampung people owed MARA. The PAS lawyer then got the landowners to sign the transfer papers and he personally paid off the MARA loans on the landowners’ behalf and transferred the land into his own name.
A PAS EXCO member, who was a very senior leader in the party, revealed this to me. He just hated the guts of this PAS lawyer, who was also a senior party leader.
Another friend of mine was running a tourist resort in Terengganu. When PAS took over the state they refused to renew his liquor licence. You see; liquor is haram in Islam so PAS will not issue liquor licences.
But then almost all the patrons of my friend’s resort were non-Muslim foreigners, mainly from Europe. So he just had to sell liquor. But how was he going to do that without a liquor licence?
My friend approached a very senior PAS leader, not the Menteri Besar, Abdul Hadi Awang, to ask what to do. The advice he got was: do not apply for a liquor licence. If he applied for a liquor licence the state would be forced to reject the application. And this would cause problems because my friend would now be on the radar screen.
Just go ahead and sell liquor and the state would close one eye, said the PAS leader. So that is what my friend did and everyone lived happily ever after.
When you know the PAS people very well then you will know that although they talk about Islam non-stop they are just like any other politicians with their sex scandals and scams. And they will make deals if it is financially or politically to their benefit. So it is no surprise what is happening in Permatang Pauh. For the right amount of money PAS people, too, can be bought. And once bought they can do a U-turn and change their vote from nay to yay.
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