Negeri Sembilan Bersatu chief Rais Yatim said lessons should be learnt from the country's past experience of accepting other races when dealing with Rohingya refugees.
Rais (photo) indicated that while they may be well-behaved when their numbers are small, this may change when their numbers grow.
"When their numbers are small right now, the Rohingya are gentle that they wouldn't even kill an ant.
"But when their numbers are in the hundreds of thousands, they will maul us.
"It ended the same way with other races when they came during the British era in the 1920s.
"Let us learn from the history of siding with outsiders," he said in a Twitter post.
Rais was responding to former inspector-general of police Musa Hassan who highlighted the case of three Rohingya men being involved in a series of burglaries.
Anti-Rohingya blame game
Meanwhile, DAP's Bagan Dalam assemblyperson M Satees criticised Deputy Federal Territories Minister Edmund Santhara Kumar for blaming DAP for the anti-Rohingya sentiment on social media.
"Can Santhara point out a single statement by a DAP leader, on the Rohingya issue, flaming xenophobic comments against the refugees? Certainly, he can’t.
"As a social-democratic party, DAP had always stood for the oppressed communities throughout the world. Not only for Rohingyas, DAP always stood for the victims of the oppression, be it in Palestine, Myanmar or Sri Lanka," Satees said.
The DAP lawmaker said Santhara should instead advise his PN coalition partners to be more consistent on the Rohingya issue.
"Instead of trying to put the blame on DAP for something imaginary, Santhara instead should advise his new friends from Umno and PAS to be more consistent (on the Rohingya issue), and don’t change their stance for political browny points.
"DAP has always been consistent in the humanitarian issues; we don’t change our tunes to suit the new environments.
"Obviously, people like Santhara won’t understand the consistency of party like DAP; people like him can change their stance at every instance, like how he and his friends did two months ago," he said.
Santhara (above) was among the MPs who defected from PKR, leading to the collapse of the Harapan government.
He is now part of the PN government. The Parliament website now lists him as a Bersatu MP.
The spotlight fell on the Rohingya issue again after the Royal Malaysian Navy turned back a refugee ship carrying some 200 people on April 16.
A day before that, it was reported that at least two dozen people had died after a ship carrying 382 Rohingya refugees was repeatedly turned back by Malaysian authorities.
They were eventually rescued by the Bangladeshi coastguard, which said they had been adrift for two months.
The refugees had fled from Myanmar, which does not recognise the Rohingya community as citizens. - Mkini
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