Musing With Marina Mahathir

No fresh start to 2012

2012-01-09T14:06:00.000+08:00

Wednesday January 4, 2012
No fresh start to 2012
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

The last year was one where there were particularly high levels of obliviousness. Why not, in 2012, for the sake of doing something different, have a campaign called “End Stupid Statements”.

IT’S 2012 and if the Mayans are to be believed, the world ends this year. For me, the world didn’t start well because we got up on New Year’s Day to dry pipes. No water in the toilets is not what you call a fresh start to the year.

Could someone make a resolution to replace the old pipes in Bangsar, please?

Otherwise, we Bangsarites will go on a shower strike and stink the place out until our demands are met.

And, yes, our smelly mob will assemble in the streets to protest.

For some other Malaysians, especially some students, the New Year certainly did not start well at all. It makes one sigh again with frustration.

Let us see this clearly; the only people capable of using force on others are the ones with the batons and guns.

Generally, those aren’t civilians, and especially not students.

If this is the way the year is going to start, then we have learnt nothing from 2011, nor will we do anything new in 2012.

We will continue to exhibit our fears by clamping down on those who think differently, or who are simply different.

We display our paranoia by immediately looking for who is behind those who think differently.

We cannot imagine that people can think for themselves, without someone telling them how and what to think and do.

It’s the ultimate indictment of our education system, that every single thing anyone does, especially if contrary to what the establishment wants, must be attributed to a sheeplike disposition to be led.

Well, surely, if those who are contrarian are doing it because they are sheep, then those who are conformists are also sheep.

After all, everyone went through the same school system, no?

The last year, for me, was one where there were particularly high levels of obliviousness among those who rule us.

Oblivious to what people really think and want being chief among them.

Whether it’s deliberate or not, I can’t tell, but somehow there’s mild comfort in believing that it’s just natural gormlessness, and not willful blindness.

I am hoping that this year will be a year of greater imagination.

It would be nice if our leaders suddenly had the imagination to trust their people to be able to think on their own.

And to trust that people thinking on their own is not necessarily a bad thing, nor necessarily a move that will backfire.

I’d also like our leaders to start believing that their people are generally good people, who get on with one another and simply want to live their lives as best as they can.

And they can do all that without any interference from those who think they are leading us.

I don’t need anyone to tell me how to get on with my neighbours; I already do.

I do need someone to tell off those people who keep telling me to constantly be suspicious of my neighbours, including when they are nice to me.

Apparently this is only because they want to dislodge me from my faith.

In that case, my being nice to them must be equally effective at dislodging them from their beliefs.

Why not then have “Be Nice to Your Neighbours” campaigns?

Indeed, why not in 2012, for the sake of doing something different, have a campaign called “End Stupid Statements”.

Every statement uttered by a public figure that simply does not stand up to scrutiny gets printed on a big banner and then symbolically thrown into a giant dustbin at Dataran Merdeka.

My first candidate: Jews and Christians Are Taking Over the Country! (My test for the credibility of that statement is to ask: what for?).

I’m sure it’ll be a full dustbin.

But what am I saying?

We have an election to look forward to, which means there’ll be an endless supply of dumb utterances from all sides of the fence.

We should arm ourselves with deflectors to shield us from the inanities that are bound to rain upon our poor heads.

Or helmets at the very least, because it’s bound to injure our craniums.

But let me remain optimistic.

The first person that says all Malaysians are equal under our Constitution gets my vote.

Or who says, men and women are equal, or who outlaws child marriage.

And I’ll even give some grudging respect to the first person who says: “I lied, I’m sorry, I’ll step down now.”

But I suppose that would be like expecting to see porcine flying objects. Life trundles on, folks.

Try and have a good year!

Year that was for the protester

2011-12-29T14:03:00.001+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.

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Wednesday December 21, 2011
Year that was for the protester
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

The silly season is already on us and no doubt will be a fractious and prolonged one going into 2012.

IT’S the end of the year and, like everyone else, I’m going to try and summarise what made it an interesting year indeed.

Time magazine named The Protester as its Person of the Year in 2011.

I couldn’t agree more, because really few people have made an impact on society than protesters this year.

From the protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and Syria to the Occupy Wall Street protesters and its many offshoots, these largely peaceful protests have forced things to change in their societies.

In the Middle East, corrupt and authoritarian leaders have been forced to step down. In some, it’s still an ongoing battle.

Of course, these steps towards democracy are not perfect. Nor are the results.

But that’s democracy for you.

Just because people don’t know what they want is no reason to dismiss democracy.

It is the fact that they finally have choices is the triumph, after so many years of not having any.

For those who insist on equating the London riots with the Arab Spring, do get your facts right.

The former was not about changing an authoritarian government for a more democratic one, nor was it meant to be peaceful.

The latter was a peaceful demand for change; the violence came from the government response.

If you want to equate the London riots with the Syrian government’s response, perhaps it would be more accurate.

Time magazine has mostly recognised the Arab, Spanish and American protesters in their essay.

But perhaps they should have also looked eastwards.

I think the Bersih rally goers, protesting peacefully for clean and fair elections, are also deserving of the award.

For the first time, ordinary Malaysians went out to demand what should be their right, to be able to vote fairly.

Young and old of all races and religions, Malaysians marched to protect this basic human right. And were demonised because of it.

While the Government responded to the Bersih demands by establishing the Parliamentary Special Committee on electoral reforms, at the same time the so-called Peaceful Assembly Act – aimed at curbing any other rallies like Bersih – was passed.

In any case, it is delusional to think that curbing protests will curb rebellious thoughts. These will continue to thrive in 2012, that’s for sure.

Perhaps 2011 was also the year of the Strong Woman.

On the international scene, not one but three women won the Nobel Peace Prize this year: President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Leymah Gbowee, also of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, the youngest-ever recipient.

It’s interesting that all of these women are rebellious women, who refused to accept the established, and patriarchal, way of doing things.

Instead, they found their own way, and worked for peace in their countries.

Malaysia, too, has its share of strong women. Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan is the prime example of someone who has had to withstand personal attacks from all quarters like no other person has had to in our country, yet still carries on with her strong principles.

Let it never be said that she lacks courage.

For women to get ahead, it really is imperative that they have the sort of integrity and display the sort of ethical behaviour that we often find lacking in men.

This year is, of course, also the year of the Obedient Wives Club, hardly a great leap forward for womankind.

Nevertheless, the OWC knew exactly how to get publicity for their causes.

And, I suspect, despite the sniggers over their sex manual, there are many who actually agree with their basic premise, that a good wife is one who blindly obeys her husband even when she doesn’t feel like it.

Finally, this year has been a bad year for justice and equality.

Children born less than six months after their parents married are considered illegitimate, thus forcing them to bear the sins of their parents.

Even if legitimate, children can be married off at even 10 years old, surely a blight on our society if we are to consider ourselves progressive.

Muslim women still don’t have the same rights as their non-Muslim sisters when it comes to marriage, property and inheritance.

And people of different sexual orientations are not regarded as full citizens.

I’d like to be optimistic about 2012 but that does not look likely.

The silly season is already on us and no doubt will be a fractious and prolonged one.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks!

Gimme, seems to be the easiest word

2011-12-07T11:19:00.000+08:00

Wednesday December 7, 2011
Gimme, seems to be the easiest word
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

In a land of opportunity for all, people should remember John F. Kennedy’s famous words: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

THIS is going to be one long sigh of exasperation, folks. I get like this when I think of my country sometimes and despair at the sheer shallowness of how we talk about her.

How, amid protestations of how much we love her, we insist on treating her with such disdain and thoughtlessness that in fact we are ruining her every day.

Once upon a time we used to talk about our country and what we could do for it. We used to think that what John F. Kennedy said – “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” – was so admirable.

We wanted to make our country so good that we could hold our heads up high anywhere in the world. Instead, all we hear these days is what can I get from this country, how can I get rich off this country.

While this should be a country of opportunity for all, why is there this attitude that this country owes us a living? Indeed, some of us think that we are entitled to be cosseted and pampered to the nth degree for as long as we live.

When I was little, my aunt gave us children a book that taught us about how to be good people. Basically, it meant expelling from our vocabulary two phrases: “Give Me”, and “I Couldn’t Care Less”.

People who used these phrases often were selfish people who were not considerate of others; indeed, thought the whole world was only about them. We learnt that it was better to give to others than to take, and to always care about other people.

So my jaw has to drop to the floor when I read the papers these days, and almost all that anyone says is “Give Me” and “I Couldn’t Care Less”.

“Give me,” they say, even though they have done nothing to earn it and even though it will bring ruin to the country. When asked to consider the feelings of others, basically they show a finger and say that they could not care two hoots.

Obviously nobody gave them the same book.

It’s hard enough to teach values to our children these days without adults showing every day in our papers and on TV that they have none at all.

How do I teach my children that nothing comes without hard work and discipline, and that consideration for others is not just a value but a duty as a human being?

As a little girl, I was taught one of the biggest sins was telling lies. Nothing made God angrier, it was drilled into me, than telling untruths, especially about other people. To this day, I cannot fib much, not even about my age or weight.

But nowadays people tell such blatant lies. You can always tell when a person is lying; they always feel the need to shout it out, as if sheer volume makes it truthful.

I’ve never known people with clear consciences to ever be anything but calm. So you watch this lying and you have to wonder how come their parents didn’t scare them to death about God as mine did?

Of course you only tell lies because you think that people will actually believe them. Which means that you think that such people are fools.

And indeed they often live up to the label. The astounding thing is, why are there so many of them? Are there absolutely no smart people around?

People who see through all this, and say something about it, are somehow made to feel as if they are unpatriotic.

Just because we don’t buy into the improbable stories, we are not playing by the rules. Of course, nobody wonders if the rules are good in the first place.

Actually, rules have been broken a great deal in these past few years. The rules of simple civility, for one, are long gone. I used to think of my people as the gentlest, most polite people on earth.

Until I saw a video of a meeting with much shouting and screaming, and someone pulling a chair from under an old man. We don’t censure behaviour like this, but we tut-tut at people kissing. Go figure.

I struggle to teach my children to be kind to others, to mind their manners, to never emulate those who are doing things that are wrong.

I tell them that whether it’s five ringgit or five million ringgit, if they take what’s not theirs, it’s called stealing. And if they make up stories that can cause harm to others, they must own up and apologise.

But when adults are the ones doing these things, what do I tell them?

Vying for dubious achievements

2011-11-30T11:16:00.001+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday November 23, 2011
Vying for dubious achievements
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

We are great at railing against idiotic politicians at mamak stalls and on social websites, but when it actually comes to doing something, we make excuses; and with that, we disempower ourselves.

IN 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called The Tipping Point, defining it as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point”.

It’s that pivotal moment when people decide that enough is enough and actually do something to make a change.

In 2011, we’ve seen lots of tipping points.

It happened at the end of December in Tunisia when fruitseller Mohamad Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest against the confiscation of his stall.

That act of defiance against injustice became the tipping point for Tunisians fed up with the sys-tem and their rebellion led to the downfall of their president and set off a chain of events in neighbouring countries known as the Arab Spring.

Sooner or later, people reach a tipping point where they will no longer tolerate repression and corruption, pushing them to do something about it, even if it means that lives had to be sacrificed.

I really have to wonder when we Malaysians will reach our tipping point.

Every day, we read so much blatant nonsense from our leaders that the newspapers have truly stopped being readable.

News reports treat us all as people of low intelligence because only imbeciles would believe some of the outrageous claims made by our leaders.

When elections are in the offing, there is no doubt that our politicians immediately start jockeying for positions by trying to outdo one another.

It would be wonderful if they were racing to think up the best policies to manage the country, the economy, social issues, etc.

Instead, they are racing to find the silliest ways to strike fear into our souls and find more ways to oppress people.

I mean, solar-powered talking Bibles, really?

There is a foreign magazine that gives out Dubious Achievements Awards every year.

These are a bit like the Ig Noble awards, the opposite of the Nobel prizes, where people are cited for doing the silliest things.

Malaysia, especially our politicians, seems to be in the running for a lot of dubious achievements this year.

Maybe we should just accept that those are the only achievements we will ever have.

Meanwhile, we the people have to live with these shenanigans.

We find out every year from the Auditor-General’s Report that millions have been wasted on ridi-culous items which any fool would know should not cost that much.

The report highlights a “mess” in a government-related company and an unexplained stupendously expensive apartment purchase.

There are also ministers who claim that none of it has anything to do with the Government.

Gee, the Auditor-General must have so little to do that he needs to audit private companies as well.

And wow, they must really think we are dumb.

And while the world is facing an economic recession that will be more severe than anything ever seen, fodder for revolutions everywhere, what do our politicians care about?

Whether people of different sexual orientation should be allowed any space at all to talk about their problems?

Like natural disasters, the last thing economic catastrophes care about is whom you’re attracted to.

And given that most people are heterosexual, the chances are that the people who will be most affected by a recession are the heterosexual and poor.

Shouldn’t politicians vying for votes be concentrating on them?

Perhaps our politicians, unlike voters, don’t read.

They seem not to have noticed that there are protests going all round the world against inequality, especially the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor.

Even some business people are saying that things must change or else there will be a global revolution, particularly against exploitative and uncaring corporations.

But as always, our politicians are one step behind the rest of the world.

They’re still dreaming of joining the fat cat 1% and forgetting that the 99% have a lot more votes.

Why do we put up with all this?

Are our tolerance levels for stupidity that high?

Is it because we don’t know any better?

Or are we just lazy and complacent?

We are great about railing against idiotic politicians at mamak stalls and on social websites, but when it actually comes to doing something, we make excuses.

We shrug our shoulders and say we can’t make a difference, only some people can.

And with that, we disempower ourselves, much to the delight of our leaders.

But every now and then, we do rise to the occasion.

I think last July we reached a tipping point of sorts, where lots of ordinary people simply got fed up and decided to make it known, albeit peacefully.

But have our leaders learnt anything from it?

Not much, going by the constant demonising ever since.

So how long will we put up with imbeciles leading us?

How long will we tolerate unbridled greed and hate?

Irrational fear abounds

2011-11-15T10:30:00.002+08:00

Wednesday November 9, 2011
Irrational fear abounds
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Prejudice and discrimination, both rooted in fear of the unknown, can always be dispelled with better knowledge, at least in those willing to learn.

TEN years ago the world turned a decidedly nastier place for Muslims. Although Islamophobia already existed before Sept 11, the events that day ratcheted it up several notches. Suddenly Muslims in the United States and all over the world found themselves under intense scrutiny, much of it hostile.

Stereotypes abounded. Although Islam is a religion of peace, all Muslims were branded terrorists, undemocratic, violent, oppressors of women.

The only images seen in the media were of angry bearded men wielding weapons and shouting threats to the West. Only Muslim women covered head to toe in dour black, were seen. It did not help that some Muslims themselves provided fodder for these images.

Tales of aggression against Muslims abounded. Headscarves were pulled off, insults hurled and, at airports, anyone with the slightest tinge of an Arabic name was pulled out for special inspection. Some people suffered even more violence, resulting in injury and even death.

New perspective: One of the biggest boosts to the image of Islam and Muslims has been the Arab Spring where young Muslims, including women, were seen at the forefront of the revolution. – Reuters

Sometimes entirely wrong people became victims of the prejudice. A Sikh man got shot because he wore a turban, a bunch of Orthodox Jewish rabbis were pulled off a plane because they were praying in a language other passengers didn’t understand.

Fear ruled and with it came prejudice and discrimination, much of it fuelled by the media. Most of it stemmed from ignorance about the world of Islam, which is not only large but also diverse.

A Muslim in the Middle East is culturally different from a Muslim in Asia, but that was not appreciated in much of the West. Indeed Middle Eastern Muslims comprise only 15% of the entire Muslim world. Furthermore there are many Western Muslims who look and act no different from their fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq only angered Muslims, who then reacted in ways that ingrained the stereotypes about them.

The early post-Sept 11 Islamophobic madness only lessened when much better information and knowledge about Islam and Muslims became available. This took two forms.

One, many Muslims took it upon themselves to educate non-Muslims about Islam, and in particular reached out to other faith communities to talk about their commonalities, rather than differences.

And two, thousands of students flocked to universities to learn more about Islam. Both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars of Islam did much to teach students about the real religion, rather than the one perpetuated by the media.

Ten years later, although it cannot be said that Islamophobia has disappeared, Western perspectives on Islam have become more measured and based on better knowledge. One of the biggest boosts to the image of Islam and Muslims has been the Arab Spring.

Suddenly the images of Muslims were young, modern, and protesting not about the West but about their own corrupt leaders. Although they did not explicitly talk about religion, in 2011 the Middle East became associated with the yearning for freedom and democracy, one not too different from what developed countries enjoyed.

Women were seen at the forefront of the revolution, both head-scarved and not, and changed the image of the oppressed Muslim woman.

It just goes to show that prejudice and discrimination, both rooted in fear of the unknown, can always be dispelled with better knowledge, at least in those willing to learn. There are of course many who simply refuse to open their hearts and minds to such enlightenment, but progress has been made in incremental steps.

It is also clear that very often those who steadfastly refuse to eliminate their prejudices do so because they think it is politically profitable to them. The loudest Islamophobes always seem to be politicians trying to win the populist vote. And the only way they maintain those votes is by keeping people ignorant. Hence, their refusal to engage at all with Muslims.

Every phobia about groups of people who are different from us works in the same way. They rely on stereotypes and on the fear that allowing these minority people the same basic rights as others would mean that they would demand more.

Thus, although no Muslim ever asked for it, some people in the US insist that there are plans to impose syariah law there. The media stokes the hysteria and stigmatisation. Unjust accusations and calls for depriving them of citizenship becomes the norm.

Although those baying for blood are small in number, they still make innocent people suffer. People who have never harmed anyone else suffer distrust and hostility from their former neighbours. Violence against them is justified, sometimes with religious backing. The entire atmosphere is poisoned by hate.

This past week, where some people seem to be proudly picking on the powerless, has reminded me of that Islamophobic hysteria. I fear for our country and where we are heading

Enough of ‘softie’ bashing

2011-10-17T15:14:00.000+08:00

Wednesday October 12, 2011
Enough of ‘softie’ bashing
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

If you are to believe certain TV commentaries, lots and lots of Malaysian women are losing their husbands to transsexuals who are prettier and sexier than them.

THERE can’t be very many things more amusing, at least for a short while, than people willing to go on TV to make fools of themselves. That’s why reality shows make good TV.

For many people, just being famous, no matter for what, is all they care about. They become celebrities for the infamous Warholian 15 minutes.

Which is the only explanation I can give for the women and men who went on TV last week to discuss the “threat” that transgendered people pose to women these days.

Apparently, if you believe these people, lots and lots of Malaysian women are losing their husbands to transsexuals who are more beautiful and sexier than them.

The alarm bells have to be sounded now before society deteriorates even further.

I think when we have shows like these passed off as intelligent TV, our society has already deteriorated beyond redemption.

With absolutely no evidence to support their thesis, these women and men mouthed off the most hateful prejudiced warnings about the scourge that apparently is threatening marriages these days.

Not for a moment did any of them pause to consider whether their argument was logical at all. Are they saying that all those second and third wives are transsexuals? If so, by what miracle are they producing all those babies?

And as always, women blame the other party for everything, quite forgetting that there is the man in between who is more than a willing partner to such shenanigans. How come nobody blames him?

The subtext (if you can call such unsubtlety sub anything) is that no man can resist a pretty and sexy woman who’s out to entice him. This is baffling. Are the complaining women thus saying that they themselves are therefore not pretty and not sexy?

And that the Lord of the Manor, who they serve hand and foot and swear to obey no matter what, becomes a total weakling when faced with an alluring look and the toss of some well-blown locks?

Shouldn’t they just throw such a spineless creature out of the house?

The blame should also go to the TV producers who put on a show like this. I am trying to imagine the preparatory meetings beforehand. “What shall we put on next week?” asks the head of programming.

“Oh I heard somewhere that women are losing their husbands to transsexuals,” pipes up the producer of the show.

“Oh! Hey, great topic. Go for it,” says the boss.

And there you have a programme, based on some rumour that the producer heard “somewhere”. Is it any wonder that TV is called the idiot box?

More seriously, however, is the unashamed attempt by the media to fan prejudice and discrimination against a part of our society – transgendered people – for no good reason other than to hide their own shortcomings.

This is only the latest in a long series of both TV programmes and articles in tabloids that have consistently been shrieking the most vile accusations against transgendered people, all in the belief that they have religion to protect them.

The result of this constant stream of disgusting news has been that transgendered people and lelaki lembut have been subjected to so much harassment and injustice that, for some, it has become unbearable.

Tragic incident

Not too long ago, a transsexual whose application to change her name on her identity card was refused by the courts died out of dejection and despair. And no doubt, the self-righteous patted themselves on the back for a job well done.

We are facing a world these days with so many challenges. There are people out there who are hungry or have no roof over their heads.

In our glittering capital city, there are people taking their showers in the Dataran Merdeka fountain because they have no bathrooms to call their own.

So many others are finding it harder and harder to get by on what they earn as prices rise.

And yet what does certain media care about? Whether our men are being enticed away, not by the sort of sexy young things that the same certain media like to showcase every day but by transsexuals!

Or whether we should do something about the “epidemic” of soft men who generally have done nothing to harm anyone. Soft men are not known, for instance, to become Mat Rempits or to snatch anyone’s bags.

Is it too much to ask that certain media not insult our intelligence? Can we demand a stop to the sort of prejudiced nonsense that they pass off as smart commentary?

When the annals of our history are read 50 years from now, would certain media like to be recorded as having contributed to the dumbing down of our people?

Apparently they do.

A holistic look at laws needed

2011-09-30T11:08:00.000+08:00

Wednesday September 28, 2011
A holistic look at laws needed
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

Legislation can be interpreted in many ways, and the innocent may end up being wrongly accused just because they look different.

I’VE often heard it said, in discussions on our more repressive laws, that if you never do anything wrong, you would have no need to worry about them.

This reasoning always sounds appealing and if you are not one to think too hard, then there doesn’t seem to be a good counter-argument against it.

But what we often forget is that while laws often seem well-intentioned, the people carrying them out may not be.

A good example is the Patriot Act in the United States. Ostensibly, this is meant to catch any would-be terrorist bent on repeating what had transpired on Sept 11, 2001.

It is meant to keep Americans safe from those who mean harm.

But what has really happened is that the lives of one group of Americans, all Muslims, have been severely disrupted and disturbed by the Act.

Innocent people have been accused of collusion with terrorists, have lost their jobs and, in their daily lives, have to endure insults and humiliation from their fellow citizens.

Even some non-Muslims, such as turbaned Sikhs, have to suffer various slurs just because they look different.

So it may be that you are totally innocent and doing nothing to break the law but once a law is in place, you can suffer from wrongful accusations, and worse if someone merely suspects that you might be up to something.

Donating to a particular charitable organisation, or even buying certain books, can be deemed as proof of guilt.

The good thing about the US is that there are people in the American Civil Liberties Union who are always vigilant about these abuses of the law and will take action to defend the rights of those wrongly accused.

Thus never intending to break a law is not safe enough protection from a repressive one.

There are other laws that some people want to introduce, which they insist will not affect anyone outside its purview, or anyone who isn’t intending to break the law.

The first issue is whether you even know there’s a law you might break.

Secondly, even when you don’t think you’re breaking the law, there is someone else who is sure you have and makes your life miserable for it.

For example, there have been several married couples who have been caught for khalwat, even one non-Muslim couple on holiday here.

Do they get any apology or compensation for the humiliation and embarrassment from the overzealous agencies responsible?

Such laws are not exempt from the test of justice. Just because a particular law is in place doesn’t make it just. That is the worry.

Even if you know you will never break that law, you still have to worry whether the enforcers have any sense of justice at all.

How sure can we be that all the safeguards that we need against being wrongly accused are also in place?

As many American Muslims can tell us, just being of the “wrong” faith is all it takes to make life take a distinctly miserable turn.

It’s also only a certain set of people who are most confident that these laws will not affect them.

Invariably they are elite and have the sort of money that can buy them the best defence.

Again, we need only look at the majority of people caught for khalwat, usually young and poor, to see that laws are not applied fairly across the board.

If you can afford a posh hotel or apartment, you can get away with it.

Similarly, some people have been musing about having laws that punish people for stealing by cutting their hands off.

Other laws purport to punish adultery by stoning those found guilty.

Again, will this mean that those who are poor and caught for stealing petty sums will have to face this, while those who steal millions can get away with it?

Celebrities who get caught for khalwat only need to have a grand wedding, complete with designer gowns, and all is forgiven and forgotten.

If such laws cannot be enforced in the fairest way, then why have them?

This is why we should not have any of these laws at all.

There may be some need for security laws but the intentions and safeguards must be clear and made known to all. They cannot be made redundant by provisions lurking in some other law.

It’s not enough to repeal selective laws. A more holistic look at all laws in the interest of justice and equality is what is needed.

I welcome the recent announcements of repeals of these laws. But like everything else affecting our lives, the proof is in the pudding. Right now it hasn’t even started cooking yet

Fallout from Sept 11 still being felt

2011-09-19T11:56:00.001+08:00

Wednesday September 14, 2011
Fallout from Sept 11 still being felt
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

There are efforts by ordinary citizens all over the world to heal the wounds left by the Sept 11 tragedy. Many people have been reaching out to one another with respect, humility and trust.

UNLESS you’ve been on Mars this past week, you would have realised that it was the 10th anniversary of Sept 11 a few days ago. There had been so much news and stories about it everywhere.

Nobody doubts that the events of Sept 11 10 years ago were a horrific tragedy, and all sympathy should go to the families who lost loved ones that day. But it should also be remembered that the aftermath of Sept 11 has been equally tragic, and is still ongoing.

According to the costs-of-war project at Brown University, a “very conservative” estimate is that about 137,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and that the wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees in these countries.

The Brown project puts the wars’ ultimate cost, including interest payments and veterans’ care, to the United States at up to US$4tril – equivalent to the country’s cumulative budget deficits for the six years from 2005 to 2010. Think of how many people that money could feed and school.

Still in tears: Family members of the Sept 11 tragedy victims attending the memorial service in New York in remembrance of their loved ones.
What have all these gained? Even Americans have been affected by it. Today, they live in an environment so fearful of another attack that they have to suffer the indignity of all manner of surveillance and security inconveniences. One recent op-ed in the New York Times suggested that on balance the infringements on civil liberties that Americans have had to suffer are relatively minor.

It failed to mention that for its American Muslim citizens, these have been major. The blame, the humiliation and the abuses that they have had to endure are not yet over.

But despite all these, and its global impacts, there are efforts by ordinary citizens to heal these wounds. In the United States and several other Western countries, the issues that arose from Sept 11 were not glossed over but discussed and debated as a way to rebuild the broken bridges. Civil society, rather than governments or politicians, have been at the forefront of these.

I was just in Western Australia where I was asked to speak at a conference on Rebuilding Harmony in the post-Sept 11 world. It was heartening to see so many people interested in the subject, and so disappointed by the ongoing violence that has accompanied the event by all sides.

Many Australians had been opposed to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, correctly seeing that this was no way to have peace.

They emphasised that people of different backgrounds, cultures and faiths need to know one another in order to avoid war, and that politicians should be held accountable for their part in the violence.

In the evening after the conference, we attended a special service at the main cathedral in Perth to commemorate the anniversary of Sept 11. It was attended by all the state dignitaries as well as people from all faiths. The entire service was beautiful and solemn as befitted the occasion.

But what moved me most was something I did not expect nor had ever experienced. An imam from a local mosque got up and recited the Al Fatihah and two other verses from the Quran dealing with compassion to humanity.

To hear the first surah of the Quran recited in Arabic in a cathedral while everyone listened so respectfully was a profoundly emotional experience for me. Never had its meaning been more beautiful.

It led me to think about how elsewhere in the world so many people have been reaching out to one another with respect, with humility and trust. When I heard the Al Fatihah in that church, it made me love my religion more.

The translation was in the programme, along with the words of all the other prayers and hymns that day, Christian and Jewish.

And what struck me most was how the sentiments expressed, while coming from different holy books, were in fact similar. My religion is as compassionate and generous as any other, not just to our own people but to all of humanity.

It made me wonder why this does not happen at home, why there is so much mistrust that nobody steps into a house of worship that is not their own.

Surely to be able to know one another is a good thing. After all, God says in surah Al-Hujarat, verse 13: O men! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.

By constantly isolating ourselves from each other, are we not rejecting what our Creator intended?

As Malaysia Day approaches, perhaps we should think about how we can reconcile with one another. Or at the very least, refuse and reject the many deliberate attempts to divide us.

Selamat Hari Malaysia!

A wish list of freedoms

2011-08-31T15:25:00.002+08:00

Wednesday August 31, 2011
A wish list of freedoms
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

We still need the fundamental freedoms that every human being desires, especially freedom of speech and expression. Our foreparents understood 54 years ago that we had a fundamental right to freedom and self-determination.

FIRST of all, let me wish everyone Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri. Also, as the days happen to almost coincide this year, Selamat Hari Merdeka. In many ways, this is very significant.

Raya is the day we free ourselves from a month of abstinence and restraint. Ramadan is a time for reflection on what good we have, or have not, done over the past year. It is a time to ask for forgiveness for our past sins and mistakes, and hurt we may have caused others.

Sadly, this Ramadan has hardly been an exemplary one. With insults galore, shouting and screaming, burning and threats, it has hardly been one of restraint and reflection, at least on the part of public figures. Nor was there any sense of shame at these violations of the good and holy month.

Since Raya coincides with Merdeka this year, I thought I would write a list of freedoms we should give ourselves in these coming months, besides the freedom to now eat.

First, let us have Freedom from Imagined Slights. I am sick and tired of the people who have nothing better to do than scour the media for all sorts of insults, while at the same time feeling entitled to slight others.

Some people’s skin is stretched so thinly over their rounded bulks it’s a wonder it hasn’t ripped. Every little imagined offence calls for protests and demos, almost always outside mosques after Friday prayers. One wonders if God feels slighted at this trespassing on His property, which should be oases of calm and tranquility.

As a corollary to that, let us also have Freedom from One-Sided Prosecutions. For example, some people seem to insist on having the monopoly on being sensitive. Everyone else is assumed to have thick skin, so much so that it is now apparently OK to insult people to their faces.

Thus, action is taken only when they have been offended, but never when they offend others. One has to wonder what is so great about displaying such thin skin? Won’t you wither under the sun?

Let us also demand Freedom from the Forgetful Politician, that is, those who forgot who voted them in. First off are those who insist that we should be grateful that they are there to lead us. Talk about a circular argument!

Then there are those who, although usually insisting that Malaysians are a unique species of people, totally different from everyone else in the world, are then quick to equate those same Malaysians with the worst of foreigners, those who riot, loot and destroy property.

Makes you wonder how that gels with our tourism campaigns. Are we supposed to be nice hospitable people or rioters?

One great freedom that I really wish we would give ourselves is Freedom from Snoopers, especially those intent on sticking their noses into our private lives. If one wants to create a moral society, then let’s widen that definition to include ethics instead of just keeping it totally focused on our sex lives.

A moral society is not just one where everyone behaves well sexually, if such a thing even exists, but also where people feel a strong civic duty to uphold the law, not be corrupt, treat the poorest and most vulnerable well, and protect and preserve the environment.

Instead, we have increasing official “busybodiness” coupled with the encouragement of society to be busybodies. Thus our young feel that they are constantly under suspicion of doing something bad, even when they are not. Does this stop all sorts of social ills? Of course not.

Indeed we should also demand Freedom from the Ostrich, the stick-their-heads-in-the-sand attitude that insists that some things just don’t exist in our country. On the one hand there are people who see a conspiracy under every pebble and on the other there are those who just refuse to connect the dots.

For example, young people don’t have to become pregnant outside marriage if we educate them and provide the services they need to make the best choices. Instead, we refuse to educate them and then blame them for having babies out of wedlock. Some even insist that the solution is to marry them off early.

That’s where we need Freedom from the Short-sighted, those who only think in terms of short-term solutions and not the harm that will come many years down the line.

At heart, however, we still need the fundamental freedoms that every human being desires, especially freedom of speech and expression. Without these, the Snoopers, Ostriches, Short-sighted and all these others will continue to thrive and make our lives miserable.

Our foreparents understood that we had a fundamental right to freedom and self-determination 54 years ago. Let’s not forget that the next time we vote.

Merdeka!

We are always an ‘exception’

2011-08-20T15:23:00.000+08:00

Wednesday August 17, 2011
We are always an ‘exception’
Musings
By Marina Mahathir

Malaysian policies often state that we are different and therefore cannot be compared with others. Yet those who join peaceful marches are likened to British rioters. Suddenly we are the same?

ARE we getting progressively schizophrenic? Judging by current responses to events around the world, it would be easy to conclude that we are.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have normal emotional responses and to behave normally in social situations.

If you read up on Malaysian policies and statements on various issues, the one striking factor is our insistence on exceptionalism. That is, we are different and therefore cannot be compared with any other country.

Fiery aftermath: The violent riots in London left many properties in ruin. — AFP
In the early years of the AIDS pandemic, we thought we were protected because we were different. If non-Muslims in other Muslim countries use the word “Allah” for God with no fuss, ours can’t because we are different. We are apparently unique and incomparable to anyone else in the world.

Which is why it puzzles me that all of a sudden our citizens, or at least the ones who want to voice their opinions with peaceful assemblies and marches, are being compared to British rioters and looters.

If we are always different, how come suddenly we are the same?

Going by the statements of our leaders, basically we are nothing more than savages who would rob, rape, loot and pillage given half the chance. Therefore, we need all sorts of laws to keep us in check and not venture in groups of more than five outside our homes.

Now, this is why that schizophrenic inability to think logically comes into play. Despite evidence that none of the 30,000 or so peaceful marchers last July robbed, raped, looted or pillaged, our leaders insist that we would have. They must be looking at mirrors.

Just a few days ago the fellow who demonstrated how inconvenient a protest is by inconveniencing everyone in Penang declared that he would burn down two online news portals whose reports he disagreed with. Now if that’s not London rioter behaviour, I don’t know what is.

More disturbingly, after already having insulted all the good citizens who exercised their right to peaceful assembly, our leaders go on to insult them some more.

Instead of being proud that we did not have the type of violence that the UK experienced, instead of talking about how so much more civilised our people are, our leaders liken us to rioters who have vandalised, stolen and killed.

Talk about the inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

A certain amount of hypocrisy also rears its ugly head. What if Mark Duggan, the man who was shot by police in London and whose family’s peaceful protest became the original rallying cry for the rioters, was Mohamad Duggan?

Between 1987 and 1993 and 2000 and 2005, the Palestinian people went through two uprisings against the Israeli government, known as the First and Second Intifadas, respectively. Both Intifadas involved demonstrations, protests and, yes, a certain amount of violent rioting.

They were met with an even more violent response from the Israelis that resulted in many deaths and the eventual blockade of Gaza, still in force today.

Our government supported the Intifadas then. Does that mean that our government supports the right of Palestinians to demonstrate, protest and riot, but refuses its own people’s right to do much less, that is to just march peacefully?

Or is the logic that when governments are democratically elected, its people then lose the right to protest against them?

Conveniently ignored, too, is the fact that in the UK, protests and demonstrations are held all the time without the type of violence we saw recently.

One of the biggest was in 2003 when hundreds of thousands of people marched against the Iraq war. At the time we looked benignly at this because we had the same stand. Did we tell the Brits and others round the world that they should not demonstrate against the war?

So what is the message here? We may be trusted to peacefully protest as long as the subject of our protest is in sync with the Government’s. Otherwise, if we should protest for free and fair elections, against corruption or anything else that the Constitution gives us the right to, we are labelled as unpatriotic thugs out to disturb the peace and destroy the economy and image of our country.

Looking at the UK riots, are we even talking about the same thing? What cause was the UK rioters espousing?

Some wide reading instead of political posturing might be more beneficial here. The UK rioters did not loot bookshops, and some have suggested it’s because they don’t like to read.

Perhaps they are not unlike some of our politicians.

The polarised world of politics

2011-07-30T09:29:00.002+08:00

Wednesday July 20, 2011
The polarised world of politics
Musings
By Marina Mahathir

Politicians of every stripe have two bad habits. Firstly, they think that those who don’t belong to any political party are incapable of having a single political thought. Secondly, when non-politicians think of a good populist idea, politicians of all stripes rush to hijack it.

George W. Bush, that giant of intellectuals, famously said after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks that “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.”

Those words unleashed a world polarised by politics with no hope for peace, which necessarily requires a coming to the table of all sides to discuss common issues.

This “Us versus Them” mentality is an affliction that has befallen not only American politicians but many others around the world, including in our own country.

It creates an illness known as hyperpartisanship, which can be defined simply as “if you’re not on my side, you must be wrong.”

It’s the only explanation I can give for the consistently delusional statements that tend to come out from our politicians’ mouths.

To their minds, nobody can be right unless they’re on the same side.

Additionally, if you don’t agree with them, then you must surely be on the “other” side.

Politicians can’t seem to fathom anything but a bipolar world.

They can’t seem to get it into their heads that firstly, there may yet be a third (or fourth, fifth) way of looking at things, and secondly, that the ones with these different perspectives could conceivably be civilians.

Politicians of every stripe have two bad habits.

Firstly, they think those who don’t belong to any political party are incapable of having a single political thought.

They forget that every five years or so, it is they who insist that we think of politics when we go and vote.

Secondly, when non-politicians think of a good populist idea, politicians of all stripes rush to hijack it.

Non-politicians, otherwise known as civil society, then have to fight them off tooth and nail.

How many times have we had politicians turning up at big events organised by non-politicians and trying and making it sound as if it’s a big endorsement of themselves?

Some politicians are certainly more delusional than others.

Since Bersih 2.0 shocked them, they have been working overtime to demonise it.

It is one thing to badmouth the rally in the days before it happened but it’s quite shocking to see the pathetic attempts to paint it as a riot when it was clearly not.

From calling the teargassing “mild” to denying that the police had fired teargas into the Tung Shin Hospital, to trying to check the motives and bank accounts of those who went for the rally, our dear leaders insult us every day.

Yet all they have to do is, instead of surrounding themselves with sycophants who will only tell them what they want to hear, read all the heartrending and heartwarming personal accounts written by the many ordinary people who went to the Bersih 2.0 rally.

These were housewives, retirees and young people, all fearful of what violence they might encounter, but who steeled themselves to go and exercise their right to voice their opinions.

These were people who had probably never done anything more confrontational than argue with a salesperson in their entire lives, who faced teargas and water cannons fired at them by a government they probably voted in.

How much courage does it take to insult your own people from an airconditioned room compared to facing the FRU?

If our leaders think teargas is something mild, they should ask the FRU to try it on them.

I was lucky that day because I chose a route where the police decided not to deploy their gas and water cannons on us.

But many of my friends and colleagues were not so lucky. I feel ashamed that I suffered no more than tiredness, compared with what they so courageously went through.

And all our hapless leaders can do is call them names.

The people who went to Bersih 2.0 are Malaysians who will forever feel united and bound to each other because of that experience. Some may have been politicians and NGOs but so many more were just people of every race, religion, age and creed.

So many have said they never felt more Malaysian than they did that day.

At a time when everyone has been lamenting how divided we are, we came together. What more could we have wished for?

Perhaps we should take another leaf from Sept 11. In the wake of the death and destruction wreaked by the US government to avenge the World Trade Centre deaths, some of the families of those who died, horrified by such violent vengeance, started an NGO called Not In Our Name.

Perhaps those many decent Malaysians, the “silent majority” our leaders like to claim as their own, can come out and say that, even if they disagree with Bersih 2.0, they will not stand by and let their fellow citizens be insulted and abused in this way.

At least, not in their name

Projecting the preferred image

2011-07-15T09:19:00.001+08:00

Wednesday July 6, 2011
Projecting the preferred image
Musings by MARINA MAHATHIR

Deliberately causing problems to solve a problem is an entirely ingenious idea, like blocking the Penang Bridge just to show how inconvenient a demonstration can be.

SINCE the subject has come up so often recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about our country’s image.

In the first place, why do we even think anyone else spends much time thinking about us? And secondly, when they do, why do we even care?

Obviously we do care since we seem obsessed with it.

And the main reason seems to be that if we did not have a good image in the eyes of foreigners, they won’t invest in us or visit us and therefore we’ll become poor.

Our standard of living, therefore, depends on what people think of us.

It rather reminds me of those days, when some people said we should not have any public campaigns on HIV/AIDS in case foreigners think we DO have the epidemic here and therefore won’t come.

We never thought that maybe foreigners might think better of us if we admitted we might have a problem but we are doing something about it, rather than be yet another country which prefers to sweep things under the carpet.

When it comes to the image of a country, it really depends on who you talk to.

Of course, we should be proud that we are almost a developed country with almost first-world facilities: great airport, great roads, good shopping malls.

We also have fantastic food and fairly hospitable people, especially to foreigners with money.

We may not be very nice to those without money, such as migrant workers and refugees, but we don’t care about them.

Unless, of course, their governments decide to stop sending domestic workers and we face the grim prospect of having to clean our own toilets.

On the other hand, we seem pretty unconcerned when our image gets a battering all round the globe for attempting to whip women for drinking in public, actually whipping them for having babies out of wedlock, forming clubs for obedient wives and sexually harassing women for allegedly breaking immigration laws. Or declaring poco-poco haram in one state out of 13.

I guess we don’t mind people laughing at us, as long as they still spend their money here.

So image, just like justice in this country, is a moving target.

It’s whatever we make it out to be.

While we complain about men who ride their motorbikes dangerously on the streets when nothing is happening, when we need them we simply put red T-shirts on them and call them patriots.

We should really send them to international conventions overseas as patriotic examples of Malaysian citizens. They must surely do wonders for our image.

We should also send those fine people who blocked the Penang Bridge the other day just to show how inconvenient a demonstration is, to conferences on innovative ways to solve problems.

Surely, deliberately causing problems to solve a problem is an entirely ingenious idea!

Yes, Malaysia’s people, especially its leaders, really do wonders for our image overseas.

Apparently as a moderate Muslim country, we have absolutely no qualms about behaving just like the less-than-moderate ones, the ones who are quite happy to turn thugs and tanks onto their own people.

We jeer at Western hypocrisy that supports tyrants and dictators when it suits them, but we don’t seem to be much different ourselves.

Our image of ourselves must sometimes mirror the image of those we want to attract.

We want to attract the deep-pocketed tourists from the Middle East and China, governments who also don’t look kindly on demonstrations.

Therefore, not tolerating demonstrations here is just part of our marketing strategy, just like providing airport announcements in their languages, encouraging little Arab villages in the middle of the city and other amenities to make them feel at home.

Perhaps we should mention it in our travel ads: “Come and shop in Malaysia.

“We shall ensure nothing will block your route to the malls”.

Our leaders are such intellectual giants that the concept of freedom and human rights has been distorted and diminished to only mean freedom and the right to shop and make money.

I love it when certain leaders defend their right to shop in places they have not stepped into for decades.

The sudden concern for the petty traders, mostly foreigners, who have not benefited from their wallets all this time, is so touching.

So it depends whose image we want to emulate.

In developed countries, millions can march peacefully and nothing happens to the economy.

In fact, their economies have been devastated more by smart-suited bankers than any street demo against the ensuing austerity drives.

Perhaps, in defining patriots and traitors, we should look at suits rather than T-shirts

Struggling with ambiguity

2011-06-26T09:17:00.000+08:00

Wednesday June 22, 2011
Struggling with ambiguity
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Not everybody assumes the best in other people. Some people say that if you let people demonstrate their wish for clean and fair elections, they will surely riot.

I HAD always assumed that as I become older, things would become much clearer. The whys and wherefores of life’s big questions become obvious, I will have more “Aha!” than “What?!” moments, and I will stop struggling with ambiguity and confusion.

Unfortunately, thanks to a short, fat little man with permed hair and straightened teeth, this is not happening.

I grew up thinking that fairness was a good value to have. Not fair skin, but being fair to one and all. Children have a natural sense of justice; they know when they are being unfairly treated. It’s only when they see people benefiting from injustice that their natural values start to adapt.

Civic-conscious citizens: It’s amazing that one million and more fiery hot-blooded Egyptians could turn up in Tahrir Square to protest against their government peacefully, even in the face of government tanks. Then after they succeeded in ousting their President, they turned up the next day to clean up the square. — EPA
Maybe something happened to that little man in his childhood. Did something happen somewhere in his murky history where he had to resort to underhanded means to get something?

Because it puzzles me enormously why anyone should be opposed to fair and clean elections. Has the world changed so much that dirty and unfair elections are more prized?

Say, if my child wanted to stand for election at school, should I tell her that she should do everything she can to win, including undermining her opponent? Is this the lesson I should be teaching her?

This year, I told her she could have a nice holiday if she did well in school. Lo and behold, she did. So, now, I have to fulfil my promise. This is fair, as my old values tell me. But under these new-fangled values vaunted by some loud people, I should not do this. I should instead find some excuse to not uphold my side of the deal.

Although upholding my promise will be expensive for me, I still win because it confirmed my faith in my daughter, that she can do well in school with a little push. I can’t imagine assuming that she would fail no matter what.

But not everybody assumes the best in other people.

Another thing that befuddles me is how some people say that if you let people demonstrate their wish for clean and fair elections, they will surely riot.

In the first place, I would have assumed that those who want dirty elections are more likely to go crazy in public places. Mostly because the rest of us won’t be able to help laughing at their banners that say “Dirty is good!” or “Who wants to fight fair?”

On the other hand, who would show anything but respect for people who may be shouting “Let us restore our dignity: keep our elections clean”. After all, dirty elections are more associated with very much less-developed countries, which, surely, we are not.

It’s such a Boy Scout thing, wanting fair elections. Have you ever known Boy Scouts to riot? Only thugs who have never sworn to do their best do that.

It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that those simply wanting something good like clean elections are likely to be doing things like throwing stones, overturning cars and maybe looting shops.

There is nothing that drives good things away more than fear-mongering, is there?

So, therefore, to stop this, the forces of, I don’t know, Anti-Clean want to go down there and ensure security. Sounds like the George Bush School of Pre-Emptive Strikes to me. Let’s bomb them before they bomb us.

Equally disingenuous is to say that wanting clean elections is playing politics. But, isn’t everyone playing politics these days? And is politics confined only to politicians?

So, if I wanted to have a big demo to say that “No child should go hungry”, is that or is that not a political act? And therefore, will there be a counter-demo that says “Who cares if some children are undernourished”, just because my demo might cause traffic jams? That’s how crazy the thinking has become.

I find it amazing that in mild-mannered conflict-avoiding Malaysia, we assume that any gathering of more than five people will naturally turn into a riot.

Yet one million and more fiery hot-blooded Egyptians could turn up in Tahrir Square to protest against their government peacefully, even in the face of government tanks. Then after they succeeded in ousting their President, they turned up the next day to clean up the square!

So why not just make a deal with Bersih 2.0 to bersihkan the street the next day?

The confusion these days arises from the fact that thugs are given lots of leeway while perfectly normal people are made to feel like criminals, even before they do anything.

If that’s the norm these days, can someone make it official that justice and fairness are no longer values we uphold?

Then I’ll know what to teach my child.

Signing off for the niceties

2011-06-18T08:45:00.002+08:00

Wednesday June 8, 2011
Signing off for the niceties
Musings
By Marina Mahathir

Civil servants, when writing to others, sign off with the phrase declaring themselves as servants of the people, their real masters in theory.

THE penny dropped for me the other night. It suddenly dawned on me that the ubiquitous sign-off “Saya yang menurut perintah” on government letters was in fact a translation of that quaint colonial bit of politesse, “Your obedient servant”.

While the latter may not have been meant at all sincerely (Humphrey the smarmy Chief Secretary in Yes Prime Minister comes to mind), still I find it fascinating that while we have studiously imitated all the administrative niceties of our former colonial masters, we have managed to go our own way on this little courtesy.

You see, “Saya yang menurut perintah” literally means, “I who obey orders”. This is not quite the same as “Your obedient servant” that should be translated as “Pembantu setia anda” or perhaps, more accurately, given the way we treat our helpers these days, “Hamba abdi setia anda”.

Not only are the words lost in translation, so is the sentiment behind them.

The English version, used by civil servants when writing to others, is meant to convey that they are servants of the people.

As I said, this may not be meant sincerely at all but, as the Brits would have it, correct form is everything.

Our version however begs the question: whose orders are you obedient to? Ostensibly, these should be orders by the government of the day and by extension, the people who voted them in.

We also pay the taxes that make the salaries of civil servants possible. And at over one million of them, that’s a lot of taxes.

But we all know that obeying their real masters, that is, us, is not really our civil service’s calling. So whose orders are they obeying?

It’s a valid question when you see so many cases where the people’s concerns seem to be dismissed in favour of, well, who knows?

For example, why are the residents of Gebeng’s worries about the Lynas rare earth plant hardly entertained? How is it, when we are supposed to become ever more developed, we are expected to hold ourselves to lower safety standards than Australians?

When civil servants make life difficult for the people, what is that obedience for?

I read a sad story about someone who, finally, after years of trying, gave up staying in this country, where he was born and bred, because the family could not get their utilities fixed.

It might seem small but these are public amenities our taxes pay for, and we should not have to beg for them to be fixed. Why don’t we simply call ourselves a Third World country so that our expectations are not too high?

The other day I met someone who was so tired of trying to jump through the bureaucratic hoops trying to get his proposal approved that he went overseas to try and sell it. And did so with far less aggravation.

I can’t say whether his project has any merit, but I can understand his agitation at not being able to discuss facts and figures, merits and demerits without being passed from one clueless person to another.

So perhaps our bureaucracy ought to have a far more honest sign-off from now on. How about “Saya yang akan melambatkan (I who will slow things down)”?

Talking about obedience, every paper’s been abuzz about this obedient wives’ club this week. Talk about anachronistic; nobody has pushed this type of archaic concept since at least the 50s.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry to read of women degrading themselves like this, blaming everything on their own sex’s supposed inability to keep their men.

Life’s miseries are attributed to women smelling less than fragrant! Wow, who would have thought of that!

Not long ago, a male politician said the best Muslim wife is the one who would drop everything, undoubtedly even feeding the baby, every time hubby wants some nooky. He should be the patron saint of the OWC.

It does strike me as interesting that the guys who like to say these things are rarely the sort women would generally drop everything for. Do you think George Clooney ever has to even think about this?

I actually propose another club we women should join. It’s the Good Husband and Father Fan Club. Like any fan club, members will extol the virtues of the good husbands and fathers they know.

Hubbies who help at home and who do homework with their kids, for example, would qualify. If they are clean and smell nice, they would get lots of bonus points.

Each month there could be a Hubby and Father of the Month, and they would all compete for Hubby and Father of the Year.

And yes, their prowess in bed would also be a consideration

Lending credence to stories

2011-05-31T22:35:00.000+08:00

Wednesday May 25, 2011
Lending credence to stories
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

THE Americans have a term for when you’ve been fooled or had the wool pulled over your eyes. They say “you’ve been had”.

It’s not a nice term and it means that you weren’t smart enough to spot the trick.

I look at the recent kerfuffle over assumed religious attempts to take over the Government and am bewildered by the number of people who were had.

Some totally unreliable bloggers said on the Internet that a religious coup was about to take place; and like a pack of cards, any number of people fell for it.

First, it was a newspaper, which once refused to talk about any stories which appeared online first, on the basis that they cannot be true.

Then lo and behold, it fell hook, line and sinker for an Internet fabrication by these bloggers who are not known to have any objectivity at all.

So we believe the Internet when it suits us, do we?

Especially when they sensationalise stories that don’t make sense?

Whatever happened to the days when broadsheets were credited with journalistic integrity, I wonder.

I suppose it’s true that if you read rubbish, you will spew rubbish.

Hence, it was that our dear leaders, instead of being more cautious about repeating incredible stories, actually lent credence to them by saying they ought to be investigated.

I suppose engaging one’s brain before opening one’s mouth is not standard operating procedure for our politicians these days.

How wonderful to know that those we elected truly have no grey matter or even the good sense to know that to repeat dangerous nonsense is as good as endorsing them!

Only one sensible person sat down to do the numbers and proved that, even if anyone had any such intention, they could not possibly make it happen.

It simply does not add up.

In one of the most just concepts in Islam, God does nothing if one thinks of something bad, only when one actually does it.

On the other hand, one gets instant credit for thinking of something good, even without putting it into action.

Imagine how much pahala all these people could have gotten simply by thinking:

“Naah, they can’t possibly be thinking of anything so outrageous!”

I have a theory that everyone imposes on other people their own values, whether the others subscribe to them or not.

In other words, many people assume that everyone will act exactly like them if given the chance in any situation.

Therefore, one assumes that others will behave in a good or bad way because if put in the same situation, that’s exactly what one would do.

So what does it say about a person who assumes that if people of different faiths from them get together, they must surely be plotting something bad?

It means that if this person were in the same position, that is in a minority position facing much harassment from ruling authorities over one thing or another, then he would certainly be plotting to take over the country.

I suppose that’s why the American government worries about its Muslim citizens so much.

Surely, they reason, if we harass them all the time, they must be conspiring to do something bad, such as blow up a building, because that’s what we would do.

So, if half-witted so-called writers who, only by dint of their race are getting any attention at all here, were to be put in the middle of the US where they would be in the minority of minorities, then the first thing they would do is plot to overthrow the US government.

Ever heard of Don Quixote, anyone? Why, I have to ask myself, does our Government waste so much time on nonsense such as this, causing even more grief among much of its people, when there are much more important things to do?

Or is it more important to divide people with artificial issues, then to bring them together to face larger problems?

Don’t we have enough economic and social woes to keep us occupied already?

There are people who sniffed at the Middle East revolutions because we are apparently not miserable enough to revolt.

Carry on this way, and by default, life will become desperate enough to warrant rebellion.

I doubt if I’m the only one who is not interested in any government or leaders with religious-political overlays.

Rather, I would prefer leaders who have some sort of ethics in the way they handle things.

Whether the ethics come from religious beliefs doesn’t matter, so long as there are ethical underpinnings to what they do.

Is it so difficult to just be fair these days?

Is justice a moving target?

More importantly, why do we put our trust in people who think like this?

Inured to violence and death

2011-05-19T21:34:00.001+08:00

Wednesday May 11, 2011
Inured to violence and death
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Living in an environment where killing is flashed every day in the media, one can become numb to what it really means.

IN Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine, about the Columbine High School boys who gunned down their schoolmates and teachers, he postulated that one of the possible reasons they did this was that they lived in an environment that had become so used to death and killing that young people had become unable to think of these as real.

He pointed out that in the nearby area there was a factory that built cruise missiles meant to kill people thousands of miles away, death machines for distant lands and peoples.

It is perhaps true that when you live in an environment where death and destruction are beamed to you every day in the media, you become immune to what these really mean.

Tragic day: Rescuers attending to the wounded near Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, during a shooting rampage by two students in 1999. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives. — AP
Recently, an American Red Cross study among teenagers in the US found that more than 60% of them supported torture as a valid way of obtaining information from prisoners of war.

This was a far cry from the attitude of their parents and grandparents who, after World War Two, supported the 1949 Geneva Conventions that made illegal the use of torture on such prisoners.

But yet unsurprising when you consider the amount of propaganda American teenagers are subject to every day about how the information being obtained from those held in Guantanamo is what is keeping them safe from terrorists, and supposedly led to the killing of the so-called Chief Terrorist.

No wonder then that there was much champagne-pouring and patriotic jubilation when the news got out that the Chief Terrorist had been killed.

Although some were appalled at this unseemly celebration, especially at the site of the World Trade Centre, others gloated because this was exactly what some Muslims had also done when more than 3,000 people – mostly Americans, but some Muslims too – died on Sept 11, 2001.

Apparently in revenge for those earlier celebrations, one should also party now.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

But what has become of this world where we have accepted that violence and death are simply what should happen to people we don’t like, especially if they are distant and foreign? How have we managed to numb ourselves to it all?

In the aftermath of last Sunday’s events in Pakistan, a quote attributed to Dr Martin Luther King Jr travelled via social media all round the world.

“I mourn the death of thousands,” he was reported to have said, “but I do not rejoice in the death of one, even an enemy.”

It turned out that Dr King never said any such thing, or at least not in those exact words. But it is not a bad sentiment, and the fact that it went round the world so quickly does show that there are many who believe it.

I had the opportunity to visit the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Centre in Atlanta recently.

Reading the history of his life and looking at the photographs, especially of the marches against segregation, it seems incredible that only 40 years or so ago, African-Americans had to suffer the indignity of discrimination just because of the colour of their skin.

More incredible still was the violence that various state authorities used to enforce this discrimination, not to mention vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Yet Dr King and his supporters fought patiently and relentlessly against all this, without using violence. And today an African-American is President of the United States.

I wonder what Dr King would have thought of the state of affairs the world finds itself in today, where violence, death and destruction are commonplace, even as state policy.

What would he have thought of the two hours it takes to get out of his hometown’s airport if you arrive from an international destination ... because your bags have to be X-rayed three times and every single arriving passenger is treated as if he or she is potentially a suicide bomber?

Or that, the day after the Chief Terrorist died, there was a global security alert, which now seems ridiculously unfounded.

I think he would have preferred to look at what is happening in the Middle East and applaud the tenacity of Arabs, especially the young, in pushing for the freedom and democracy that African-Americans too wanted in the 60s.

Especially the fact that they are doing it peacefully, in the face of much state violence, willing to die – and indeed dying, just like Dr King – for their cause.

He would have pointed out that the so-called Chief Terrorist, because he was not interested in freedom and democracy either, was in fact more akin to unpopular dictators.

We are yet to experience any of the violence others have undergone or are going through. But let’s not underestimate the power of violent words to set the tone of the environment we live in.

Note: No reproduction of this article is allowed without the author's consent.

No knee-jerk policies, please

2011-04-29T00:19:00.001+08:00

Wednesday April 27, 2011
No knee-jerk policies, please
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Unnecessary negative publicity and ridicule can be avoided if wider consultations are held before the implementation of any plan.

I DON’T know what is more annoying, a government that doesn’t think things through or one that doesn’t and then expects us not to notice.

This past week there have been two unforgivably annoying announcements that are clear examples of a government or its officials who live in a world so isolated that they are incapable of anticipating anything but praise for their ideas.

The first was the bizarre idea that everyone should have the same e-mail address.

Taking it in their stride: Participants at the boot camp in Besut, Terengganu, doing a march. The purpose of the camp has drawn flak from many quarters.
Either whoever okayed this idea has no clue about what the Internet is all about or they were genuinely naïve enough to think that people would actually fall for this scheme.

When privacy issues are hot talking points among everyone who uses the Internet, how could the instigators of this scheme not have thought that people would immediately become suspicious about its intentions?

Would we all be suddenly subjected to government-issued spam, including those that tell us who to vote for? Worse still, would our e-mail be spied on?

All these concerns are perfectly natural if you operated like normal people and if you took the trouble to think them through.

But from the immediate backtracking that occurred, it became clear that someone had either the wool pulled over their eyes or been so dazzled by the idea that Malaysians, babies and old people included, would be inescapably connected to the government — as if with our identity cards we weren’t already trapped into the system enough.

I won’t say anything about the company that had been given the contract to do this scheme, except that they must be revising their business plan downwards every single day ever since the news broke.

There may still be people who think this is a nice idea but I doubt it’ll turn anyone into a billionaire. No, we don’t yet have a Malaysian Zuckerberg.

The next half-baked scheme was of course the “boot camp” for effeminate boys in Terengganu which has managed to offend just about anyone who read about it.

Firstly, there were questions about how and why schoolboys should be singled out just for showing outwardly “feminine” traits and sent off to camp to have these ironed out of them.

Then some confused psychology lecturer managed to anger mothers by blaming them for supposedly turning their sons soft by making them do housework.

It’s interesting that nobody blames fathers for not being there to teach their progeny to use drills and chainsaws.

Soon the back-pedalling began in earnest.

First they claimed that the camps were in fact to instil patriotism, not change the limp-wristed into tougher souls.

It begs the question of why the gentler ones should be seen as less patriotic. But given the types of politicians we have these days, I suppose extreme machismo is equated to greater patriotism.

Then it was not about patriotism but about instilling confidence. It seems that our gentler sons have less confidence than the more hard-boiled ones, perhaps because they are less inclined to try and break their heads on Friday nights screaming down city streets on their motorbikes.

I would, however, argue that it takes great confidence to pluck one’s eyebrows and take an interest in fashion in a boys’ school, so these boys hardly seem in need of confidence topping-up.

Still, they came out of it gushing over what fun the camp was. Which I’m sure it was.

The latest news contained that standard line about the media having totally misquoted the original announcement about the boot camps. How amazing that a reporter would have plucked the word “effeminate” out of thin air!

Where do they get silly ideas like that? And how is it that the denial about the sexuality selection should take a whole week to come out?

Meanwhile, of course, the news has gone round the world and once again other earthlings are laughing at us.

We did get some kudos because one minister had the temerity to condemn the entire scheme as violating the Child Act.

But generally the rest of the world thinks rightly that we’re a bunch of idiots, thanks to some state bureaucrat who forgot that news like this doesn’t stay under the coconut shell, nor that people are likely to passively nod their heads and applaud its brilliance.

Is it too much to ask that we have no knee-jerk policies but more carefully considered ones? Wouldn’t all this unnecessary negative publicity be avoided if only wider consultations had been held?

If I had been consulted, I might have laughed hysterically at first but eventually I would have given wise counsel: save the money and just encourage our kids, all of them, to be who they are. They’ll love us in return.

Note: No reproduction of this article is allowed without the author's consent.

In defence of women’s rights

2011-04-14T14:56:00.000+08:00

================================
IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday April 13, 2011
In defence of women’s rights
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

We have long been told that human rights has no place in religion, especially Islam, so it was an incredibly profound experience to listen to imams saying that it is crucial to defend human rights, especially women’s rights.

WHEN things are really miserable, what we need most is hope. Sometimes that comes by meeting people who behave in unexpected ways.

I have just returned from a meeting of human rights defenders organised by the Carter Centre and Emory University in Atlanta, USA. The theme this year was Of Heaven and Earth: Religion, Belief and Women’s Rights.

To say that it was an extraordinary meeting is to put it mildly.

The participants, from all over the world, were people who fight all sorts of human rights violations, especially of women’s rights.

There was a woman journalist from Jordan who had led a campaign against honour killings (the killing of women for allegedly dishonouring their family names, sometimes just by looking at a male stranger). The campaign was so successful that today, people can be jailed for a minimum of 10 years for it.

There were those fighting for justice for the women rape victims of soldiers during the war in the “Democratic” Republic of Congo and those who successfully made more than 40,000 villages in Senegal pledge to end the horrific custom of female genital cutting (FGC).

The most astonishing aspect of the conference for me was that so many of these human rights defenders were religious leaders, both Muslims and Christians.

When for so long we have been told that human rights has no place in religion, especially Islam, it was an incredibly profound experience to listen to imams saying that it is crucial to defend human rights, especially women’s rights because the violations are in fact un-Islamic.

I listened open-mouthed as Tostan, an NGO in Senegal, a mostly Muslim country, described how for many years they had worked to educate religious leaders, tribal chiefs and “cutters” themselves that FGC is not an Islamic practice, and that there is nowhere in the Quran that says it should be performed.

Village by village they went educating people but without judging their long-held beliefs and customs.

Tostan understood that people had been doing FGC for years simply because it was tradition.

They brought together chiefs from different villages, all Muslims, where some practised FGC and some did not, thereby disproving that it was Islamic.

I listened as Imam Cherif Diop described how human rights is not incompatible at all with Islam.

A custom like FGC only brings misery, ill-health and even death to young girls. Therefore it cannot be Islamic.

Oureye, a former cutter, an immensely dignified old lady, described how she had followed her grandmother’s and mother’s roles as cutters in the village.

“Although I did not go to school, I was always keen to learn,” she said.

So when she heard that Tostan was conducting programmes to educate people on health and human rights, she joined.

What she learned from the programme led her not only to abandon FGC, even though it meant a substantial loss of income but to also become one of the best educators against FGC.

When I listened to these wonderful people, I wondered which country was really more developed.

Senegal, where there was change for the better led by religious leaders, or Malaysia, where religious leaders have no interest in bettering our lives on earth, only supposedly for the afterlife.

Indeed, recently, despite there being no Quranic or health evidence for it, our National Fatwa Council passed a fatwa that made female circumcision a must for Muslim women.

In Malaysia, although it can be done in very sterile conditions, it remains an unnecessary procedure and meant to supposedly control female sexuality.

The chair of the conference was former US President Jimmy Carter who, with his wife, have made it their mission to defend human rights everywhere.

They have programmes, for instance, in Liberia that provide access to justice to victims of the recent civil war, especially women who have suffered rape, and children born of those rapes.

The couple are profoundly religious people in the Southern Baptist Christian tradition but see defending human rights as part of their duty as Christians.

A few years ago, they left the church they had attended all their lives because it had issued a statement that wives must always submit to their husbands.

To the Carters, this was a gross violation of women’s rights.

As the former president put it: “I support human rights because I am a Christian; I am a Christian because I support human rights.”

Similarly, Professor Abdullahi An-Naim, an Islamic scholar teaching at Emory University, who had once been a political prisoner in Sudan, stressed that “I support human rights because I am a Muslim; I am a Muslim because I support human rights”.

By that he meant universal human rights, not some special Muslim version of it.

When I read of what was happening at home, where both religious leaders and politicians treat women with such disdain, I wonder if perhaps I should move to Senegal instead.

At least there I can see change for the better.

It’s not all about the politicians

2011-03-31T14:49:00.002+08:00

================================
IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
==================================

Wednesday March 30, 2011
It’s not all about the politicians
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

People are supposed to get into politics to do something for us, the people who voted them in. It’s not at all about them and what they can get out of it.

I HAVE just returned from a holiday in the pristine Scottish countryside where my head and my lungs imbibed very clean air. Unfortunately, as soon as I got home and read a local newspaper, I felt polluted again.

How do we get away with printing these lurid stuff all over the front pages? Aren’t we concerned our children might read them?

I know we’ve been through this several times before, all of it more disgusting than the last, but I keep hoping that one day our newspapers might rise above the gutter. But what am I thinking? They never do!

What is worse for me this time is that there are three personalities trying to make themselves seem like paragons of morality. At the very least, the fact of revealing this horrible video taints them with the most muddied brush there is.

I make no judgments about the contents of the video or whoever is in it. But I do question the judgment of people, politicians or not, who feel they can get away with behaviour they’d happily pass laws against as long as it affects someone else.

I’m still waiting for a politician who will state, as part of his election campaign platform, that his party will get rid of all moral policing laws, for all communities.

If we put private behaviour where it belongs, behind closed doors, there will be no opportunity to try and blackmail anyone.

But then politics is all about hypocrisy, isn’t it? It’s not about making people’s lives better by passing laws and policies that actually benefit people.

Instead it has become all about proving that someone else is dirtier than you, and therefore, relatively speaking, you come out smelling slightly rosier. At least that’s what you hope.

The truth is, there isn’t much to differentiate between one and the other; all sides smell like excrement.

Is it any wonder that when I talk to young people, I find they are so turned off by politics? They have no role models in politics anymore because almost every single one is tainted in some way. Or if not tainted, so despicably boorish and hateful that they are just as unappealing.

I don’t recall fan pages being set up for people who make insulting remarks about women in Parliament, for example. Is there a single politician on the national stage that gives any young person hope at all?

I really wonder how some people want to be remembered in history. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be remembered for having elevated your own people, whether economically or intellectually, rather than for having dragged them straight into the gutter?

Wouldn’t it be better to get accolades for taking young people to a higher plane and exploiting their potential, than making them read pornography in the papers every day?

What is the point of constantly trying to censor the Internet, supposedly to protect our children, when they can read filth in every paper?

Have we forgotten that elsewhere in the world people are dying either from natural disasters or being shot at by their own rulers, and that there is an impending nuclear disaster hovering over us?

Who cares who’s sleeping with whom when we’re all going to be glowing from radioactive fallout.

Is it too much to hope for some civility to return to our political life, where people may disagree with one another but still respect each other, where private matters stay private because ultimately we all have to go before the one Judge in the end?

I may not personally like a public figure who betrays his wife with someone else, but when it comes to politics, it’s not about him, it’s about the rest of us (though of course I would doubt his ability to make women-friendly policies).

I think that’s what’s been forgotten. That people are supposed to get into politics to do something for us, the people who voted them in. That it’s not at all about them and what they can get out of it, but what we can get out of them.

Every five years or so, we march off to the polls to make an investment in our future, not theirs. Of course, if they do well for our future, theirs is assured, too. If not, then they should be booted out.

Right now, I wish all our politicians would realise that they are all found wanting in one way or another. I can’t really think of a single one I would be thrilled to sit next to at dinner and have a scintillating conversation with.

And if they bring up sex scandals, I swear I would just get up and leave. That’s all they deserve.

Salute to heroes – and heroines

2011-03-29T19:42:00.005+08:00

================================

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

Wednesday March 16, 2011

Salute to heroes – and heroines Musings

By MARINA MAHATHIR

To the many men and women I have known over the years – some world-famous, some not – thanks for showing me the true value of life and how to cherish it.

I AM a week late for International Women’s Day, but since it is the 100th anniversary of this special day, I don’t think it matters.

I thought I would do a list of people who’ve done a lot for women over the years, who still are making an impact, and who really deserve to be recognised.

This is in no particular order and covers only those I’ve known personally. Some are world-famous, while others are not. But they all deserve mention.

1. My first dedication is actually to three women who are no longer here – Basariah, Lim and Suzana. All three were HIV-positive and died eventually of complications from AIDS-related diseases. But in their lifetimes, they taught many of us about the true value of life and how to cherish it.

2. Prof Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh who, through his microcredit programmes, has raised the incomes of so many poor women and empowered many of them to take charge of their lives. Many Grameen women have stood for local council elections and won. I hope this inspiring man will overcome his recent troubles soon.

3. Kamal Ahmad, the founder of the Asian University of Women (AUW), also in Bangladesh. The AUW is dedicated to providing tertiary education to young women from all over Asia, especially if they would never have access to such education otherwise. AUW students now come from 12 countries, including Afghanistan and Palestine, and if the recent symposium I attended in Dhaka is any indication, these girls will definitely be leaders in their countries one day.

4. My local heroines Zainah Anwar, Ivy Josiah and Datuk Ambiga Sreenivasan who have done so much for women in Malaysia, trying to protect them from violence and unjust laws. They are my mentors.

5. Nafis Sadik and Thoraya Obaid, the two immediate past heads of UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund). Both Muslim, both formidable, both great role models to younger women everywhere.

6. Mona Eltahawy, my favourite current affairs commentator, especially on the Middle East goings-on. So smart, so sharp, so passionate. An antidote to all the dull ones we have at home.

7. My late grandpa Mohd Ali Taib, who wouldn’t let his daughter, my mum, get married until she finished her studies. She started her medical studies late and finished even later after having had to repeat two years. No supporter of early marriage, he.

8. My dad, who thought I was bad at Maths because I was too lazy to think, not because I was a girl. Actually it was because I was yet to meet a good Maths teacher, which I finally did in Form 1 and have had no trouble with numbers since.

9. The boys who did A-levels with me in Britain, for finally convincing me that you’re not smart just because you’re a boy.

10. My first bosses Ayesha and Jeanette, who convinced me that women do not necessarily block other women once they have positions of power. Thanks for the early encouragement!

11. My 3R co-producer Lina Tan for helping me make an idea come true 10 years ago. We never knew how big a gap our TV programme was going to fill.

12. My 3R “girls” – Azah, Yuen, Rafidah, Tini and Celina – who now have gone on to bigger and better things, including babies, but are still dedicated to raising the awareness of young Malaysian women of what they can truly be.

13. My late friend Dalilah, who bounced through her cancer experience so cheerily that it seemed impossible that it would catch her some day. To her and all other women with cancer, whether they survived or not, I place my heart on my hand to you.

14. The female Islamic scholars I have had the privilege to learn from, including Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Amina Wadud and more recently the amazing Musdah Mulia, who have been breaking new ground for justice and equality for Muslim women so fearlessly. There are few people more courageous than women demanding justice.

15. ... and that includes Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman who fought back after being savagely raped and then founded a school because she knew that women’s empowerment depended on education.

16. The many young Malaysian women I know who are so sparklingly bright, energetic and enthusiastic that they give me hope in this country. Now, if only none of that energy is dampened by the unchanging attitudes in this country, they can actually make a difference.

17. The young women in Tahrir Square, Cairo, who changed the face of young Muslim women everywhere by challenging everyone’s idea of what Arab women are, and look like.

18. My mum, who achieved many firsts long before most women, but who continues to want to learn new things, including the Internet. I still have to learn how to be as gracious as she is, to smile at the many impertinences I have to put up with rather than rail at them and to just laugh at the self-serving antics of wannabes everywhere.

Note: No reproduction of this article is allowed without the author's consent.

Ignorance giving rise to discrimination

2011-03-04T11:46:00.000+08:00

Wednesday March 2, 2011
Ignorance giving rise to discrimination
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Much of the tension that we experience today is because of the mistrust we have for one another and also because those who have more cannot find it in their hearts to be fair to those who do not have as much.

IN THE women’s rights work that I do, the foundation of my colleagues’ and my belief regarding our rights is that there can be no justice without equality.

Where that applies to women, it’s called feminism, but it can equally apply to any oppressed group we know of.

Basically, we cannot be just to anyone if we don’t think of them as our equals.

If we don’t think some people are equal because of their sex, class, race, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, ability or age, then it would be very hard to be truly just to them.

We find it hard to compare them to ourselves, and, therefore, as deserving as ourselves of whatever rights and opportunities there are.

This is sometimes why we are in awe when people “cross barriers” to help someone outside their usual circles, like when Princess Diana visited people with HIV. It was just so unusual, that it proved the rule.

Hence, we are neglectful of people who are different from us, or worse, discriminatory. Often this comes from ignorance.

There are some of us who grow up simply unable to fathom lives different from ours. But it can also be willful and deliberate.

Much of the tension that we are experiencing today is because of the mistrust we have for one another, because those of us who have more cannot find it in our hearts to be fair and just to those who do not have as much.

Worse still, we find ways to justify why we have to behave that way.

We have come to a point in our nation’s life where we really have to think about where we are headed.

Are we going to perpetually think of ourselves as so exceptional and different from everyone else that we don’t have to meet normal human standards?

Do we have to be so defensive that we only see what we want and are blind to any other point of view?

Today, I read about some people who objected when a non-Muslim began his speech with the traditional Muslim greeting of peace.

Apparently, this was considered offensive because it was sensitive.

Honestly, this is the sort of thing that makes me want to give up on this country, that there are idiots who have the temerity to call themselves leaders at all.

As any child knows, assalamualaikum means “peace be with you”.

It is the most benign and civil of greetings, welcoming and warm.

If meant sincerely, it means that you have come in peace and wish to conduct yourself in a peaceful way.

In the Arab world, everybody uses this greeting. They certainly never, as Malaysians did at one time, differentiate between who they could say it to, and whom they couldn’t.

It is not a greeting patented by Muslims or owned by God.

So, intelligent right-thinking Muslims should be very welcoming when a non-Muslim uses it because it means they have come in peace. And you can hold them to that.

So why make war out of it? How come when President Barack Obama used the same greeting when he went to Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, nobody objected?

Why, if he went to Penang and did the same thing, no doubt there would be appreciative applause and pleased shuffling, too.

I don’t know what world we live in that we think we are so special that nobody can hold a candle to us.

We look in distaste when Arabs protest, but when we see that it’s peaceful, we say that they must be mature people, unlike we here who are so incapable of protesting peacefully that we need to be censured before we even step out of our homes.

Students and young people around the Arab region are liberating their countries from tyranny and oppression, and ours are deemed too untrustworthy to even talk about politics.

The image we seemingly want to present to the world is one of gross intolerance of anything that doesn’t fit into the small narrow hole we call Malaysian.

At the same time, we seem to be proud of our immaturity. Do we actually tell foreigners that our students are too immature to be trusted to discuss politics? And we’re proud of it?

How do we explain to puzzled foreigners, including Arabs who actually speak the language, that we think some of their words are exclusive to us only?

Right now, the coolest nationality to be is Egyptian. It means young, democratic, inclusive and free.

In Wisconsin, where people are protesting against a state government that is taking away their union rights, there are signs that say “Fight like an Egyptian”. Imagine that.

When will the rest of the world want to be Malaysian?

Let’s adore our beloveds daily

2011-02-21T12:27:00.002+08:00

Wednesday February 16, 2011
Let’s adore our beloveds daily
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Unless prompted, most of us forget about romance in our lives. Everybody needs some, and there is no need to restrict it to only a certain day in the year.

WE often bemoan the intense politicking between our political parties where neither side will ever agree with whatever the other side says.

But occasionally there is bi-partisan cooperation on issues. Unsurprisingly they cooperate on sin. Or, anti-sin if you like.

Recently, the Youth wing of PAS announced that Muslims should not celebrate Valentine’s Day and instead lead a sin-free life.

Not long after, the government department Jakim announced that it would launch an anti-Valentine’s Day campaign to persuade Muslims to lead a life sans sin.

First of all, wouldn’t it be nice if we could all lead lives without any sin at all? Why, this would obviate the need for Judgment Day, and even heaven and hell.

We would all live our lives never telling a single lie, never betraying friends and family, never asking for payola or paying off anyone to get something.

I don’t recall ever a time in history where people lived in such bliss but I suppose we should not stop hoping.

Secondly, there are certainly 365 days a year (less in a Muslim year) to both commit sins or not to, so it hardly seems efficient to concentrate so much time, energy and effort on just one.

Why, if I were a smart sinner, I’d just postpone my romantic dinner with my husband by one day. Although I still don’t understand why going on a date with my husband should be considered a sin. I thought that was why I signed on the dotted line.

Isn’t that why we encourage young girls to sign up for marriage, so that they would stop sinning, the little hussies? So the dating would become kosher?

I do agree, however, that we should not focus all our passion on our loved one (or several) on just one day in a year.

We should instead spread it out so that our beloveds feel adored every day. That is, if they don’t feel smothered instead.

Perhaps our problem is that, unless prompted, most of us forget about romance in our lives. Everybody needs some, and why restrict it to certain days in the year?

Instead of having an anti-Valentine’s Day campaign, I propose that Jakim (and PAS, too, if they’d like to) do a year-long one on love.

The campaign could have some catchy name, like “How Do I love Thee, Let Me Count the Ways” (and there should be at least 365 romantic ideas). Or, “What’s Love Got To Do With It? Romancing the Halal Way.”

Or, in tune with our current government slogan, “1Love.” This however might be problematic for those who may have more than one beloved in their lives.

But campaign slogans may not be enough, especially when people don’t understand what they actually stand for. What we therefore need are role models. People whom everyone can look up to as fine examples of perfect halal sin-free love.

In this case, who would be better suited for these roles than our religious leaders themselves?

Presumably they all have wives they love. Therefore they should lead these campaigns by giving talks on how they express their love for their wives.

Every single day, of course. It would be instructive for the rest of us, not to mention rivetting.

I’d love to know how PAS youth make their women feel special. Do they compliment them on their looks, or on their cooking skills? For those with wives who work outside the home, do they take them out for a celebratory meal (and thus give them a day off from the kitchen) when they get promoted?

How do Jakim officers fete their wives? On birthdays and anniversaries, what do they give their lovies? Since sexiness by one’s spouse is very much allowed, do they shop the Victoria’s Secret catalogue for risqué undies? Apparently it’s well documented that apart from diamond rings, sexy undies always work.

Lest anyone think I’m mocking anyone, I am dead serious. You can’t take away a fun activity like Valentine’s Day without giving a suitable alternative.

It is simply not enough to say that since Valentine’s Day leads to sin, you must just do something unsinful. There needs to be more pro-active ideas than that.

Give examples of unsinful things a loving couple could get up to, especially if they are married. What would be suitable replacements for a bouquet of roses, a box of chocolates or a teddy bear, for example? And where would be good dinner venues, those with presumably bright lights and religious music?

And what advice would they give on how to douse passions that such evenings might arouse?

All of us long-time marrieds are waiting with bated breath. After all we want to go to heaven, too.

Winds of change beckon in Egypt

2011-02-02T10:41:00.002+08:00

Wednesday February 2, 2011
Winds of change beckon in Egypt
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

It started in Tunisia and has now spread to Egypt. People are revolting against longstanding leaders who have ruled with iron fists and lived in opulence while the masses suffer with soaring unemployment and a rising cost of living.

WHOEVER said the Year of the Rabbit would be a gentle one?

In Tunisia, a small act of desperation literally sparked off historic changes.

A young man called Mohamad Bouazizi, educated but only able to earn a living selling fruit and vegetables at an illegal stall, set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated it.

Mohamad symbolised all the young and disenfranchised in Tunisia, frustrated by the huge gap between them and the extremely wealthy elite, and thus sparked large protests.

In less than a month, the much-hated President and his family were out and Tunisia is now in the throes of transition to a new government, the shape of which nobody quite knows yet.

Whatever it becomes, Tunisia’s people revolt had inspired others.

Smaller protests started to spring up in Algeria, Jordan and Yemen.

And then Egypt, with the largest population in the Middle East – 80 million, suddenly caught fire.

We have to realise that people don’t revolt just to be trendy. The Middle East has been ripe for this for a long time.

Long-standing leaders rule them with iron hands, rigging votes as well as disallowing their people of much freedom.

Some use religion as the basis for such repression.

But such leaders can slowly go blind and deaf.

Many of them fail to notice that their population, which comprise the younger generation mostly, are the ones who are facing a desperate unemployment situation.

According to the International Labour Organisation, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has the worst unemployment problem in the world.

In Egypt, 58% of the population is under 25 years old.

In 2003 it had the highest unemployment rate in the world, at 25.6%, and there is an additional 500,000 unemployed each year.

Across the Arab world, the unemployment rate stands at 20%.

This translates to 22 million people, out of which 60% are youth.

Much of this unemployment is attributed to the failure of most Arab countries to link education to the needs of the job market.

As we can see from the events in Egypt right now, nothing could be more dangerous for leaders than to educate young people for jobs that do not exist.

Couple that with a failing economy which depletes people’s already low standards of living and a refusal to address those issues, then you provide kindling dry enough to be set alight with any match.

And it doesn’t even have to be an internal one.

This should be a lesson for leaders everywhere.

More than anything, people’s dignity and self-respect is important.

In this light, a job and the ability to provide for one’s family is part of that personal dignity.

When people are unemployed, it is not because they are lazy and choosy.

It is because there are no jobs or none that matches their educational attainments.

How humiliating it is to be forced, like Mohamad Bouazizi, to take a job selling vegetables in a market when you are an educated person.

But only leaders who are willing to listen to people will understand the need for such dignity.

If at the same time, a leader is seen as not only unwilling to listen but also greedy and corrupt, living in unashamed opulence as Tunisia’s former President and his wife did while his people had so little, then there will come a time when the patience of the people will run out.

Malaysians may shake their heads at the riots in Egypt.

But it has to be understood that the desperation and frustration of Egyptians far exceeds anything we have ever known.

And after brutal repression all these years, to go out on the streets to demand a return of their dignity is an act of courage which we rarely have to show.

Egyptians and their Arab counterparts are not scared of dying to gain freedom.

That is what’s frightening every single leader across the region now.

Especially since even the police and army, crucial to maintaining power, are also rebelling.

I am appalled at the silence on our side at this historic moment, apart from ensuring our students are safe.

Indeed, most world leaders have been caught off-guard and dumbfounded by this.

Some big powers are even trying to hedge their bets, not quite supporting their old friends while trying to encourage the people’s revolt.

After all, they had been supporting undemocratic regimes and now democracy has a chance to bloom without their help at all.

And the countries they have invaded for the sake of “democracy” are not doing that well either.

We should watch closely this historic moment in the MENA and learn the many lessons from there.

And let us never think that such a revolution can’t happen here.

As MENA leaders are finding, never be foolish enough to say never.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Resolutions for one and all

2011-01-10T08:46:00.000+08:00

Wednesday January 5, 2011
Resolutions for one and all
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

Malaysians from the famous to the not so famous and the man in the street ought to resolve this year to making the country be a better place for all. Here are some suggestions.

IT’S the New Year and, as with convention, we should really make resolutions, even though the chances of keeping them are slim.

I get more half-hearted about making them each year although my list nowadays tends to be short and realistic, with a 50% chance of being kept.

I do however like to indulge in making lists for other people.

For my children, I wish they would resolve to work harder at school and be tidier. For my colleagues and friends, I wish that they (and I) could brush aside small problems and concentrate on the big ones.

Needless to say, I can’t help but wish for resolutions from our various public figures, particularly those in government. Here’s a list, in no particular order.

I wish that our Government would resolve to:

1. Slap down rather than merely slapping the wrists of those public figures and politicians who misbehave. Just say “that’s nonsense and we won’t stand for it!” rather than the wishy-washy “we must investigate” reaction. Or worse still, complete silence.

2. Stop twisting words in order to spin what’s wrong into what’s right.

3. Stop using simpering journalists to interview politicians because they do a great job of convincing the public that both they and their interviewees are nothing but idiots.

4. Stop demonising people who are critical and calling them traitors when they probably love their country more than most.

5. Stop being afraid of those who think that getting ahead means getting handouts for everything in the belief that this will let them stand tall.

6. Do the right thing even when it may make them unpopular for a while. Ban plastic bags. Push for safer sex. Outlaw child marriages.

7. Remind some people that they are paid by taxpayers to do their job and that does not entitle them to act as if they are God’s representatives on earth.

8. In fact, I truly wish we could just forget about having to use taxpayers’ money to pay anyone who is likely to believe they are God’s representatives on earth.

9. Allow more consultation with people on the ground who know what communities need for their own development. Maybe have a policy that ensures that absolutely nobody is marginalised for any reason.

10. Overhaul the entire education system to make it more open, democratic, and at par with the best in the world. And completely eradicate politics from it.

11. Make sports and the arts as important as economic development because we need to have a country with soul.

12. Ban the habit of giving titles to sports, arts and entertainment figures until they’re at least 50 or have had significant achievements in their field for a number of years. Roger Federer has been No 1 in the tennis world for a record-breaking 237 weeks and the Swiss government still hasn’t made him a Datuk.

I wish politicians would resolve to:

1. Stop politicking and concede that sometimes the other side can be right.

2. Work together more on issues that affect everyone. Australia’s successful HIV programme worked well because from the very beginning, the government and opposition decided it was a bipartisan issue.

3. Be more self-reflective. And breathe before they say anything.

4. Get rid of sexism everywhere it is found, especially in political parties, in Parliament and State Assemblies and in general commentary.

5. Come out and unequivocally condemn violence against women, no ifs, no buts.

6. Publicly shake the hand of an HIV-positive adult.

I wish the police would resolve to:

1. Ticket every single person who double and triple park on Fridays and not excuse them just because they are apparently communing with God. Or, watching football.

2. Stop finding parangs in the cars of every single person who accuses them of wrongdoing.

3. Stop shrugging their shoulders every time someone complains of their bags being snatched, laptops stolen etc. Police reports aren’t just for claiming insurance or getting new ICs done.

I wish Malaysians in general would:

1. Use their car signal lights for a change

2. Queue

3. Park in the right places, dead straight and not encroach onto empty spots.

4. Not double and triple park in front of mosques on Fridays and think that God is OK with it.

5. Stop waiting for someone else to do something

6. Stop putting down people who do something

7. Stop reading so much gossip and trash. It really doesn’t reflect well on us.

8. Stop believing everything they read. Just because it’s on the Internet really doesn’t make it truer.

9. Register to vote if they haven’t yet.

10. Remember that their votes are valuable and should not be given away on empty promises.

Happy 2011, folks!

Diversity is our great wealth

2010-12-23T10:42:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday December 22, 2010
Diversity is our great wealth
Musings by MARINA MAHATHIR

Malaysian Muslims need to travel more, even within the Muslim world just to see its diversity. Muslims all over the world have just as many different cultures and traditions as they do similarities.

I was really hoping to end the year on a happier note. But in a very fractious year, there is simply no let-up. The long list of intolerance and human rights abuse continues unabated.

We live in a country of a great diversity. Our people are of many different ethnicities and religions. That is our great wealth and strength and undoubtedly we have managed to live better with that diversity for more than 50 years.

Now, however, diversity is a fact that can’t even be acknowledged.

What does plurality mean? It just means that we are not homogenous, that we have many different streams among our people, whether it’s ethnic makeup, beliefs or opinions.

Being plural is just a statement of fact, not a judgement call on which of these streams are better than the other.

Yet, there are people warning us about the dangers of pluralism, because apparently pluralism makes equal what they believe is not. Where they got this is not stated.

All of us believe that our religion is the best one. But the fact that other religions exist is something we have to accept.

In parts of the world, our religion is not accepted and indeed discriminated against. If we complain about that, is it not hypocritical for us to do the same at home?

In the Quran, God talks about believers and defines them this way: “Believers are only they whose hearts tremble with awe whenever God is mentioned, and whose faith is strengthened whenever His messages are conveyed unto them, and who in their Sustainer place their trust.” (Surah Al-Anfal, Verse 2).

Can we seriously go around and decide who are believers and who are not? And even if we could, can we do anything about it? As God says, “Behold, God lets go. Astray him who will (to go astray), just as He guides unto Himself all who turn unto Him” (Surah Al-R’ad, Verse 27).

Nor does pluralism refer only to us and the other but also within our own communities. How is it we can be so intolerant even of those within our own fold, unless we don’t know our own religion?

“All believers are but brethren. Hence, (whenever they are at odds) make peace between your two brethren, and remain conscious of God, so that you might be graced with His mercy.” (Surah Al-Hujarat, Verse 10).

And yet, our leaders are calling us to hound people whose beliefs differ from ours, even when their roots go back to the same source as ours.

Sometimes, I think Malaysian Muslims need to travel more, even within the Muslim world, just to see its diversity.

Muslims all over the world have just as many different cultures and traditions as they do similarities.

Not everybody does things exactly the way we do it. Yet their core beliefs, what makes them Muslims, are all the same.

So who are we to decide whether they are wrong or not?

More practically speaking, if we insist that Shiites are deviants, then how do we explain the Islamic Republic of Iran and its membership in the OIC? Or is inconsistency simply part of politics?

Not only are we a plural society in terms of race, religion and within religion itself, we are also plural in other ways, including sexuality.

Here again we go against our own core beliefs in order to act out our own prejudices.

If we believe that God determines everything, then surely our sexuality is not a matter of choice either.

Therefore, if we did not choose to be heterosexual, it stands to reason that nobody chose to be homosexual either. In this way, we are equal before the Divine.

How then does this justify the type of savage discrimination that some of us insist must be inflicted against those of minority sexualities?

If we persecute every single gay man, woman and child in this country, would God guarantee that no disaster will ever befall us henceforth?

If I sound frustrated, it is because I am completely tired of the abhorrently arrogant way that those in authority have conducted themselves in the past year.

Somehow supremacist beliefs about just about everything is gaining ground, not just about race and religion but also about gender, sexuality, age, disability and everything else not considered the “norm”.

Those of us who complain about discrimination and abuse become the ones who are branded irreligious.

Did we forget this verse? “O men! Behold, We have created you all out of males and females, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another”. (Surah Al-Hujarat, Verse 13).

Could there be nothing clearer about a pluralistic world?

Try and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everyone!

For enlightenment, do read this http://www.ammanmessage.com/

Marriage is not about legalising sex

2010-12-08T10:01:00.000+08:00

Wednesday December 8, 2010
Marriage is not about legalising sex
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Worldwide society is moving towards banning child marriages altogether. A child bride is utterly dependent on her husband, being less educated and unable to earn her own income.

WHEN a mainstream newspaper puts a front-page photo of a 14-year-old bride with no comment at all, then there is something seriously sick with our society.

Despite signing on to the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) we are still allowing child marriages to happen with the pretext that religion allows it.

What has child marriage got to do with discrimination against women? When child marriages occur, it is almost always girls who are the ones married off, rarely ever boys.

And in almost all cases, they are married to much older men, sometimes old enough to be their grandfathers. Child marriage is therefore never one of equality because how can a child ever be an equal partner to her adult husband?

One might argue about the presumption of equality in marriage; that wives should be, by default, inferior to their husbands. Even if this is a valid belief (and it is not), doesn’t a girl child have even more odds stacked against her than an adult wife?

A child bride is even more dependent on her husband than most adult wives, being less educated and unable to earn her own income. Her entire future is in his hands, to be decided as he wills.

I have to ask, what sort of parents match-make their underage daughter to an older man, albeit one who is a family friend? Do they have so little ambition for their child?

I know how parents, especially mothers, fall “in love” with young men they think would be ideal for their daughters, but is it so important to grab a man as a husband for such a young daughter instead of waiting for her to grow up and, who knows, find a better one herself later?

Or is the idea to control your child’s life to such a degree that you dictate her future before she can even acquire the means to decide on her own?

It is entirely sick that there are religious officials who view child marriage as the answer to “social problems”. What problems are they talking about? Is sex outside marriage the greatest evil there is? Is not child marriage with its virtual enslavement of girls, its proven physical damage to girls’ bodies and the utter lack of preparedness for a life of responsibility not a bigger social evil?

Every day in the papers we see endless horrifying results of irresponsibility in marriage; abandoned wives and children, domestic violence, child abuse. Aren’t those greater issues?

Has anyone even noticed that in cases of child abuse, the parent perpetrators are invariably young and saddled with several young children who they obviously view as a hindrance to their enjoyment of life?

Go visit an orphanage and see the many children there who are not orphans but have been either discarded by their parents or have been placed there by the courts because of abuse by their own parents.

Is marriage only about legalising sex? And therefore if anyone is in “danger” of having illegal sex they should be married off regardless of age?

Indeed, when we think of child marriages as a way of fending off “social evils”, who do we think is the would-be perpetrator of that evil? Is it not the groom? So, if he does legally what in all other cases would be called rape, he is all right?

In other countries, society is moving towards banning child marriages altogether. Even in super-conservative Saudi Arabia, a member of the Senior Council of Ulema said that the Prophet Mohammed’s marriage to a nine-year-old girl some 14 centuries ago cannot be used to justify child marriages today.

Sheikh Abdullah Al-Manie said that circumstances today are different from the days when the Prophet married Aisha. (Other scholars have also argued that Aisha was not nine but 19, which seems to indicate some defensiveness about this issue.)

In Indonesia, a Muslim cleric who married a 12-year-old girl was jailed four years for sexual abuse of a minor.

He said he was not going to sleep with her until she reached puberty, but few in the predominantly Muslim nation of 237 million were mollified, especially when he went on to say he also intended to marry two other girls, aged seven and nine.

Paedophilia is paedophilia no matter what the garb.

But of course we in Malaysia have to be different. Once upon a time we talked about how our grandmothers married very young but we also dismissed this as an old-fashioned practice.

In the 21st century when we’re trying to become a modern nation, why are we not ashamed that we find excuses to allow child marriages?

It is now time to just ban this outright and become civilised.

Of orphans and orphanages

2010-11-30T08:57:00.000+08:00

Wednesday November 24, 2010
Of orphans and orphanages
MUSINGS BY MARINA MAHATHIR

Children in orphanages, some of whom have parents, bring much emotional baggage to their new ‘homes’, baggage that is often not dealt with at all.

AMID our outcry about babies being dumped, there is one thing we forget. Those children who live need our attention, too.

Recently I went to visit what I thought was an orphanage. An orphanage, to me, is where orphans – children with no parents – live. As it turned out, I was to learn a lot about orphans and orphanages.

According to my host, orphans make up only a small percentage of the inhabitants of orphanages. The rest of the children who live there do have parents but are forced to live apart from them for various reasons.

Many have only one parent, usually the mother, who simply cannot afford to care for them. Some parents have moved on in their lives and just didn’t have space for their kids.

Still others actually have two parents but have been ordered by the court to live away from them because of abuse.

It’s hard to decide which are the saddest cases. One girl had lost both parents in a car accident, after which the courts gave custody of her and her siblings to their mother’s relatives.

Sadly, this did not make their lives better because their relatives apparently only wanted their inheritance. Once the inheritance was gone, they were shunted off to the orphanage.

Perhaps the relatives had never heard of the Quranic verse 4:2: “Hence, render unto the orphans their possessions, and do not substitute bad things [of your own] for the good things [that belong to them], and do not consume their possessions together with your own: this, verily, is a great crime.”

Another girl had been there for five years, even though in fact she had parents who were divorced. Each holiday she went “home” but because her father ignored her, it was always an unhappy visit.

By all accounts, this is a good orphanage because it is not over-crowded and the children are well fed, cared for and go to school. It is also open to motivational programmes, which was why I visited and talked to the girls.

Other orphanages are filled to the brim with kids from so many different backgrounds.

Some are true orphans, some are not; many have been abused.

What is certain is that they all bring much emotional baggage to their new “homes”, baggage which is often not dealt with at all.

We often see in the newspapers cute kids being taken on outings to the zoo, movies and other treats. But rarely do we enquire into the backgrounds of these kids to find out their stories.

It is probably that enquiry that they need most, for someone to ask them why they are there. If their stories are not dealt with, their emotional scars will not be revealed and they cannot heal.

Many years ago, a family friend from the United States adopted a little girl from an orphanage here.

When she returned to the States, she made it known that her new daughter had siblings who were also up for adoption.

A friend of hers adopted the brother and sister and everyone thought it would be a happy ending because all the siblings were living close to each other.

Sadly, both families went through years of difficulties with these children who for some reason did not feel secure enough to think of their new homes as permanent.

Who knows what caused them to think of running away from a safe comfortable home?

The last I heard, my friend’s daughter, now in her 20s, had finally stabilised and settled down, but I don’t know what happened to her siblings.

Having met the girls recently at the orphanage, I now realise that there is a wide range of child abuse. While the more visible forms of physical abuse are easy to spot, we don’t see the invisible forms, such as the emotional abuse that they may have undergone, sometimes by their own parents.

The question is, what do we do for these children? Are we really looking after all these children and helping them so that they may have an equal footing with kids who are luckier?

Children who have suffered violence and abuse, including sexual abuse, tend to go on to become violent and abusive adults. What do we do to prevent that?

What do we do to protect their rights? According to UN statistics, there are 410,000 orphans, presumably only those with no parents, in Malaysia. Curiously, we have no figures for how many are in school.

These days, with so many reports of fatal motor accidents, I wonder how many children they orphan and what really happens to them afterwards? How do we ensure justice for kids like these?

Nov 20 was Universal Children’s Day and the 21st anniversary of the Convention of the Rights of the Child.

Sign up at www.uniteagainstabuse.my if you think no child should be abused.

Are we disasterâ€™d out?

2010-11-12T10:00:00.000+08:00

Wednesday November 10, 2010
Are we disasterâ€™d out?
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Most people feel overwhelmed by the numbers and scale of disasters and then feel paralysed. But every little bit helps, even if it is only RM10 or two T-shirts.

IN A short space of time thereâ€™s been a tsunami and an ongoing volcanic eruption in Indonesia as well as floods in Kedah and Perlis.

Further afield, there have also been floods in Pakistan and typhoons and hurricanes elsewhere, including the already suffering Haitians yet to recover from their earthquake early this year.

Despite this litany of natural disasters, so many of us have been barely able to lift a finger to do anything about them.

Blame it perhaps on the economic crisis that has made everyoneâ€™s wallet a lot leaner.

Or just that itâ€™s been too much all at once. Whatever it is, people are not being as generous as they once were.

A couple of years ago when floods hit Johor, I organised a collection of clothes, food and other sundries to be sent to the victims there.

My office was quickly filled with donations and we even got help from a packing company and an airline to send the things down.

This time Iâ€™m hard put to know which disaster area to organise collections for.

There are some people whose natural reaction is to put our own citizens first.

Recently, my young friend Yeoh Ee Ping put up a video appeal for any volunteers to go up north with her and her brother to help with relief and clean-up work.

Nobody has responded, except to say they cannot go.

Perhaps itâ€™s because few know Ee Ping. I do.

She is an enthusiastic young woman who is active at college in many activities while waiting to go for further studies abroad on a JPA scholarship.

Her family is a warm and supportive one, always encouraging her to do community service.

I met her online and then face-to-face and found her and her family genuine people.

So, when Ee Ping decided to go up north to help, she was serious about it.

She had organised contacts and accommodation for herself and her brother and left by bus on Monday for Kangar.

I am amazed her parents are allowing them both to go up on their own but then they know of her determination and trust her.

Such a story should inspire everyone.

But few people seem to be.

Perhaps other people have work and school to attend to.

But at the very least there should be donations being handed over for Ee Ping to take up.

Or maybe because of the long weekend, nobody had seen the appeal.

These days when we read of so many different disasters, itâ€™s hard to know which to support.

Our fellow citizens need help and floods are indeed awful, but when you read of hot gas rushing down mountains burning entire villages in its wake, you also feel for the poor villagers around Mount Merapi.

You also feel for those in the remote regions of Pakistan displaced by floods, so much more numerous than ours and with so much less help reaching them, obstructed by geography, government inefficiency and politics.

How does one choose and what help is appropriate?

Most people feel overwhelmed by the numbers and scale of disasters and then feel paralysed.

But the trouble is, if everyone feels immobilised, then nobody will help.

What we need to understand is that every little bit helps, that even if we can only donate RM10 or two T-shirts, itâ€™s still good.

Perhaps what relief agencies need to do is, instead of saying that they need large amounts of money or goods, to reduce the appeal to bite-sized contributions.

For example, to say what a certain amount of money would get one child.

I find people respond much better to this, when we can put a face to a disaster or make the relief needs human-sized.

A few years ago, I launched an online appeal to help a Timor Leste girl who needed a heart operation.

When I compared the small donation per person needed to one roti canai or pizza meal, people responded well and we raised the required money in no time.

A few years later, when I made a Christmas appeal for funds to help with the education of the same girl and 16 of her fellow orphans, the response was much more reluctant.

Perhaps the media should also broadcast more free appeals along with phone numbers of the relief agencies helping out.

This would raise awareness of the different disasters and what help was needed.

Itâ€™s not that people are not generous but that the sheer scale of the many disasters has paralysed them into inaction.

All they need is a little motivation.

Please contact your nearest Red Crescent or Mercy Malaysia office to see how you can help.

> Surf http://redcrescent.org.my/drupal/node/36 for contact details of Red Crescent state offices or call its national headquarters at 03-4257 8122, Disaster Management Centre at 03-4260 3242, or e-mail secgen@redcrescent.org.my.

The Red Crescent Society also has a Malaysia Relief Flood Fund. Donations, which are tax-exempted, can be banked into its Maybank Account No: 5144-2210-7228.

Mercy Malaysia can be contacted at 03-2273 3999 or e-mail info@mercy.org.my.

Stereotypes still abound

2010-10-31T08:59:00.000+08:00

Wednesday October 27, 2010
Stereotypes still abound
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

Although women have made great strides in Asia, there are still many areas in which they lag far behind, most notably in political participation.

AS PART of my work, both as a columnist and as an activist, I have to read a lot.

I read to learn and to inform what I say and do.

It takes time, but it needs to be done because when youâ€™re involved in the business of persuading people, you need a lot of information in order to stand your ground.

It so happens that this year has really been a year of gender reports.

There was the UNDP Asia Pacific Human Development Report with the theme Power, Voice and Rights: A Turning Point for Gender Equality in Asia and the Pacific, then the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap report 2010 and also the Global Media Monitoring Project 2010 report that focuses on the issue of gender in the media.

These reports provide a lot of information.

For instance, the UNDP report says that although women have made great strides in Asia, there are still many areas in which they lag far behind.

There are still many â€œmissingâ€ girls in the birth rates of East Asian countries leading to issues of sex discrimination; 106 boys are born for every 100 girls.

In many Asian countries, between 40% and 65% of female employment is in agriculture, yet women head only 7% of farms in Asia, compared with a global average of 20%.

On the whole, the majority of Asian women are mostly in â€œvulnerableâ€ employment such as in the informal economy or in low-end self-employment, subject to economic vagaries.

Furthermore, women generally earn less than men in Asia-Pacific countries, between 54% and 90% of menâ€™s income.

When it comes to political participation, despite having had several female heads of state, women are poorly represented.

The Asia-Pacific region contains the second-lowest percentages of women parliamentarians in the world â€“ the Arab region has the lowest.

Only about one-third of Asia-Pacific countries have a gender quota in place for Parliament.

The World Economic Forumâ€™s Gender Gap report says pretty much the same thing.

In its report on Malaysia, which ranks 98 out of 134 countries, the only areas in which women exceed men is in tertiary education enrolment and in life expectancy.

In all other areas, women still lag behind men, most notably in political participation where only 10 of our parliamentarians are female and only two women are in the Cabinet, ranking us only 110 in the world.

Also interesting is the Global Media Monitoring Project Report that looks at gender bias in news coverage all around the world and publishes its report every five years.

Generally speaking, although there have been small increases in womenâ€™s visibility in the global media over the last five years, overall, â€œthe quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered has revealed that women are grossly underrepresented in news coverage in contrast to men â€¦ the studies have shown a paucity of womenâ€™s voices in news media content in contrast to menâ€™s perspectives, resulting in news that presents a male-centric view of the worldâ€.

Only 24% of the people heard or read about in the news are women.

Thus, although many countries including Malaysia, have a lot of women presenters and reporters, the reins of power in the media are often held by men who decide what news would be covered.

Women reporters are often relegated to soft stories and rarely assigned to the hard political and economic stories.

Furthermore, when experts and professionals are quoted, they are rarely women.

Instead women are often covered as victims or â€œordinaryâ€ people, rarely people with special knowledge on any issue.

Given this very extreme gender imbalance in the news, it is hardly surprising that stereotypes of women abound and that gender issues are rarely covered.

As the media have a large influence on the way a society is informed and educated, the lack of coverage of womenâ€™s issues thus leads to a situation where there is a lack of awareness of those issues or, at best, only marginal interest.

Reading these reports gives you an idea of what momentous challenges still lie ahead for women everywhere, even with the achievements we have made.

While our leaders may insist that Malaysian women are in fact doing very well, when benchmarked against other countries, we realise that we really have nothing to shout about.

In the Global Gender Gap report, there are only 36 countries out of 134 who are worse off than us.

We are the lowest-ranked Asean country; the Philippines is the highest-ranked at number 9!

Gender gaps clearly have nothing to do with economic status.

Our work has to start from the evidence before us.

That is what informs and inspires us. Therefore I am puzzled as to why Puteri Umno should choose to tout the issue of sanitary pad commercials as the root of social ills.

Have they not read anything?

An idea least likely to work

2010-10-20T08:57:00.000+08:00

Wednesday October 13, 2010
An idea least likely to work
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

There is no point in trying to counter prejudice and hate. We need to unpack some of those beliefs about Muslims and show how untrue they are.

AS IDEAS go, this one ranks among those I would categorise as â€œleast likely to workâ€. In a fit of helpfulness, our leader decided to offer the Leader of the Free World a slew of lecturers to counter Islamophobia in the United States.

In a follow-up fit of help-the-boss-itis, other leaders piped up about how great our lecturers are and how perfect they would be in countering manic hate against Islam in the US because, after all, they used to lecture there.

I do wish people would wake up from whatever drugged sleep they are under. There are just so many things wrong with this suggestion that I hardly know where to begin. But let me try.

First of all, the last people to counter prejudice of any sort are lecturers, for the simple reason that nobody likes being lectured to, least of all by foreigners espousing a religion they regard as uncivilised.

Are people like that pastor who wanted to burn Qurans seriously going to flock to listen to a lecture on Islam and then come out preaching peace and love towards Muslims? In all likelihood, our lecturers are going to preach literally to the converted.

Secondly, the assumption seems to be that if they should get an audience at all, our lecturers will be greeted with a passive one, just like our students.

But what are they going to do if they meet up with a hostile and vocal audience? What happens if all their lectures are met with demonstrators holding up the vilest placards on Islam? Call our embassy?

The truth is our people here have no idea what Islamophobia is and how it manifests itself. Islamophobes â€“ just like Christianophobes, HinduÂphobes and Buddhistphobes â€“ are not amenable to reason and facts but would rather delve into scurrilous beliefs.

I met someone once who asked me why Muslims liked to cut off peopleâ€™s heads. Thatâ€™s the sort of stuff Islamophobes like to say. No point in quoting the Quran there.

In fact, Iâ€™m not sure there is any point in trying to counter such prejudice and hate. But if we really want to, we need to unpack some of those beliefs about us and show them how untrue they are.

For instance, one of the many points held against Muslims is that we oppress our women. So the way to counter that is not to send male lecturers who will undoubtedly get defensive about this issue but to send bright young and articulate women who are doing things people donâ€™t normally associate with Islam.

Send female fighter pilots, artists, mountain climbers, activists and the like and get them spots with the most popular talkshow hosts. There is no need to talk about religion at all; just talk about the amazing things they do. The point will be made.

Another charge often made against Muslim countries is that we are undemocratic. Here I donâ€™t think we should even dream of trying to defend every single Muslim country in the world, least of all those which donâ€™t have elections, jail dissidents and ban the Internet.

We should just concentrate on showing off our own record, although that record is very spotty indeed.

If we are going to send lecturers, we should at least make sure they know how to respond credibly to questions about our various laws seen as undemocratic, if that is at all possible. Perhaps training on how to talk to reporters from Fox TV might be useful.

And let us not underestimate the influence of the US media on Americansâ€™ perceptions of Islam. While some media may try to be fair, there are many media commentators who are unashamedly IslamoÂphobic, and popular because of it.

It would be ludicrous to try and counter talkhosts like Rush LimÂbaugh or Glenn Beck, although it may be fun to watch one set of rabid demagogues go up against another.

The truth is: Who are we to speak for the entire Muslim world? We may say we are peaceful people but then some people from another Muslim country might blow up a few of their country folk, and our credibility along with them.

We may say we have regular elections and then someone would point at those countries ruled by ridiculously wealthy royal families. We may show off our educated women and someone would bring up the torched girlsâ€™ schools in AfghaÂnistan.

So letâ€™s forget this silly idea and instead deal with our own extremist problems at home. God knows we have enough of them and are doing precious little to counter their many phobias. Lecturers wouldnâ€™t be any good here either.

I am curious however about one thing: When the offer was made, how did Obama respond?

The serious side to cartoons

2010-10-01T08:54:00.000+08:00

Wednesday September 29, 2010
The serious side to cartoons
MUSINGS BY MARINA MAHATHIR

Cartoonist Lat has this gift of being able to sharply skewer people without seeming to do so. And this is where his lampooners can draw inspiration from.

IF THERE were anyone who is genuinely a Malaysian household name, it would be Lat. For several decades now, Lat has been the only cartoonist for most of us, making us laugh at ourselves even while he tells us some truths about ourselves.

Who can forget the way he pokes fun at our attitudes towards driving, queuing, eating and our relationships towards each other? Or the way we interpret government policies?

Latâ€™s characters are memorable because they are larger-than-life versions of people we are familiar with. There is the big fat teacher in her cheongsam and cat-eye glasses, the Chinese boy with the buck teeth and beansprout posture, the Sikh policeman and the ayu Malay girls with their winsome smiles and curly eyelashes.

Larger than life: Three animated vignettes of the cartoonist, entitled â€˜Latâ€™s Window to the Worldâ€™, premiered in Kuala Lumpur not too long ago, backed by live music by the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.
He also draws cartoon versions of real-life characters, mostly politicians and public figures. I knew Lat from the days when I worked for a publishing house and he used to say that drawing people who are too handsome is difficult.

People need to have a defining facial feature â€“ a prominent nose perhaps â€“ for him to be able to do a recognisable caricature of them. Once we recognised them, we knew what he was trying to say about them. Indeed, having Lat draw you was the ultimate sign that youâ€™d arrived.

Lat has this gift of being able to sharply skewer people without seeming to do so. He makes us see the funny side of people because we know thereâ€™s some truth in it, even when heâ€™s saying something critical about them. For that we love him, and even those he caricatured held him in great affection.

Latâ€™s cartoons are in a mainstream newspaper and heâ€™s published many books of his cartoons. So lots and lots of people read him and laughed (and sometimes cried) at his stories.

We all know what the funniest characteristics of our politicians are, as well as their quirks. We loved the Lat versions of them, even when we may not necessarily like the real-life people.

As far as I know, Lat has never gotten into trouble for his cartoons. It may be because we once had a better sense of humour, or our politicians were once more secure. But it was certainly unheard of to prosecute a cartoonist for anything.

Today we actually arrest cartoonists for sedition! Which is not only ridiculous in itself, but considering that the cartoonist in question publishes in an online subscription-only news portal, and is far from known to a lot of people, such action is a sign of paranoia gone to extremes.

Cartoonists, like columnists, are allowed to have opinions. And they do take sides. Just look at some of the mainstream political cartoonists. The assumption however is that there is only one side to take and itâ€™s not the one contrary to the Governmentâ€™s. So once a cartoonist takes a different view, then itâ€™s all panic stations.

Yet, if you asked most people if they knew who this cartoonist was, theyâ€™d probably say theyâ€™d never heard of him. But with this fiasco, they do and are probably on the lookout for his cartoons even though his books have been banned.

Whatâ€™s more, there are probably lots more aspiring cartoonists busily drawing even more cartoons for dissemination among fans right now. And none of them will be flattering.

There is a real problem with censoring writings or drawings on grounds they might be a â€œthreat to public orderâ€. Even worse, when the publications in question are really quite obscure, their very obscurity is proof that they have not caused any public disorder.

One of the more ridiculous recent cases was when an academic book was banned after two years in the bookstores for the same reason. Itâ€™s not a book that anyone would really read unless they were particularly interested in the subject.

If there is anything that needs censure, itâ€™s the negative influences of mass-market publications and TV shows because they reach far bigger and more susceptible audiences.

Anyone so inclined can compile files and files of nasty articles from these publications geared to incite people to do bad things, especially to people different from them. Now if thatâ€™s not a threat to public order, I donâ€™t know what is.

But nothing ever happens to them. That could be interpreted as the Government respecting media freedom, except that they arenâ€™t as respectful of those who have contrary views.

And this is the silly thing. Those advocating greater tolerance and understanding, who have a clear-eyed view of the problems and present solutions, are the ones who get censured. Those who accuse and incite, donâ€™t.

Is the world dangerously topsy-turvy or what?

From small issues to firestorms

2010-09-27T12:25:00.000+08:00

Wednesday September 15, 2010
From small issues to firestorms
Musings
By Marina Mahathir

Please do note the irony that the same people protesting the burning of the Quran are the ones who would be quick to call for the death of some author they consider apostate.

HOW many ironies can you layer on this story? A belligerent ignoramus with a congregation of a measly 50 people in Florida threatens to burn Qurans and thousands of miles away, Afghans who may have never previously heard of Florida get killed protesting against him.

So, without burning a single Quran, the guy’s managed to get at least two people killed. How much power is that?

The thing is not only is he not worth dying for but nothing of the sort would have happened had not someone decided that the masses, already suffering from occupation, should occupy their time protesting this.

Was the Quran-burning directed at Afghanistan? Not particularly. Yet nobody else in the Muslim world, least of all in the more prosperous countries including ours, felt inclined to interrupt their Hari Raya celebrations to protest against this insult.

Which of course it was meant to be. And nothing gets you frontpage headlines like insulting an entire global community, never mind that the faith you so proudly declare yourself a proud defender of does not support any such behaviour. Already your own brethren are denouncing you, but how else would you have gotten the Secretary of Defence himself to call you personally to beg you to cease and desist?

When it comes to attention seeking, there is nothing quite like these little demagogues. Take some stupid idea and simply shout it out and it is bound to get you noticed. And the media obliges. Wouldn’t a bonfire of burning Qurans make a great photo? Might even win an award!

Conventional politicians have nothing on these guys. Issue a statement or a protest note to the nearest diplomat? How tame and lame! You need big statements, delivered with much fanfare and drama. Or better still, you should issue a counter-threat! If Rev Jones burns the Quran, Afghans will lock up more women at home. Or Malaysians will … let’s see, stop watching American Idol?

The biggest irony of all is that nobody stops to think about book-burning itself. It’s a medieval tradition, used against books deemed evil because they gave people the wrong ideas. It effectively stopped people from reading them because, in the days when books were a relatively rare commodity, burning a few would obliterate those particular books from the earth.

But these days, there are only so many Qurans one can burn. The approximately two billion Muslims in the world all have at least one, if not more. Then there are the non-Muslims who also own Qurans. All in all, the number of Qurans Terry Jones wants to burn is miniscule compared to what is available out there. That’s not even counting the Qurans you can read online.

A better way of protesting would be what some Christians have proposed, which is to have a Read the Quran Day on Sept 11. In London, British Muslims plan to distribute booklets with selected verses from the Quran all over the West End. Like all books, holy or not, they should be read before they are condemned so that one criticises from an informed stand. And like many have also pointed out, the Quran also talks about the same prophets who are in the Torah and Bible, including Jesus. Imagine burning them up!

But while we think of burning books as the extreme form of censorship (and insult to a religion), we forget about other forms much beloved by our own people. We love banning books for instance, making the possession of such a book illegal and liable to punishment. How much different is that really from burning books? And who is to stop some other attention-seeking demagogue from issuing fatwas calling for the death of some author just because they don’t like his or her book?

Please do note the irony that the same people in Afghanistan protesting the burning of the Quran are also the same who would be quick to call for the death of some author they consider apostate.

Terry Jones’ burning a few Qurans does not mean that Islam dies in flames. Indeed, it has lived through far worse. What is the need to get so worked up about it to the point of getting killed? Are people hoping to be considered martyrs and therefore get a free passage to heaven? I’m hoping that God keeps a special corner for foolish people although it’s likely to get very cramped soon.

Meanwhile, let’s look at our own attitudes towards differing opinions. What is the current trend for making police reports but yet another form of censorship? Aren’t we in fact asking for people to be burnt at the stake?

Disturbed in heart and mind

2010-09-06T12:23:00.000+08:00

Wednesday September 1, 2010
Disturbed in heart and mind
Musings
By Marina Mahathir

The Shah Rukh Khan hit movie ‘My Name is Khan’ holds a pertinent message for us: there are only good and bad people in this world; there are no other differences.

IT’S very strange, but as we enter our 54th year of independence, what I least feel is independent. It so happened that I had to travel far recently, to a land where the air was a lot cleaner.

I felt that I breathed a lot easier but I don’t think it was just the air. Once you get away, the air just feels so much less toxic.

Indeed, in the month of Ramadan – the month of reflection and restraint – we find instead more toxicity than ever.

From school principals who spout racist nastiness to politicians and media who insist on poisoning what is already a poisoned well.

Instead of the serenity one hopes to feel at this time, in order to feel closer to God, all I can feel is the disturbance in the heart and mind that comes from living in an environment of hate.

It’s not that I’m lacking in loving friends, family or neighbours.

I live in a lovely street where we know one another and help each other out.

My friends are the kindest in the world. I feel blessed to know all of them.

But I open the newspaper or switch on the TV and there is nothing but anger and sadness.

How can we call ourselves independent when we are so caught up by hate, none of which seems to have any real foundation at all?

A few thousand kilometres away, the rhetoric of hate has become mainstream.

In the United States, Islamophobia is reaching fever pitch, fuelled as always by politics.

No American politician worth his salt, especially if he’s standing for election this November, will avoid talking about religion, affirming his own and besmirching others.

A rally by the most rabid right-wingers to supposedly “reclaim honour” drew 87,000 people.

The direct result of all this hate-mongering was the stabbing of a New York cabbie after he told his passenger he was Muslim and the burning of a mosque in Tennessee.

When we look in horror at these events on the other side of the world and feel indignant and self-righteous about them, do we think how we might ourselves contribute to the same treatment to others?

We see how badly minorities are treated in those countries and see no irony in treating our minorities the same way.

Is our empathy only meant for those of the same faith as us?

In Surah 21, verse 92 of the Quran, God speaks: “Verily, [O you who believe in Me,] this community of yours is one single community, since I am the Sustainer of you all: worship, then, Me [alone]!”

And again in Surah 33, verse 35: “Verily, for all men and women who have surrendered themselves unto God, and all believing men and believing women, and all truly devout men and truly devout women, and all men and women who are true to their word, and all men and women who are patient in adversity, and all men and women who humble themselves [before God], and all men and women who give in charity, and all self-denying men and self-denying women, and all men and women who are mindful of their chastity, and all men and women who remember God unceasingly: for [all of] them has God readied forgiveness of sins and a mighty reward.”

In both these verses, and in fact in the entire Quran, God does not speak of particular races but simply to all humankind. We are all equal before God.

How is it that we missed this simple message?

If we knew it, would we be spreading toxins instead of love and respect for one another?

Do we have the independence of mind to believe, rather than to follow those who claim to know what’s good for us but in fact are poisoning us bit by bit?

I just watched the Shah Rukh Khan hit movie My Name is Khan for the second time.

In Malaysia, someone saw fit to censor a lot of it, particularly whenever it showed a Muslim being bad.

Everyone, regardless of race or religion, has a chance to be good and bad in the movie.

Censoring it, in fact, was a great disservice to Muslims and missed its central message.

When the Shah Rukh Khan character was a child, his mother told him a truth that he held onto all his life: there are only good and bad people in this world.

There are no other differences between human beings.

Perhaps we should make all our politicians watch it.

They might learn something not very new. They might learn that most of us can tell who’s good and who’s bad.

Let’s stop tip-toeing around

2010-08-25T10:49:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday August 18, 2010
Let’s stop tip-toeing around
MUSINGS BY MARINA MAHATHIR

Pregnancy for a young girl is a lonely, frightening and confusing experience and help is hard to come by. We need comprehensive solutions to this problem, not criminalise it.

I ALWAYS get a little worried when people start talking about death penalties. It often spells a poverty of ideas, which of course, comes from not really understanding what the problem is all about.

The hysteria surrounding the issue of abandoned babies seems to have made people lose their minds. Instead of asking why people, especially young people, get pregnant and then abandon their babies, all sorts of ideas come floating by.

First was to marry them off regardless of their age. Never mind that we have just triumphantly announced the lifting of our reservation to the clause on the minimum age of marriage being 18 in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, now we were officially promoting sex among children by simply making it legal.

Who cares if under-aged sex and pregnancy have long-term consequences for the unfortunate girls? Has anyone noticed that the parents who abuse their kids are almost always very young and clearly unable to cope with the responsibilities of parenthood?

Long have we called for comprehensive sex education in our schools but to no avail, despite the rise in teen pregnancies and in sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

What do we get instead? Abstinence education! But haven’t we had this all along? Again, the central message is abstain until you get married. Or, in other words, if you want to have sex, get married. Even if you’re 14.

Since most people don’t think young kids should be having sex (unless they are married) and therefore should not be given any advice on contraception, no wonder then that teen pregnancies abound.

Hormones don’t wait for marriage certificates. And since our society stigmatises out-of-wedlock pregnancies, what choice do young girls have but to get rid of their unwanted babies?

For this, we want them killed? What sort of stone age society are we? What if the girls got pregnant because they were raped, perhaps by their own fathers or brothers?

Marrying them off is no solution for any number of reasons.

Nobody seems to have noticed that, in most states, Muslim babies are not recognised as legitimate if they are born less than six months after their mother got married, even if they married the baby’s biological father.

Given that many young girls are not likely to realise that they are pregnant until they are well along, or may wait a long time before they inform anyone, the chances are that even if they are forced to get married they would be past the three-month mark. Therefore, their babies would be considered illegitimate anyway. Bit of a waste of nasi minyak, if you ask me.

If only our dear leaders would take a deep breath and go talk to the only people who matter, the young pregnant girls themselves, they might actually learn that these girls did not have sex just because they are little sex bombs nor did they purposely get pregnant.

Pregnancy for a young girl is a lonely, frightening and confusing experience, and help is hard to come by. What more when the papers are full of young unmarried mothers being whipped for having illicit sex.

To tackle this problem, we need comprehensive solutions. Let’s stop tip-toeing around the fact that our kids are woefully ignorant about sex and the reproductive system and the consequences of having unprotected sex.

So grit our teeth and immediately put in place sex education, with a gender perspective and emphasising boys learning to respect girls.

In the meantime, yes let’s have baby hatches and let’s publicise them so that pregnant girls know where to send their babies to. Better yet, let’s have homes for girls to have their babies safely, where they can keep up with schoolwork and where they can learn mothering skills should they want to keep the babies.

Otherwise, talk to them about adoption and set up safe procedures for the babies to be adopted. Then set up a system where the girls can continue school afterwards.

Finally, adults themselves must set good examples. Every day we see adults trivialising marriage as if its only purpose is to have legal sex.

What happened to responsibility, care and, gosh, love? What happened to planning for the future, for your kids’ education and all that? When we see lawmakers breaking laws just to get another wife, how does this set an example for our young?

If we want to encourage good parenting, let’s start with ourselves, shall we?

Policies must be well thought out

2010-08-11T14:49:00.000+08:00

Wednesday August 4, 2010
Policies must be well thought out
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

While bullet points may pick out the salient benefits, to explain a new policy one needs to know the research and thinking that goes behind them.

WHEN I was in Sixth Form, I had a wonderful history teacher who taught us not only about history but how to think and write about it. Every week we had to submit an essay on one subject and a plan on another.

The plan was her magic formula. Essentially, she taught us how to organise our facts and thoughts, and logically come to our conclusions. Her students have been known to pass their exams just by writing out their plans because those so clearly laid out what they knew and how they meant to answer the question.

Her training has stood me in good stead until today. I still try to write a plan when I need to prepare a major paper because it helps me to take an argument logically from start to finish. I wish everybody had studied under my teacher. If they had, we may not be constantly subjected to the sort of fuzzy, half-formed and illogical thinking that we are assailed with today.

When I read pronouncements by our leaders today, more and more I start to wonder what the process of thinking is behind them. And, increasingly, I start to believe that our leaders practise what I call “bullet-point policymaking”.

My theory is this. A politician says to his or her staffers that he or she needs some exciting thing to announce. They go off to research what would be new and innovative to address any particular situation, for example, the deplorable state of our schools or teen pregnancies.

They might actually write a whole paper on the subject along with recommendations on what to do and present this to their boss.

But he or she doesn’t have time to read it and orders the staffers to give him or her talking points in bullet form. These will be what he or she then announces at a press conference.

Now, this may seem an efficient way of doing things; but it is also deficient in many ways. For a start, while bullet points may pick out the salient benefits of whatever new policy, they cannot give you all the research and thinking that goes behind them.

And if you don’t know exactly what led anyone to arrive at this particular policy recommendation, then not only can’t you explain it properly, you also cannot truly “own” it.

What is more, “bullet-point policymaking” is not going to also give you an idea of the points that people are likely to make against the policy, and how you are supposed to respond to these.

Hence, if there is any criticism of any new policy, the standard response is to accuse the other side of politicising the issue. Or, equally poorly, backpedal immediately.

When was the last time we heard an Education Minister talk about education with true passion? Or anyone defend the position of women in the face of much male-dominated derision? How many leaders do we have who can say, “This is what I really believe in because …” and stand their ground on principle?

Instead they rely on what their staffers tell them to say. Now if you have professional and dedicated staffers who are keen to do the best by their bosses, you might actually get good papers backing up your bullet points.

If you don’t, then the points you get may not be worth much anyway. But unless you read yourself, or at least insist on a full briefing on the subject, including pros and cons, how would you know if the policy you are about to announce is sound at all?

This is why we get announcements that exams should be scrapped because we have become too exam-oriented, without the accompanying well-thought-out alternative.

Then, when everyone has not wholeheartedly praised the idea, there’s the belated attempt at consulting people on what exactly the policy should be. Shouldn’t they have done all the consulting and surveying before announcing it?

Is it any wonder then that, increasingly, people are starting to feel that their leaders don’t know what they are doing? That announcements are made because there is some public relations quota to be filled? Do their KPI report forms have a column for how many policies are announced each year? Better none at all rather than too many silly ones.

What is obvious to any intelligent person in the street, and maybe not to our leaders, is that problems often have multiple causes, and solutions cannot come only from one source.

Thus, an issue like teen pregnancies would involve several ministries and not just one. Would it not be fantastic if a major joint policy announcement on this were to come from the relevant ministers at the same time?

But then, why share the limelight?

Let women judges do their job

2010-07-30T18:20:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday July 21, 2010
Let women judges do their job
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

We do need to look at justice with a gender perspective. It is always women who suffer, both from injustice and society’s blindness towards it.

IT SEEMS to be the unchanging lot of women in Malaysia. First we are elevated, and then we are brought down to earth with a thud.

When the first women syariah judges were appointed this month, Muslim women were elated. At last, not only are women recognised for their ability to sit on the syariah bench but also perhaps now we can expect better justice for women in the syariah courts.

The first uneasy twinge came, for me, when one of the new judges said that she wanted to show that just because she was female it didn’t mean she would be biased towards women.

While, yes, justice is supposed to be blind, this statement made it sound that she is determined to prove her credentials by bending over backwards not to favour women at all. Given that women have hardly found justice in the courts all this time, this is disappointing.

Then came the whammy. It seemed that only after appointing them, a syariah court panel, consisting only of men, was being set up to decide what the women judges could rule on.

How about that? Give someone a job and then decide what she can do. Was this just incompetency or an attempt at ensuring that they are kept “in their place”?

It is a fact that women have been getting short shrift in the syariah courts, whether in getting due compensation in divorce cases for themselves or their children, in inheritance cases and many others.

Even when courts have ruled in their favour, for instance in ruling that men have to pay maintenance for their children from their ex-wives, rarely have these been implemented.

As a result, many women and their children are left in dire poverty. Is that justice?

We do need to look at justice with a gender perspective. Otherwise “justice” will always be seen from a male perspective because it is generally men who make the laws. Or in the case of religious rulings, it is men who interpret them.

It would be nice to expect men to simply be gentlemanly and ensure that the mother of their children and their progeny are well cared for after divorce. But this rarely happens. Thus someone needs to stand up for women. Invariably this should be a woman who truly has justice in mind.

Not that this always involves only divorced women. The recent study on the impact of polygamy on families by SIS Forum Malaysia shows that generally polygamy does not lead to happy families.

First wives and their children generally suffer most, both in terms of attention from their husband and father as well as in terms of standard of living — after their husbands had taken on another wife, 44% of first wives were forced to go out and work just to ensure the survival of their family.

Considering that men are only supposed to take on another wife if they can afford to support both, this evidence, culled from interviewing over 1,200 families, shows they are coming up short.

Not that second wives and families are faring better either. All families complained about the amount of time their shared husband and father had to spend with them.

Equal time and attention is simply not humanly possible. As a result, there was dissatisfaction all round when birthdays, anniversaries, school events are missed.

Men may think of polygamy as their “right” but it is a stressful one, if nothing else.

It is always women who suffer, both from injustice and society’s blindness towards it. Heaven knows what we need to do to make society take violence against women seriously enough.

We can rightly point to many countries to show how our women are so much better off than theirs. But the reality is, unless women are protected from violence and can seek justice in the courts, such “equality” that we enjoy can only be superficial.

So let those women judges get on with their jobs. After all, their counterparts in the civil courts have been doing so for a long time.

Online threat to reading culture

2010-07-12T19:12:00.000+08:00

Wednesday July 7, 2010
Online threat to reading culture
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Web language has changed not only the way we communicate but also rewired our brains to only respond to things that are short and fast.

LET me make this clear: I love the Internet. As all my friends know, I’m online virtually all the time whether on my laptop or my PDA. I e-mail, Facebook, tweet, blog and chat nearly constantly. Someone once described my instant response to emails as “quite frightening”.

But recently there have been some articles in overseas publications talking about the effect of these new ways of communication on us, or more specifically, our brains.

As all these online ways of connecting are short and fast, our brains are literally being rewired to only respond to things that are also short and fast. In other words, our attention span has shrunk to, oh say, 140 characters. It has become harder for us to focus on anything that takes longer than a few minutes.

I have to admit that I’m as much a victim of this as any other Internet addict. I begin my days by reading the news online, mostly on Twitter. This wonderful invention delivers to me all the news stories in the world in one convenient form.

But it is edited already, first by me, because I choose which news websites I want, and then by the websites themselves.

As anyone who has clicked a headline to go to the website knows, there are always lots of other interesting stories which they don’t put up on Twitter.

But I do read. What Twitter, and sometimes Facebook, do is draw my attention to a story, and if my interest is piqued I follow the link and read the story in full.

In this way, I not only learn about the news fast but also in depth. The other day I read a fascinating story about the Bosnian war and how artists responded to it, which came to me via Twitter.

The Internet worries me for other reasons. I have always been a reader, so the Internet has enhanced my reading, not lessened it. But in a country where reading habits are already so poor, I have to wonder what it is doing to the young.

Recently, I posted a long article about gender equality on my blog. It was full of interesting information and insights and I thought it would provoke some interesting discussion. But most commentators only mentioned that the article was too long.

Interestingly enough, most of those who complained about its length were men, thereby fuelling my suspicion that men not only read very different things from women but they also refuse to read anything that has both length and depth.

Perhaps it is no surprise that there is a whole genre of books called “chick lit” and nothing called “dude lit”. Is there some un-macho stigma attached to men reading books? If reading is where we gain an insight into the world, then I’m afraid this dislike for reading alone will ensure that men and women will inhabit different worlds.

Indeed one young man proudly claimed that he had only ever read 10 books in his life, and in fact hates reading. Yet his English was excellent, a result, he said, of playing games online. This may be an exception.

My son, whose schooling was entirely in Indonesia, picked up most of his English from playing games on the Net. But one holiday he picked up a Harry Porter book and loved it so much, he read the entire four books available then in two weeks.

The point I’m trying to make is not just about reading. It’s about the ability to maintain focus for a decent length of time, enough to complete a job or to learn something new.

If our young people are doing everything in quick bursts, whether it is on SMS or chat, then are they acquiring the focus needed to really learn anything or to concentrate long enough on something in order to become an expert at it?

Today we see written language, already poor, being shortened in such a way that it can become incomprehensible. We may need to be concise on many things but we still have to be understood.

SMS language is really only appropriate on mobile phones and not anywhere else.

Perhaps the real danger to a native language is not so much another language but the abbreviated mobile phone form of itself.

There must be a way of marrying the immediacy of the Internet with a more leisurely reading habit. Better-written books and articles would help. Making reading books cool would increase interest.

re catchwords are just not enough

2010-06-30T19:11:00.000+08:00

Wednesday June 23, 2010
Mere catchwords are just not enough
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

A slogan will remain just that if it is not translated into action.

WITH 1Malaysia the catchword these days, everyone is falling over themselves trying to insert the numeral “1” into their slogan or motto, as if they’d never seen it before. But we are after all a nation of small imaginations, so new catchy slogans are immediately catching.

(However, can someone shoot whoever invented that nonsensical greeting “Salam Satu Malaysia”? That, like the hand-on-the-heart bow of hotel doormen, should be relegated to the wastebin of artificial culture).

But we all know that for all the banners, ads and promos in the world, a slogan remains just that if it is not translated into action. I won’t repeat the many different ways in which the intention of 1Malaysia is undermined.

Suffice to say, that as long as there are people running things who at heart don’t believe in the concept, unity is not going to happen.

One of the most debated issues in our country is of course education. Much of our so-called disunity has been attributed to the fact that our kids now go to different schools.

Basically, the well-to-do go to private schools while everyone else goes to national schools. Kids are further separated into different schools by language, and into Islamic schools.

I agree that having our children in different schools may do plenty for a diverse educational landscape but does nothing for unity. Kids are growing up generally not meeting kids from either a different community or class.

National schools have become largely Malay, Chinese schools largely Chinese and Tamil schools for Indians. I say largely because there are small pockets of “nons” within these schools.

That is mainly the effect of standards. Most people have issues with the standard of education in national schools. So those who can afford it abandon them for the higher standards of expensive private schools. Some, including non-Chinese, go off to Chinese schools known for their discipline. At heart, parents want the best for their children and so will choose the best schools that they can afford. Parental choice must always be respected, though not all parents have the luxury of choice.

On the other hand, there are people who believe that kids must go to the same school and get the same education in order for there to be unity. On the face of it, there is some merit to that argument but it needs to go beyond the superficial.

Recently there was some talk about re-introducing Pupil’s Own Language to national schools. That’s great but why call it POL? Why not make all languages (including Arabic) available to any child who wants it?

If unity is postulated on having diverse communities in one school, we need to take a hard look at what is happening to the non-Malay kids who remain in national schools.

Parents often report that teachers separate kids according to race in many activities, even classes. This is not limited to religious and moral education classes.

In some schools, kids are segregated by race for every subject. One wonders where they get the teachers to teach two parallel programmes in one school.

More importantly, textbooks need to be reviewed for bias towards certain communities and gender.

Just like filmmaking rules laid down by the Censorship Board, school textbooks must always portray Malays as good while others can play all other roles. If we complain about Western media bias towards Muslims, forever portraying them as terrorists, then we can’t do the same for others in either our media or our schoolbooks.

In fact, such stereotypes in our schoolbooks are far more dangerous because children imbibe them at a young impressionable age.

Then there are teachers who will only provide extra classes for kids of a certain race, rather than all those who are floundering. Or segregate kids for sports according to their race. If only Malays can play football, Chinese play basketball and Indians hockey, what happens to the uniting power of sports?

If we are to institute a mantra in our schools, then it should be that diversity and respect are good things. Many people translate 1Malaysia at its most superficial; as long as three races (and nobody else) are represented, we are one. But the three can’t mix with one another. What is this but apartheid, the very antithesis of unity?

We need leadership that clearly says that there shall be no segregation by race or religion in our schools. School heads or teachers who do this must be reprimanded and punished.

But ultimately the best way to get everyone to go to the same school is to make the national schools the best, both academically and socially.

And maybe the slogan is better put as “We Are One” with the emphasis on “we”.

Funny that nobody mentions the mono-religious and mono-community Islamic schools in this context.

Numbers can be so meaningless

2010-06-12T19:09:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday June 9, 2010
Numbers can be so meaningless
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Numbers give us information, but at the same time they can also mask issues. Seeing beyond the figures requires sharp analytical skills.

IN THESE days of KPIs, everyone has become “results-oriented”. But while “results” are being pulled in, we have to wonder what “results” we actually want and need.

Many of us who work in NGOs have found that the greatest frustration when we work with the Government is in the definition of “results”. For the Government, it is almost always about numbers. How many people underwent a programme, or attended a course or did this or that.

But often we find that numbers actually mean little. As an example, we are very proud of the fact that most of our people have access to schooling. We take that as proof that our citizens therefore have a high level of literacy.

But there are several problems with this simple conclusion. Firstly, is it true that every one of our citizens has access to schooling? And secondly, of the ones who do get to go to school (and manage to stay in school for 12 years), what sort of schooling are they getting? What exactly do we mean by literacy? Is it the ability to read a bus schedule or more than that?

In other words, while we may do well quantitatively, the real question is how are we doing qualitatively?

To be able to see how well anyone is doing in terms of quality requires analytical skills. This is often a capacity we find lacking among bureaucrats, and which causes not only frustration but also friction with NGOs working on many social issues.

We know that numbers are not everything, yet our counterparts in the Government are often reluctant to look beyond them.

For instance, it was no surprise to me that Zainah Anwar’s article (“Nothing divine in child marriage” – Sunday Star, June 6) picked up on a fact that bureaucrats don’t seem to have noticed, that there are a lot more child marriages, especially among girls, than we thought.

This came from a set of data meant only to register those who take HIV tests before marriage. But for those of us used to scrutinising data with a more sensitive eye, the ages of those getting married leapt out.

Similarly, when one reads newspaper reports about children being abused, what I have noticed most is how young the parents invariably are. This then begs the question: are these parents simply too young to cope with parenthood?

Which then leads to another question regarding why they married young. Was it because of an accidental pregnancy, due to lack of knowledge of the consequences of unprotected sex? Was it to legitimise sex? Once we embark on the trail of questions, we unearth a lot more information. And we need information to solve problems.

While numbers give us information, at the same time they can also mask issues. It takes a mind trained to be more curious to unearth these. And that is perhaps the problem; that among policy makers and decision makers, the training is lacking.

Training for analytical skills doesn’t have to be formal, although it helps. Sometimes it is just a matter of talking to people who have the skills. But that means accepting that there are people more knowledgeable than us, and being humble enough to ask them for it.

Recently, a very high-level civil servant bemoaned the fact that our diplomats are now too shy to socialise with people when they are on foreign posting. Thus they are unable to obtain information that would be beneficial to the country, rendering themselves useless.

I don’t think it is a problem that lies only with the Foreign Service but permeates many different ministries.

I have been on innumerable conferences abroad where I have found government delegations unwilling to use the opportunity to meet as many people as possible or sometimes to even attend sessions where they might gain new knowledge.

Occasionally, I have had to introduce high-ranking officials to their counterparts but rarely have I seen any productive interaction between them. Perhaps diplomatic niceties intrude but if one is always on the defensive, how does one have a meaningful conversation?

Indeed, two major problems beset many of our officials. One is the lack of capacity for analysing problems at any level of quality.

And second is the defensiveness manifested often by that great Malaysian particularism – “we are Malaysian, we are different”.

That shuts up all conversation. And, I might add, leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the other person.

It is not always the officers’ fault. When one is asked to always toe the line, or only promote ideologically driven policies, then why go the extra mile to find out more in case the facts negate the policies? Besides, that means more work.

But if we keep this up, be prepared to endlessly bemoan our social problems.

Showing off is a no-no

2010-05-31T08:56:00.000+08:00

Wednesday May 26, 2010
Showing off is a no-no
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my

The virtue of appropriate behaviour seems lost today when people think nothing of spending RM20,000 on drinks at a meal, or buying designer bags for a two-year-old.

WHEN I was growing up, one of the things drilled into me was the virtue of appropriate behaviour.

There were some behaviours that were deemed totally inappropriate mostly because they were either ill-mannered or unseemly.

For instance, one’s behaviour in someone else’s house was always strictly delineated because it reflected on how one was brought up. Thus, unlike today, where children are chummy with their friends’ parents,

I had to be extremely polite and even slightly scared of those of my friends.

I recall once being at a birthday party where one boy was so naughty that he earned a scolding from the host’s father. I don’t know what shocked me more, to have misbehaved in your friend’s house or to be scolded by someone else’s dad.

Inappropriate behaviour also covered showing off whatever you had that was expensive, especially to people who may not be able to afford it.

Modesty about one’s own station was taught as a singular virtue. You may be lucky enough to have nice things but you don’t need to tell anyone about them.

Thus I may be considered horribly old-fashioned when I gasp upon reading magazine articles where people happily show off their closets full of clothes, jewellery and fleet of cars.

It’s not that I begrudge them their good fortune, but I wonder why it does not embarrass them to have all these possessions photographed for total strangers to gawk at.

Similarly, I once read a letter in the papers by someone who complained bitterly that her luggage had been trifled with at the airport. Justifiable enough, until I read that the shopping that she lost included designer bags (and she named which designers they were) for her two-year-old daughter.

Rather than focus on her misfortune, what haunted me was the very idea that people would spend money on designer items for a toddler.

To be fair, the high-end designers do give people such inappropriate ideas by actually designing kiddy clothes and toys.

I doubt there would be a demand for them if they didn’t exist. Or would they?

Perhaps it is a sign of prosperity that these days people spend money in inappropriate ways without batting an eyelid.

For instance a restaurant-owner friend once regaled us with the crazy things some of his customers did, like spend RM20,000 just on drinks at one meal.

Then there was the little girl who was blithely waving the credit card her mother gave her in some high-end boutiques, only one of which was sensible enough to decline to accept it.

When 13-year-olds are way too comfortable spending money in such boutiques, you have to wonder what it’s going to take to keep them in comfort as they grow up.

But perhaps I should not complain about the inappropriate behaviour of individuals like these.

My worry however is that other people, including my children, might think that these behaviours are the norm, and then try to emulate them.

It would be a short ride downhill from there, morally speaking.

Sometimes, however, you find inappropriate behaviour at a higher level, where people who deem themselves worthy of our support take unconscionable actions.

For instance, breaking laws put there by the very law-making institution that they are part of.

Is the message “Do as I say, not as I do”? Or are these laws just for the rest of us and not for them?

No wonder they all want to get elected; apparently it gives them a licence to do what they want.

For me, my test of inappropriateness is whether my cheeks go hot and red upon learning about such behaviour.

It burned when a friend talked about a group of people who came into his restaurant every night, ran up a tab and then walked out without paying, telling them to bill their boss.

It didn’t look like their boss knew what they were up to at all, so the bills remained unpaid. I didn’t know these people, but somehow felt embarrassed at their brazenness.

And I must say I flush all the way down to my neck when I see people desperate to be seen as more important than what they are. I’ve been lucky enough to meet real heroes who do their work with no fanfare at all. So to see much lesser beings, important only because of position, being lauded for less substantial work makes me go – and see – red.

But life is short and one needs to make hay, as they say, while the sun shines.

Simple, spontaneous and cool

2010-05-17T12:40:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday May 12, 2010
Simple, spontaneous and cool
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Using social media to bring people together in solidarity, more than 500 Malaysians, mostly young, of all shapes, sizes and creeds, got together to simply … well, dance.

THERE is a word that young people these days often use to describe something that they disapprove of. If they say something is “fail”, it means it has earned their thumbs down.

It would not be inaccurate to say that in almost anything to do with adults in Malaysia today, young people under 30 would use the word “fail”.

Whether it is politics, law enforcement, government or religious authorities, the young would simply point their thumbs downwards. None of it appeals to them, none of it is cool. They are tired of constantly being told they are troublemakers and don’t know what’s good for them.

Yet, I have seen young Malaysians time and time again defy every stereotype that their elders put on them. Where our so-called leaders have looked as if they belonged to the 6th Century, young people are doing innovative and creative projects that show they are firmly in the 21st.

When politicians have shown that they only know how to divide people, young people have shown that they can stand solidly together.

Last year, when our leadership failed repeatedly to unite people regardless of race and religion, young people got together in a show of solidarity in the Tali Tenang project.

Using social media to bring people together in solidarity, they met in real life to show that they were for peace and unity, without the need for any political rhetoric. About 200 of them came together and, amazingly, there were no riots or any form of unruliness. Nose-thumb to their elders again!

Last weekend, they did it again. Connecting via Facebook and Twitter, more than 500 Malaysians, mostly young, of all shapes, sizes and creeds, got together to simply … dance.

Fans of a currently popular TV series, they got together on several evenings to rehearse; and on the appointed day showed up, followed instructions and did their thing in a joyous spontaneous atmosphere.

Just watching the participants rehearse already gave one goosebumps. Each night some 200 people, who mostly did not know one another, gathered together in one spot to do one thing together, dance.

They submitted themselves to great discipline and effort, enjoying the sweaty camaraderie. You looked around and can’t help but think: this is every politician’s dream; but there is no way they can do this, for the simple reason that they can never be cool enough.

The whole event was organised by young people themselves; they volunteered to teach the steps, take photos or videos or spread the word. While there was some sponsorship, it was not a hugely commercial event with no greater objective than to do something fun together.

I’m sure there will be detractors who will tut-tut about how this is not our culture and such. They can go ahead and organise a culturally-appropriate flashmob if they want. But it takes a certain generous frame of mind – one that essentially believes in the good in people – to truly organise such a community event.

The flashmob also underscores the power of social media, something so underestimated by our leaders. The entire organisation of this event was done online. All it needed was a good idea and some key people to promote it on their Facebook pages and on Twitter – and that was it.

Before long, more than 1,300 people had signed up. Although ultimately not as many people actually showed up for the event, it was still a success because it was likely the biggest flashmob ever held in the world.

The entire event held so many lessons that the powers-that-be could learn from. Firstly, to appeal to young people you need to tap into whatever is current and trendy, and not try and invent something new.

Secondly, young people can come up with better ideas than most adults, and know exactly how to organise it themselves.

Thirdly, young people are quite capable of enormous discipline and effort if they like, and want to do, something.

Fourthly, there is absolutely no need for any VIPs to officiate at these events. In fact, the absence of any ups the cool quotient of the event.

Fifthly, when young people get together like this, they do not automatically destroy. Rather they build friendships, community and peace, regardless of race, religion or creed.

Where else can you see girls in tudung boogieing next to girls in shorts, and boys, and then grinning at each other with joy at having successfully done a perfect routine?

There is no greater feeling than from having participated in something with a whole bunch of strangers that is creative, organic and fun. No need for special T-shirts, expensive equipment or long official speeches. Simplicity and spontaneity is in. Pity our leaders can’t understand that.

Moral police need policing, too

2010-05-01T12:16:00.000+08:00

Wednesday April 28, 2010
Moral police need policing, too
MUSINGS BY MARINA MAHATHIR

Fearing public embarrassment, couples accused of infringing religious laws on morality often put themselves at risk of physical hurt, and even death.

WHEN a fatal accident happens, usually there will be an enquiry to find out the reasons behind it. Landslides may cause homes to be buried along with some occupants so an enquiry is needed to decide who is at fault and to be held responsible.

Or schoolchildren out on an excursion may wind up drowned and investigations must be done, not least to ensure such a tragedy never happens again.

Sometimes fatalities occur involving government departments or officials. A proper enquiry must therefore be done so that the public gets to know the truth and retains its trust in the government department or official.

Usually this happens because there is a public outcry over the death.

But one area where there is no public outcry is when there are fatalities as a result of khalwat (close proximity) raids.

Just recently a young man aged only 21 was found dead at the foot of his apartment building.

Apparently panicked by a raid by religious department officers, he had tried to escape through a window and fallen five floors.

Who is responsible for the death of such a young man?

When the police, in the course of their job, cause a fatal accident, they are brought to book. Their only defence would be that they were defending themselves.

But in the case of the 21-year-old, there was no aggression involved, unless one counts the fright that a group of moral police causes a young couple that we don’t know for certain were doing anything at all.

This is not the first time that young people have been put at risk because of these raids. Last New Year’s eve, religious department officers rounded up dozens of couples for allegedly committing khalwat.

In one case, a young girl, in attempting to escape, went onto a window ledge many floors high above the ground. Instead of persuading the girl to come in, the officers asked her boyfriend to coax her.

Had anything happened to her, who would have been blamed?

In other raids, people have fallen and suffered injuries. In none of these cases have any of the religious officers been held responsible or accountable for causing these injuries to happen.

Mostly that is because people are embarrassed to pursue any action against them.

But this reluctance means that these religious officers are free to act with impunity because they will never be called into account for the result of their actions.

They may say that their aim is only to prevent vice. But is there something in their job description that says that injuries and deaths of those they raid are acceptable by-products of their jobs?

Or is death considered an exemplary way to stop vice?

It is only when the victim or the victim’s family decides to take action that anyone is held accountable at all.

A few years ago a young woman sued the religious department for insulting her dignity and causing her shame in public, and won. But she is rare in her feistiness.

Most of the time, these cases pass by unnoticed. Worse still, judgments are made on their morals without them ever being able to defend themselves.

Indeed most people caught for khalwat are never asked to enter their defence. Usually they don’t have any legal representation in court, especially if they are young and poor.

Is this what moral policing means, for people to be found guilty unless proven innocent?

For people to have no recourse if they feel wrongly accused? For there to be no way to obtain compensation for injuries or even death?

People are charged in court regularly without legal representation. No auditing is ever done of the budgets of religious departments or whether they do what they are supposed to do, which apparently is to propagate religion.

But is religious propagation to be measured by how many people you catch for alleged vice?

Pretty soon there’ll be more people arrested than there are to be propagated to.

We need to get the moral police under control if we cannot ban them altogether. Never held up to account for neither their actions nor any transparency in whatever they do, they hide behind religion as justification for all sorts of misbehaviour.

Just as others are held responsible when accidents happen, religious officers must be, too. Otherwise we foster a society where it is not only impossible to have a private life but it becomes dangerous as well.

Stretching social mores

2010-04-15T13:54:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday April 14, 2010
Stretching social mores
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

It is time we re-looked at laws governing social behaviour that, instead of protecting people’s dignity, expose them to shame and humiliation.

HOW do we know if social mores are deteriorating? Is it when more people are arrested for doing wrong in public? Is it because people are keener to report their neighbours? Or is it because the definitions of social wrongs are expanded?

I wonder about this because of two recent cases. In one, 39 young people were charged with khalwat for all being together in one room.

Previously, khalwat was the charge put on two unmarried people in close proximity. Now, it seems a whole roomful of people can be charged for the same thing.

It makes you wonder if this might mean that people in a classroom or lecture hall can be charged for the same offence. Would this be a lead-up to having single-sex classrooms?

What is even more disturbing is that none of the young people charged had any legal representation when they had to face the syariah judge.

Does this not compromise their rights? Or do we presume that young people in a room together should have no rights at all.

Then last weekend in another case, the Federal Territory religious department not only saw fit to burst into an apartment in the early hours of the morning but its officers also ransacked the place and broke doors while shouting at some girls living there.

They didn’t even identify themselves as religious officials and when asked could not be specific about what the alleged crime was.

In both cases, the religious authorities claimed to have acted on a complaint but neither the complainant nor the nature of the complaint was made known.

What sort of society are we turning into?

We are the only Muslim country in the world that has laws that allow invasion of privacy.

Neighbours or others are allowed to call the authorities on suspicion of activities that they cannot possibly ascertain or verify and who remain free to besmirch others’ reputation for no apparent reason.

Are we turning into a society of sneaks and snoops? More importantly, is a society of sneaks and snoops Islamic?

In the Quran, God admonishes: “O you who believe! Do not enter houses other than your own houses until you have asked permission and saluted their inmates; this is better for you that you may be mindful” (Surah 24:27).

A hadith states: “Beware of suspicion. For suspicion is the most untrue form of speech; and do not spy upon one another and do not revile one another” (Sahih Muslim, Kitab al birr wal silah, Bab al nahy an al tajasus).

Where does breaking down doors and destroying property come into it?

Not only does the Quran emphasise respect for privacy, it admonishes against making false accusations.

“And those who launch a charge against chaste women, and produce not four witnesses (to support their allegations), flog them with eighty stripes; and reject their evidence ever after: for such men are wicked transgressors” (Surah 24:4).

And yet we are keener to flog the supposed accused rather than the accusers.

Indeed, there is a story of the Caliph Umar who, while patrolling Medina one night, saw a man and a woman committing adultery.

The following day the caliph informed other companions and asked them whether he should enforce the prescribed penalty (hadd) for zina (fornication) on the basis of his own observations.

To this, Ali replied that the law of Allah stated clearly that four witnesses were required to prove zina, and that this provision was to be applied equally to the caliph.

Other companions are also reported to have concurred with Ali’s opinion (quoted by Al Ghazali, Ihyaa Ulum al Din; Kitab Adab al Suhbah p.369).

While quoting this report, Al Ghazali observes that this is strong evidence that the shariah demands the concealment of sins (satr al fawahish); it also discourages spying on or reporting the private affairs of others [Kitab al Adab p.345-6].

So we have to ask whether we have strayed far from what our religion says, in that instead of protecting people’s dignity, we are instead keener to expose them to shame and humiliation.

It is time we re-looked at our enthusiasm for these laws, as they clearly have no basis in religion nor in any sense of fairness.

What’s more, their implementation will always be discriminatory.

It is no coincidence that the people caught in these recent cases are invariably young and living in apartments affordable to students or those who just started work.

This makes them more vulnerable to such allegations than those who are able to afford apartments with better security. Is this justice?

Let us not forget that it is up to the accusers to provide proof of guilt, not the accused to prove their innocence. Otherwise, they should be sued for defamation.

Neither here nor there stand

2010-04-01T14:58:00.000+08:00

Wednesday March 31, 2010
Neither here nor there stand
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

The problem with Malaysia is that on the one hand we want to be part of the community of nations; on the other, we are notorious for ‘particularism’, that is, insisting that somehow we are different from everyone else.

THIS may sound unbelievable to some people but when I was in primary school, I distinctly remember my class teacher discussing the “colour bar” with us. Today that might mean a place where we get our nails painted but at the time it referred to only one thing, racial discrimination.

In the 60s when we discussed this, the two main issues that appalled any right-minded person were apartheid in South Africa and the discrimination against blacks in the US that necessitated the civil rights movement.

Today it seems incredible that anyone should be barred from entering a restaurant or school or made to sit at the back of a bus just because of their skin colour but that was the reality in South Africa and in southern US for those who had black skin.

Holding back: Malaysia ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995 but maintained many reservations. – Reuters

Eventually the civil rights movement in the US succeeded in winning rights for its black minority, despite some high costs such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

What could never have been dreamed of then, a black President, is now a reality. And in South Africa, apartheid was overthrown and the disenfranchisement of the black population ended.

It was in that atmosphere that the UN Declaration for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) was established in 1963 and the Convention passed in 1966. (It might be interesting also to note that people thought racial equality was more important than gender equality; the UN Convention for the Elimination for All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was not passed by the General Assembly until 1979.) Today 173 out of 195 countries have ratified the CERD.

The 16 countries that have not ratified the CERD are Angola, Brunei, Cook Islands, North Korea, Dominica, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Myanmar, Niue, Palau Samoa, Singapore, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Malaysia.

Most of those are very small island nations that, apart from Singapore, simply cannot afford all the necessary processes to ratify and implement the Convention. That leaves us in the company of Angola, Brunei, North Korea and Myanmar.

I know we like exclusivity but this may not be the sort of club we want to belong to.

I recently sat in a roundtable to discuss the CERD and how and when Malaysia might sign it. Most of those participating were of the opinion that we should join the rest of the world and ratify it.

The exception was one government official who asked with twisted logic why the hurry since Singapore had not, and besides we don’t have any racial discrimination in Malaysia. Everyone else then pointed out that in that case, we should have no problem signing the convention. The problem with us is that on the one hand we want to be part of the community of nations; on the other, we resent anything that actually fosters community with the rest of the world.

Thus we sign onto the UN Charter and then ignore many of our obligations except when it suits us. For instance, some of us may turn our nose up at the UN Declaration of Human Rights but it does happen to be one of the key documents of the UN. When we join a club, we should follow the rules.

We are also half-baked when it comes to conventions that we do ratify. In 1995 we ratified CEDAW but put reservations on many clauses in it, mostly on the basis of religion. This despite the fact that large Muslim countries like Indonesia ratified CEDAW without a single reservation. Malaysian Islam must be different from other people’s Islam.

Similarly, Malaysia ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995 but has still maintained many reservations. These include reservations on Article 1 of the Convention that defines a child as anyone under the age of 18 and Article 2 which says that the convention applies to “everyone whatever their race, religion, abilities, whatever they think or say, whatever type of family they come from” and Article 7 which says that “All children have the right to a legally registered name, and nationality”.

This might explain why we are wishy-washy when it comes to child marriages and obstinate about not allowing the most basic rights to refugee children.

The point I’m trying to make is that all nations in the world are held up to certain standards and these naturally have to be universal. It makes no sense for each country to insist on living up to only their own standards since these are rarely high.

Malaysia is notorious for “particularism”, that is, insisting that somehow we are different from everyone else. In that case, we should not join the community of nations but instead take our cues from an isolationist state like North Korea. And see where that gets us.

Gender equality still falls short

2010-03-18T14:50:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday March 17, 2010
Gender equality still falls short
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Two child brides made the news lately, one only after she was found in a semi-conscious state; and in each case their father had consented to the marriage.

THERE are perhaps no more base moments in morality than when fathers think it is OK to give away their ten-year-old daughters in marriage to men four times their age. Even worse, that it is done under the guise of religion.

In the past week we have learnt that two little girls were married off to grown men with the permission of their fathers, their wali. The newspapers were full of indignation but mostly focused on the fact that these marriages did not follow procedures, one having been allegedly conducted in a car.

At least one of the fathers claimed that he was “mesmerised” by the intended groom and therefore allowed his daughter to be taken in marriage.

The papers even allowed that these marriages may be permissible, as a loophole in the State Enactments gives judges the power to permit them despite the minimum marriage age for girls being 16.

Subsequently, one of the little girls has turned up semi-conscious, dumped in a mosque. One shudders at the thought of what she might have gone through.

What sort of society are we living in that we no longer recognise child abuse for what it is, especially when the cloak of religion is flung over it? What else do we call an adult man marrying a child but paedophilia?

If we want to blame the parents, we may have grounds but we also have to stop short. They believed what the groom said when he claimed that such a marriage is completely in line with religion because the Prophet Muhammad married his youngest wife Aisyah when she was six. (This legend is now disputed with some scholars contending that she was in fact 19.)

This is what happens when people have not only little religious knowledge but also have constantly been told never to question what so-called religious people tell them.

Had the father listened to his conscience, he might have remembered that the Prophet was first married to Khadijah, who was 15 years older than him, and that they had a loving marriage for 25 years, producing seven children.

He never married another woman until after Khadijah died; even then they were widows who needed care and protection or to seal alliances with tribal chiefs.

His love for his first wife was eternal because, as he was reportedly quoted to have said, “she believed in me when no one else did; she accepted Islam when people rejected me; and she helped and comforted me when there was no one else to lend me a helping hand”.

Had the father asked anyone with some knowledge, he might have found out what the law says about the legal age of marriage. But because someone quoted him something that sounded vaguely religious, he believed him and gave his daughter’s hand.

We have to ask ourselves how could this happen in our supposedly developing country in the 21st century? Indeed, how could so many things happen to our children, from being abandoned at birth (and often not surviving that) to pregnancy at an early age with little knowledge of how to cope?

On March 8, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) released the Asia Pacific Human Development Report with the focus on gender equality. Or rather, where such equality stands in Asia.

Unfortunately even with much economic progress, we all still fall short, with many gaps between the sexes remaining.

But Malaysia was supposed to be one of the success stories, with a high literacy rate, many girls in education and in the workplace. Yet in some areas we still fare poorly.

On March 9, India passed a Bill to reserve 33% of places in Parliament and state legislatures for women. In Pakistan, the President signed an Anti-Sexual Harassment Law.

In Malaysia we have not moved at all on either of these, despite ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women more than 15 years ago.

Interestingly enough, Malaysia also signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995 but with many reservations, including on children’s age of majority.

When we gasp at the idea of little girls being married off, we never ask how come it doesn’t happen also to little boys. It’s perhaps because we often view females as property to be given away as and when we feel like it.

Is it not ironic that while a Muslim father has free rein to give away his girl child in marriage, adult women, who presumably have much more agency than children, cannot marry if their fathers refuse permission, without going through the rigmarole of getting a court-appointed guardian?

In whose interest is it to perpetually treat women like children?

And so the silliness continues

2010-02-08T14:55:00.000+08:00

Wednesday February 3, 2010
And so the silliness continues
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

The suggestion that young ladies forgo wearing underpants to celebrate Valentine’s Day have got religious authorities hot under the collar, while much more important events go unremarked on.

OUR religious authorities have announced that on this Valen-tine’s Day, they will be checking on romancing couples, especially those having candlelight dinners because this “will lead to sex in budget hotels”.

Their sternest attention will be focused on the young ladies who will be allegedly proving their love for their beaux by not wearing underpants that day.

Now, in almost any other country in the world, most people would laugh this off and not take it seriously. And most people would realise that the whole story about the panty-less Valentines is somebody’s idea of a joke.

And the very thought that sex after dinner would only occur in budget hotels should bring howls of laughter from any sane person.

But, no, this is Malaysia where we take all things silly very seriously indeed. And where the pious have plenty of time to speculate about women’s underwear.

Meanwhile, much more important events go unremarked on. Churches get burnt, gurdwaras get stoned and mosques get boars’ heads thrown into their compounds. Not to mention photographs getting stomped on, at mosques no less.

Do we hear a word from the guardians of our morals?

Surah Al-Hajj Verse 40 of the Quran says: “(They are) those who have been expelled from their homes in defiance of right, (for no cause) except that they say, ‘our Lord is Allah’.

“Did not Allah check one set of people by means of another, there would surely have been pulled down monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, in which the name of Allah is commemorated in abundant measure. Allah will certainly aid those who aid His (cause); for verily Allah is full of Strength, Exalted in Might, (able to enforce His Will).”

It is very clear from the Quran, which Muslims think of as the Word of God, that houses of worship from all faiths are to be protected.

Some people (such as Islamic scholar Abdullah Yusuf Ali, who translated the Quran into English) interpret this verse to also mean that the freedom of religion is to be protected. Whatever it is, it is clear that the desecration of any place of worship is a major no-no.

But do we hear anything from our religious authorities? The non-Muslim religious authorities, in a statement released very quickly after the boars’ heads were thrown into the mosque compounds, had unequivocally stated that the desecration of any house of worship was a sin of the highest order.

Surely this is as great a sin in Islam. When our religious authorities are so keen to go after those who are doing nothing more harmful than holding hands over dinner, they seem reluctant to bring their righteous wrath down on pyromaniacs who have a thing about places where God’s name is extolled.

No doubt they’ll reason that nobody has been found guilty yet and, indeed, we should always uphold that old adage “innocent until found guilty”. But surely a warning about the dire consequences of being found guilty, such as a less than smooth pass to heaven and those luscious virgins, would not go amiss.

Or even a more earthly punishment for going against the word of God, such as a jail term, a fine and several strokes of the cane, would surely be the bare minimum that our righteous ones can extol.

Instead, they are licking their lips over whipping a single mother who had the temerity to have a glass of beer.

One has to wonder about our authorities’ sense of proportionality when God Himself says, in Surah Al-Baqarah Verse 286, that He “does not burden any human being with more than he is well able to bear: in his favour shall be whatever good he does, and against him whatever evil he does”.

Indeed, should these people who have been apprehended and accused of throwing incendiary devices into the Metro Tabernacle Church be found guilty, I wonder what our religious authorities will do?

Or will it be a wash-their-hands-of the problem sort of response, since they were not tried in the Syariah Court? Or will they be sent off to rehabilitation centres for not just a criminal act but being poor examples of Muslims?

For that matter, how come our religious authorities have so little to say about Mat Rempits, bag snatchers and corrupt officials? Someone said that these are such obvious sins that there is no need to remark on them, much less issue fatwas.

But it must not be obvious to the increasing number of Mat Rempits, bag snatchers and the corrupt. So a reminder may be both necessary and timely.

Meanwhile, on this Valentine’s, perhaps someone can sponsor candlelit dinners in five-star hotels for young couples so that they can avoid budget hotels which would surely entice them into sex.

By the way, are married women allowed to go pantyless for their husbands?

Thank goodness for the cool heads

2010-01-25T14:30:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday January 20, 2010
Thank goodness for the cool heads
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Following the ‘Allah’ court ruling, many ordinary folks reached out to each other in peace despite differences in opinion.

ANDRE Malraux, the French writer and statesman, once said that “the first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved, without courting love. To be loved without ‘playing up’ to anyone, even to himself ”.

My interpretation is that a good leader is one who doesn’t sit around trying to find ways for people to love him or her but does the right thing for his country and people and hope they will see the justification for it, and eventually love him or her.

That may not take place in his or her lifetime. But, as they say, history will be the judge.

In the last two weeks or so, what we have seen is a leadership that has only been interested in courting love and playing up to people.

Nothing could have been so blatant in catering to an unruly crowd than the permission to hold demos against a court decision.

What sort of justice system do we have if anyone can disrespect court decisions by holding demos against them? There are legal avenues to pursue: why do we not educate people to do just that?

Some of the explanations are just disingenuous.

To say that a ban is necessary as a “pre-emptive move to prevent violence” shows that either politicians think their people are natural hooligans or they know already that violence may be planned.

Indeed, not much violence apart from shouting and screaming happened. But even so, we hear no comment from our leaders on this type of behaviour.

After 52 years, is this considered acceptable?

These demos also occurred after the first church was attacked. Not only did our leaders take more than 24 hours to visit the site of the attack but they also issued no call to cancel demos for propriety’s sake.

Indeed, one demonstrator even went so far as to call for churches to be burnt! Not a word was heard about that from our leaders.

It was the public itself who were more sensible. Not only did they refuse to participate in the demos, even if they may have been unhappy about the ruling, but at one mosque, they actively tried to dissuade anyone from joining any call to demonstrate.

Individuals went on their own to console church leaders and reassured them that they or their premises would not be harmed.

Islamic NGOs offered to guard the churches, although it’s hard to forget that they are also the ones, who had raised the temperature around the issue.

Thus far, no government leader has straightforwardly said that not only is the burning of any house of worship against the law, but it is also un-Islamic.

Some people have said that this would mean accusing Muslims of conducting the attacks when nobody is sure yet who they are.

In which case, there can be no greater priority for the police than to catch the perpetrators, if only to clear the names of the race and religion.

It has been the ordinary people again who have reached out in peace towards each other, determined that despite differences of opinion, they want to see our country remain peaceful and stable.

Thus young people connected via social media organised, within a very short space of time, a peace offering project to tell people that “everything’s gonna be alright”, discrediting a government minister’s warning that social media does very little good.

Others wrote peace messages on ribbons. One young singer was moved to write and record a beautiful song because she was so distressed by what was happening.

The peace-builders are ordinary citizens who are refusing to be taken in by political games.

Sadly, it is clear that there are too few of our leaders engaged in building peace among our people, but they are in fact more interested in keeping us divided.

Even such peace offerings seem more divisive, giving rights to some and not to others. There can never be peace without equality. Just ask the Palestinians.

Ultimately, it is a question of education. This whole sad episode only highlights the many gaps in our knowledge.

Not only do we know so little about the world, we don’t even know much about our fellow citizens across the sea in east Malaysia. Neither do we know much about each other’s religions.

The reason we have had relatively little violence is because the non-Muslim community has leadership that insisted that they turn the other cheek and pray instead.

Can we trust in the Muslim leadership to do the same if the shoe was on the other foot?

Or are we like Adolf Hitler who said, “What luck for rulers that men do not think?.”

Mysterious people in need of rules

2010-01-11T18:21:00.000+08:00

Wednesday January 6, 2010
Mysterious people in need of rules
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

There will be those who will be confused, others who will act without restraint, rampaging freely and causing havoc ... they are faceless strangers we have yet to meet.

RECENTLY I conducted a workshop with some university students in which I asked them for ideas on how to protect young women from violence and HIV.

One idea that came up was to fence and guard women’s hostels on campuses to prevent men from entering. I then asked the young man who suggested this if, without fences, he would not be able to restrain himself from entering the women’s hostels.

“I didn’t mean me,” he replied, “but other people…”

I often hear that we need laws, rules and regulations because there are people who are bound to need them. Without these, such mysterious people are bound to act without restraint, rampaging freely and causing havoc in society.

Yet when I ask anyone whom do they mean by these others, they don’t mean anybody they know. They are inevitably some strangers with weak constitutions that they have yet to meet.

The same is true of that insidious thing called self-censorship. We are constantly afraid that “someone” will get offended, so we make sure that everything we write, say, or do is so devoid of any possibility of offence that it becomes bland and dull.

The trouble with this thinking is two-fold: one is that there is only one group of people we think will be offended, and two, we know that there are some people within that group who will make it their business to seek offence and insults wherever they can.

Are people’s lives so empty that it can only be filled with imagining other people are out to hurt them? And why are they so easily wounded at all?

I find it especially puzzling when people are constantly finding their faith, which should be so personal, attacked at every juncture. Yet presumably, between Dec 31 and Jan 1, their beliefs have not changed because of what happened in court.

But it’s not about them, they say, it’s about all those poor ignorant souls, including children, who will become confused. One wag wondered how to explain why his child has to fast and pray five times a day when their friends call God by the same name but don’t have to.

Well, if parents cannot explain the basic tenets of their religion to their own child, then it’s not anyone else’s fault that the child gets confused.

Similarly, if there are sections of any faith community that have muddled ideas about which is their religion and which is others’, then surely that is the fault of their own community rather than others.

I don’t understand what is so edifying about claiming that we are always weak and easily confused. How do we on the one hand claim a superior position for our faith when at the same time we admit that we can be so easily influenced? Are the fortifications that we built for ourselves in our hearts and consciences so fragile?

Oh, but I forget, it’s not us we are talking about, it’s those people, that mysterious group of weaklings and ignoramuses that we have to stand up for. Funny, doesn’t it say in the Quran that we all have to answer for ourselves eventually?

If we constantly tell people that their faith is weak, it will become exactly that. If we say that every little thing, including language, the sound of church bells, or where temples are located, can challenge our faith, then they will feel challenged.

If we keep telling them that confusion will reign, they will believe that. Not for themselves but for some imaginary members of their faith community.

Yet, if we polled every single person to ask if they felt confused, they would deny it. Thus, on whose behalf do we bust our guts for in these issues?

Could it be that in fact it’s impossible to know what anyone’s true faith is, because only God can read anyone’s heart? That it is redundant for anyone to try and legislate faith because it is simply not the province of human beings? All we can do is try and make people behave in an orderly fashion.

There are surely more important things to occupy our minds than whether any of our brethren may misread something.

In other countries, our so-called religious kinfolk are killing each other by the dozens, no doubt invoking God’s name as they do so. Others are illiterate, starving or dying from preventable diseases.

Demonstrating over a court decision about a word is the privilege of the healthy and prosperous.

The good, the bad and the new year

2009-12-31T15:54:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday December 23, 2009
The good, the bad and the new year
Musings by MARINA MAHATHIR

Despite the nasty and horrid things that the year witnessed, there is hope yet for us yet as the people become more aware of their rights and are willing to stand up for them.

SINCE this is my last column for the year, I thought I’d do my usual list exercise. It has been a very eventful year to say the least so I thought I would list out what I’ve been happy about and what I haven’t been happy about this year.

Let’s start off with Things I Wasn’t Happy About:

1. The way some people behave so badly with such impunity, as if they know they can do anything and get away with it. Top of the list are those “cow-head protestors” as well as their brethren who declared Malays “first-class citizens” and all others, “second-class citizens”. No throwing the book of sedition at them, not even a sharp rap on the knuckles?

2. The shrinking of public space for debate and discussion especially on matters of religion and race. If anyone tries to give alternative viewpoints, they are immediately shouted down or a police report is made charging them with everything from insulting God, religion, the Sultan and whoever has the thinnest skin. And we call ourselves a modern nation?

3. The refusal to get out from under the cloak of denial on all social problems. If there is a problem among our people, the answer is always more religion, particularly the form that refuses to entertain any discussion on the subject. Somehow we expect the matter to disappear just like that. Unfortunately, they fester and will ooze slime endlessly whether we like it or not. This would include issues like drug use, Mat Rempit and incest.

On hold: It is clear now that nobody really wants to whip Kartika. But unless someone comes out and clearly states that she’s been pardoned, her life will remain in suspension.

4. Related to that is the apparent wish that the Kartika problem will just go away. It is clear now that nobody really wants to whip her. But unless someone comes out and clearly states that she’s been pardoned, her life will remain in suspension. There is nothing just and fair about leaving her in abeyance like that. Some closure for her is needed.

5. In conjunction with that is the apparent belief that the only good Muslim is the one that wants to be punished while those who question injustice are painted as disbelievers. At the same time, those who are disobeying the courts, such as the men who are refusing to pay court-ordered maintenance for their children, are never painted as bad irresponsible Muslims. Are we naming and shaming the wrong people?

6. The complete lack of common sense on the part of some of our leaders is a cause for concern. If there are two groups at odds with one another, you don’t sit down with just one and then declare their grievances are justified. Nor do you express sympathy for someone who’s been responsible for many violent deaths and say that you could have rehabilitated them. Even sillier, you don’t try to equate the “pain” a chair might feel upon being whipped with what a human being might feel.

7. While some leaders talk about eliminating corruption, most remain blind to obvious questions, such as, how come a public official can afford a RM25mil mansion? No wonder cynicism reigns!

8. The increasing racist tone by which we refer to foreigners within our midst, especially those who are from countries less developed than ours. Racist monikers may not be okay for our own people but apparently okay for others. Also despicable are the sweeping generalisations about foreigners as criminals, conmen and prostitutes.

9. The constant politicisation of everything. Really, neither politics nor politicians are the most important things in the world.

Things I Have Been Happy About

1. The increase in the number of people who have become more aware of the issues surrounding them and are keen to express their opinion on it, mostly online.

2. The many young people who are not only increasingly aware of issues around them but will also take action to effect some change. The most impressive is the MyConstitution campaign to educate the public about our ‘Document of Destiny’ but also other smaller projects such as Fast for the Nation which does more for unity than any government project could.

3. The effectiveness of social media especially Facebook and Twitter in connecting like-minded people together so that they can share experiences, learn from one another and get organised. As always young people are way ahead of adults, especially those in government.

4. The fact that we can talk about human rights without the ground opening up and swallowing us.

5. The continued belief in this country, despite all the nastiness, and the willingness to stay and fight gives hope.

There’s probably more I could be happy about if I thought hard enough but the horrid things somehow come quicker to mind.

Whatever comes along, things must get better in 2010. Wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy Muslim and Gregorian New Year!

Oh, the shame of it all

2009-12-14T09:46:00.000+08:00

Wednesday December 9, 2009
Oh, the shame of it all
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

Malaysians have brought much embarrassment to the country in what they say and do while abroad, but the reaction to Fatine’s predicament must surely top it all.

I PONDERED this week on the meaning of “shame”. A statement by an Immigration official, who said that Fatine, a transsexual facing deportation from Britain, had brought “shame” to Malaysia, prompted my mind to ponder on this word.

By definition, shame is “a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness or disgrace”.

In this case, it seems an overwhelming emotion in response to what is basically someone else’s misfortune. After all, nobody knew this poor person until this happened. To then feel shame seems a bit of an overreaction.

This is even more puzzling when shame is never the response expressed over other misdeeds done by Malaysians whether at home or abroad.

Our citizens have been known to violate immigration laws overseas a great deal. In fact overstaying their visas is almost a Malaysian disease since it is estimated that there are some 30,000 Malaysian over-stayers in Britain.

When Britain threatened to stop visa-free entries for Malaysians going there recently because of these over-stayers, our authorities organised workshops to help those lawbreakers to come home, assuring them that they would not be arrested and put in prison. How very sweet!

How come we didn’t condemn all those people for bringing shame to the country then? Why single out poor Fatine?

Indeed, how come we have never expressed shame at our people who happily break laws in other countries by smuggling drugs and people, cheating, stealing, even murdering?

How come Immigration or any other officials don’t hang their heads in embarrassment that our people have the temerity to break laws in foreign lands?

How is it that we feel no sense of disgrace when people overseas think we’re barbaric for wanting to whip a mother of two for possibly doing herself, and nobody else, personal damage by having an alcoholic drink?

I must say that there have been moments when I have felt great shame at the antics of Malaysians abroad.

I feel it at conferences where our officials are obviously missing, only to show up later laden down with bags of shopping. Or when people have taken a lot of trouble to arrange a last minute visit to a project, and then they don’t show up because “traffic jam lah”.

I felt it when at the conclusion of a short course, which was very expensive, and paid for by sponsors, one semi-government participant got an award for “biggest contribution to tourism”, a caustic reference to his frequent absence from class.

I have this tendency to cringe when at conferences overseas, some of our delegates have nothing to say whatsoever, mostly because they don’t know the subject, but it was their “turn” to go.

I remember once that the NGO delegation basically wrote the Government statement by default, simply because we knew the subject well and were willing to sit down and work on it.

My face has turned red when I have had to sit through press conferences where Government officials have patently stated untrue things because they sounded good and expounded theories for which there have been no empirical basis.

There are few things more frustrating than having to squirm through those situations where you are unable to say anything without showing up the officials concerned and, yes, shaming them.

Yet it is people like those in NGOs who know their stuff who get told off for being disloyal, unpatriotic and supposedly out to embarrass the Government.

Heck, you may disagree with what we say but at least try and argue as articulately as we do. Then we can hold our heads up and say that our government officials may get things the wrong way round but, boy, they can make a convincing argument for it.

So what is this shame that this official felt? And in fact what has it to do with him at all? Is Immigration in charge of filing charges against our citizens for embarrassing us overseas?

Is there anywhere in their regulations that people who “shame” us overseas will not be allowed to have passports? In that case, there are probably more cases than they can handle.

Our smart official also probably did not think that his words have already travelled the world over and caused many blushes among Malaysians already.

What’s more, if he carries out his threat, and indeed if anything punitive were to be dished out to Fatine if she returns home, then we would be faced with queries from all over the world, with some awkward questions about how we treat the more marginalised sectors of our society.

At a time when we already have more to be ashamed, than to be proud, of, we really don’t need another fiasco, thank you.

Beware of ‘terrorists’ within

2009-11-30T17:10:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday November 25, 2009
Beware of ‘terrorists’ within
Musings by MARINA MAHATHIR

OVER dinner in the past week, the conversations have taken a worried turn. “Where are we heading?” was the predominant question.

Even if our habit is to continually complain, there was a more plaintive note this time. Optimism was not in abundance.

I’ve found a lot of despondency lately among the thinking citizens of this country about the state we’ve found ourselves in.

There is an economic crisis going on and that’s bad enough. But why does everything else seem to be going crazy as well?

People don’t feel safe and they don’t feel they can trust the police. Friends of mine who got robbed and received no help from the police complained publicly about it.

When I checked recently with them if anything had improved, they said no, and they were preparing to move to another area. So are many of their neighbours.

Feeling safe in one’s own home and neighbourhood is a basic expectation of any citizen. So is the expectation that some of society’s other ills are being eradicated.

Corruption is one but yet we have dropped significantly in Transparency International’s corruption index. Shouldn’t we be embarrassed?

Or is it abnormal to expect that we don’t have to grease anyone’s palm to get anything done or to be given the opportunity to do any work?

What I found was disquiet among the people about the growing conservatism in this country.

It seems that there are people who are insisting that this country must prove its Islamic credentials by being more repressive, more punitive, more unforgiving of human transgressions.

These people insist that to be truly Islamic is to be harsh. Any-thing progressive is deemed not Islamic enough, if not outright un-Islamic.

As Islam and racial identity are so intertwined, we now have a situation where it looks as if this conservatism, which on the surface looks as if it would affect only Muslims, will actually impact on non-Muslims as well.

It cannot be possible for non-Muslims to be unaffected if there are people who are spreading an “Islamic” ideology where you should not interact with people of other faiths, where they are to be viewed as lesser beings and where they constantly have to be made to respect Muslims without any commiserate respect in return.

This conservatism should properly be called extremism and all ignore it at their peril. The oft-used tactic is to insist that nobody with a different viewpoint be allowed to speak for fear that it will cause “confusion”.

Yet for many Muslims raised on a benign gentle Islam, this aggressive and harsh Islam is the one that is confusing.

Another tactic is to insist on “credentials”. Previously, there was an insistence on academic credentials. But of late, even these are not enough.

As we have seen with (former Perlis mufti) Dr Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, anyone who has the slightest inclination towards a more progressive interpretation of Islam is targeted.

Given the Government’s seeming paralysis on these extremists, we can understand why there are worries.

Issues that could have been handled and solved quickly are allowed to fester, so much so that they attract international attention. Where are our leaders on these issues? Are they hoping these will just disappear?

Concerned citizens are wondering if our leaders are too busy politicking that they can’t see what is happening under their noses.

It will not matter eventually who gets into office because if these extremists get their way, there will be no politicians nor a democracy, only a theocracy.

Already a politician has suggested that the best person to lead a coalition is in fact a religious leader, one who can hardly be called progressive. I can think of no worse scenario for our country.

In our neighbouring countries, voters have summarily dismissed any extremist parties as well as politicians who are using religion to gain points.

Over here we seem to think that putting on a religious face is the way to go. That would be fine if it was a progressive religious face, one that puts justice, equality and inclusiveness at its core.

While not explicitly endorsing the most backward interpretations, our politicians’ lack of criticism can easily be interpreted as support. Silent complicity is all the extremists need.

Meanwhile, those who are warning against these dangers are being demonised and persecuted. These acts terrorise others into silence as well.

As a result, otherwise decent people who are worried say nothing out of fear of what would happen to them and their families. If that continues, one day we will wake up to find the Malaysia we love irrevocably changed.

Speak up and be counted

2009-11-16T10:20:00.001+08:00

Wednesday November 11, 2009
Speak up and be counted
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Sometimes it takes an extreme act to wake us up to our rights and guard against extremism.

THERE was a flurry of excitement last week when the Selangor Islamic Department (Jais) arrested Datuk Dr Mohd Asri Zainal Abidin, the popular former mufti of Perlis, for supposedly teaching Islam without a licence.

Surrounded by some 40 policemen and then almost handcuffed like a common criminal, Dr Mohd Asri was taken to the police station but not charged. Nor was he charged in court the next day.

The fiasco may or may not have been related to a memorandum put up by the Syariah Lawyers’ Association and supposedly handed over to the Yang di-Pertuan Agong. The group then apologised, and in 24 hours withdrew it so the question of the arrest as well as other defamatory statements made by various individuals remain.

Presumably, none of the people out to get Dr Mohd Asri quite realised how popular the ex-mufti is.

To call a man who has written that Muslims should be nice to their non-Muslim friends, should ensure that women get justice in the courts and that we should treat animals kindly, an extremist defied all logic.

This must have been news to them: kind people are popular!

Indeed there were many statements condemning Jais’ actions. Politicians on both sides of the fence, as well as NGOs lent their support to Dr Mohd Asri.

One of the best statements came from the Muslim Professionals Forum (MPF). In their statement, they said Dr Mohd Asri’s arrest was an affront to “the spirit of intellectual freedom in the history of Islam.”

They also reiterated that “every person has the right, guaranteed by the Quran, to freely follow and express his convictions, irrespective of whether he is right or wrong.”

And what’s more, they decried the tendency of various groups to resort to “labelling and branding Muslim scholars on the basis of their opinions, with a view to disparage the person instead of countering their opinions with proofs and arguments based on the Quran and Sunnah.

“By invoking the age-old argument of protecting the Muslim community in Malaysia from confusion, these groups have exposed their inability to grasp the spirit of Islam and have only created a hole for them to hide in every time they are intellectually challenged.”

The right to “freely follow and express his convictions” is not just a right in Islam but also enshrined in Article 10 of our Federal Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of speech and which can only be limited by Parliament. Obviously some of these “Muslim” NGOs and agencies like JAIS have never read the Constitution.

Otherwise they would not be writing endless memorandums or lodging police reports against people for expressing their opinion. As the MPF have pointed out so succinctly, not only do these acts violate the Federal Constitution, they violate Islam itself.

It is ironic that the very people who want to establish an Islamic state are violating an Islamic tenet. What’s more, they will no doubt hide behind that same “secular” Article 10 if need be, although given that some of their statements are in fact defamatory, they may not have even that defence.

In many ways, this incident has been a real boon for the Malaysian public because it brings into focus the issue of freedom of speech as never before. We now know that our Federal Constitution and Islam are completely in synch on the issue.

Even more interestingly, Islam does not specifically apply the right to free speech only to Muslims either, thus making us all equal, as we are under the Constitution. Amazing what a little education does to how we think about ourselves.

This is why we should encourage everyone to educate themselves about their religions, including the majority Muslim population in our country.

After all, if we rely totally on agencies like Jais, what happens when they do strange things like arrest highly qualified ulama like Dr Mohd Asri?

We also should educate ourselves on our Federal Constitution so we know our rights as citizens of this country. In fact, it should be a school subject, just as it is in Britain.

But to help everyone along, the Bar Council is organising a My Constitution campaign to educate the public about our Federal Constitution.

To be launched on Nov 13 (this Friday) by the Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk V.K. Liew, the campaign aims to get the public to understand, via simple booklets, videos and forums, what exactly is in the Constitution, and perhaps clear up some misinformation about what is not.

An educated citizenry is not just a more empowered citizenry, but also a more responsible one. That surely is a goal that nobody can argue with.

Perhaps it does take an extreme act for us to wake up and understand our rights. The right to speak on anything, including religion, is a right for all, not just some.

Need for solidarity against injustice

2009-10-31T20:05:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday October 28, 2009
Need for solidarity against injustice
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

All Malaysians should awaken to defend the rights of others to express themselves.

ONE of the features of democracy is the provision of space for all views to be expressed. This is to allow for healthy and open debate on any issue, with the hope that these interactions would lead to the wisest solution.

There are many of us here who hold firm to this belief, respect everyone’s right to have a view on any subject, and to express it publicly even when we do not agree with it. In return, we expect the same respect.

Apparently those are not the rules of the game here.

For some people, the rules are that only they be allowed to speak and anyone with a different opinion should just shut up. If the dissenters dare to say anything, then they should be hounded and intimidated until they acquiesce.

Today we have a women’s rights organisation that has had 50 police reports lodged against it by other organisations which do not agree with it. They claim these women must not only be not allowed to speak, but should be charged under the Sedition Act, have fatwas made against them and even be banned altogether.

There are even public forums being organised specifically to show that this women’s organisation is allegedly leading other women down the path to hell. You have to wonder what is so scary about this women’s organisation that it warrants all this hostile attention.

As far as most thinking people can tell, this women’s organisation has in the last 20 years been working to ensure that Malaysian women, specifically Muslim women, have access to the justice and equality that the Holy Quran says is their due.

What would be so scary about that? But if you believe its opponents, you would think that this organisation is plotting to turn this country into some Satanic state, where women rule and men are sidelined. God only knows where they got this idea.

What’s sad is that nobody has really stepped up to defend not just the right of this women’s organisation to express its views, but the right of anyone to do so in a supposedly democratic country.

Nobody seems to recognise that to file 50 police reports is nothing if not an act of intimidation geared to close the space for intelligent discussion and debate. What’s more, many of these police reports could really be considered defamatory.

It is a real mistake for anyone, whether it is the political leadership of this country or the ordinary person, to ignore this issue and think it is harmless. These police reports and forums are a concerted effort to ensure that only one viewpoint is given space.

More than that, it is a manifestation of an environment where those trying to ensure justice are intimidated and inhibited, and those trying to enhance all forms of discrimination, not just that against women, are given free rein – and even, due to the lack of comment on their behaviour, protected.

Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Islamic scholar, in his call for a moratorium on so-called Islamic punishment, quotes a hadith recorded by Al-Bukhari and Muslim, “Support your brother, whether he be unjust or victim of an injustice.”

One of the Companions asked: “Messenger of God, I understand how to support someone that is a victim of injustice, but how can I support him who is unjust?” The Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) responded: “Prevent him from being unjust, that is your support to him.”

While Ramadan mostly calls on his Muslim brethren to defend their co-religionists from being unjust, I believe that his call is also relevant for those of other faiths who live in the same society.

As he points out, “Societies will never reform themselves by repressive measures and punishment, but more so by the engagement of each to establish civil society and the respect of popular will as well as a just legislation guaranteeing the equality of women and men, poor and rich before the law.

“It is urgent to set in motion a democratisation movement that moves populations from the obsession of what the law is sanctioning to the claim of what it should protect: their conscience, their integrity, their liberty and their rights.”

Meanwhile, what do neglect and silence achieve? That old warning about staying silent while various groups are hauled away until the day comes when there is no one left to defend us when it’s our turn, is one to heed.

Just because an issue seemingly affects only one community does not mean that the basic unjust principle of it cannot be applied to others. The imperative is greater when the group under attack is one that has relentlessly defended others’ right to freedom of expression.

Where is the solidarity against injustice?

Missteps to a civil society

2009-10-15T08:46:00.000+08:00

Wednesday October 14, 2009
Missteps to a civil society
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Some university students seeking to be the moral guardians of society want to stop others from having fun at concerts, but fail to take up the bigger causes.

I WAS reading an interesting article the other day about the Roman Polanski case. If anyone still doesn’t know, the movie director was found guilty of statutory rape of a 13-year old girl in California in the 70s, sentenced to 48 days’ jail but fled to Europe to escape it.

But recently he was re-arrested in Switzerland and is facing – and fighting – extradition back to the US.

The article was interesting because it showed how values and mores have changed over the past 30 years.

In the 70s, sex with minors was viewed among certain “sophisticated” showbiz circles as a normal thing.

The media reports at the time were sympathetic to Polanski and mentioned that the girl “looked older than her age and was sexually experienced”. Even the police report was largely sympathetic.

Thanks to advocacy by rape survivors’ groups in the US, mores have changed.

Today, men who have sex with young girls or boys are considered paedophiles and rarely escape prosecution.

Those who are released after jail often find they have nowhere to live as communities refuse to have them in their midst.

It is when values and norms change from the depraved to those that protect the powerless that you can consider a society has become more civilized, compassionate and humane.

No matter what you say about Western society, they are certainly far advanced than us when it comes to protecting the disabled, the victimized and the marginalized.

We are still a long way from that. Our values have not, for want of a better word, clarified themselves.

These days people who insult others and display hooligan antics are supported and made out to be heroes.

People who are found guilty of corruption can stand for election and win.

When adults behave like that, we must not be surprised when young people take their cues from them. Our university students are an example.

In other countries, university students demonstrate for things like free and fair elections, the release of people imprisoned for dissent and other injustices they see in their society.

Sometimes they suffer great hardship because of those demonstrations, including imprisonment and torture.

The luckier ones escape into exile.

But our students have to be different.

They reserve the right to demonstrate like others of course. But their causes are rather different.

They will protest against other people, for example, for having fun at concerts. In turn they suggest no fun alternatives. It makes one wonder what they do for leisure, and if their grades reflect such asceticism.

Recently our students have formed a Friends of Kartika Club. Its aim is to “support” her and to demonstrate to others that “Islamic” caning is not at all inhuman or painful.

I am assuming that in our universities today, logic is one of the lessons taught.

But I’m having trouble working out the logic of this.

These students want to support a woman who has been sentenced by the court for a wrongdoing.

It’s not because they think she is innocent but because they agree she is guilty.

The most exemplary thing about her, according to them, is that she has accepted her punishment, which is well and good.

However there are lots of guilty persons in our courts who have also accepted their punishment.

For instance, fathers guilty of raping their own daughters are often sentenced to jail and several strokes of the rotan.

Death by hanging is often the punishment for drug traffickers and murderers. Other types of criminals get jailed, sometimes for life.

All of them also accept their punishment, to a greater or lesser degree. But nobody sets up fan clubs for them.

If “Islamic” caning is more humane, I wonder why these students don’t take up a larger cause, that of advocating that all caning in this country be made more humane?

Never mind if these are meted out to purse snatchers, Mat Rempits, rapists and other violent criminals, surely their caning cannot be Islamic? Or is the excuse that since we are not an Islamic state yet, this is why we cannot implement more humane caning?

In Saudi Arabia, the “mother of all Islamic states”, a man was recently sentenced to a jail term as well as one thousand lashes of the cane. Or was that a whip?

His crime was to have been foolish enough to boast about his sex life on a foreign TV station. But I suppose one thousand gentle “Islamic” lashes would do to teach him a lesson.

So, as we continue our determined march towards greater so-called piety, and sentences like the cutting off of hands for theft loom, will our students then tour campuses and give demonstrations of the humane way hands can be chopped off?

Unity an ongoing Malaysian project

2009-10-01T14:53:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday September 30, 2009
Unity an ongoing Malaysian project
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Having stayed together with only relatively minor spats over the past 52 years, we need to ask ourselves if we are really as divided as some politicians will have us believe.

I KNOW that every new administration feels the need to carve a new character for itself and so finds some slogan for this purpose. Our current government has chosen ‘1Malaysia’, which is rapidly becoming ubiquitous.

I understand the sentiment behind it. It seems that we have become so divided that there is a need for unity among all of us. And indeed there is much that can divide us – such as race, religion and social class – if we let them.

Yet for 52 years, we have survived with all these differences among us and, apart from some relatively small incidents, we have managed to stay together.

We have not gone the way of some countries where people who were once neighbours have turned on each other in very brutal ways, often egged on by politicians. What-ever differences we had were resolved in generally peaceful ways.

So we have to ask if we are really as disunited as we think. I suppose it depends on what we think of as united.

On the one hand, we have politicians who insist on stressing everything that is different about us.

When problems can be solved, they have often shown themselves to be too weak-willed to do so.

If only the principles of fairness and justice were applied to these problems, none of them would fester at all.

It is also true that in times of economic difficulties, people tend to focus on their differences rather than their similarities.

Whatever they feel deprived of is blamed on others having more, rather than the fact all are living in an environment of newly-amplified inequality.

If everyone felt they were suffering equally, just as in good times they benefited equally, then these problems would not arise.

But when the authorities hesitate to redress these inequalities for whatever reason, then tensions naturally arise.

It often seems that it is mostly politicians who sharpen these differences.

Despite some highly charged events recently, we can still walk around and not be afraid of insults being thrown at us, or be attacked for merely being of a certain race or colour.

Instead, in our vulnerability to crime, we are certainly not discriminated against.

At the people level, we are more intent on sharing than splitting. I have been more than amused by the craving for lemang and rendang brought on by the Raya season on the part of non-Muslim friends.

You feel that to have an open house with all these dishes is almost an act of charity.

One friend has been unwell and unable to attend any, and has been moaning endlessly about it.

I know of one young family who went out on a rendang hunt simply because they got into the Raya mood and felt it wasn’t complete without the right food. And they were not Muslims at all!

I have to say that around Chinese New Year, I start wondering who is going to invite me for a yee sang meal. And it’s been my bad luck to be always away for the past few Deepavallis, thus depriving myself of all the festive goodies.

We like to say that food unites us. But it’s not just a matter of gastronomy, I think.

Our festivals – and food is an integral part of them – are so much a part of the fabric of Malaysian life, that few people feel isolated from them.

The cultural symbols of our festivals are wired into all of us, regardless of our race and religion. And so when it’s those times of the year, our whole spirit starts to crave.

These are not things any slogan can instill. Neither is it anything new. It takes years to imbue people with this hardwiring.

We have always been this way and, bar any catastrophe, we will always be this way.

I would venture it’s because we are united already on one thing: the ongoing project that is our country.

Commonality of purpose is a very unifying factor. I used to run an organisation where everyone was united against a virus that could kill anyone, regardless of race or religion.

Our staff composition was truly a rainbow reflection of Malaysia; what mattered was your belief in the cause and your passion and commitment. Your race, sex, class or orientation did not count as long as you believed.

That singular Malaysia is an ongoing project that started in 1957, not this year.

To talk of it as something new is an insult to the decades of unity that has existed. Worse still, to depict it in shallow visual ways is meaningless tokenism. Nor should it be for tourism purposes.

It’s not about coming together for a show, and then retreating to our separate enclaves. It’s about having no enclaves.

It’s time for us to chill

2009-09-24T09:15:00.000+08:00

Wednesday September 16, 2009
It’s time for us to chill
By MARINA MAHATHIR

WHEN I was little I remember there being a Malaysia Day. I don’t remember what the date was, but now I realise that it must have been Sept 16. But at the time I remember the word “Malaysia” was somewhat a novelty, but an exciting one nevertheless.

I don’t know how it came to be that Malaysia Day disappeared from our consciousness. To be more correct, it has disappeared from the consciousness of those of us Malaysians in the peninsula.

It has only been because of the insistent reminders from our fellow citizens in Sabah and Sarawak recently that we have become conscious of the fact that today is the anniversary of the formation of Malaysia.

As important as Aug 31 is as the day that Malaya became independent, surely the day that we became the modern nation of Malaysia is equally important. We are after all Malaysians, not just Malayans.

So it is fitting that some of us have decided to make this year’s Malaysia Day an extra special one.

After what has seemed like a very bad-tempered stretch of several months when everyone’s emotions have been strung out with one incident after another, a group of individuals decided that enough is enough and that something needed to be done.

But instead of doing something that would only heighten emotions, they decided to do something to underscore the need for reflection, restraint and calmness.

They decided to reject the hatred and injustices of recent months and reclaim our country for the peaceful place that it is.

That was how the idea for the Fast for the Nation, Peace for Malaysia initiative began. As with all good ideas, it is striking in its simplicity. What everyone joining the initiative is doing today is to fast from dawn to dusk.

This is not just to show solidarity with the Muslim citizens of the country but to do something simple together as a way of showing unity.

If there is one thing that brings Malaysians together, it is food. So early this morning, several Malaysians of all races got together to have their pre-dawn meal, the sahur.

In the spirit of inclusiveness, so that there is no barrier to anyone’s participation, the meal was vegetarian. People who would never normally get up so early to eat did so just to join their Muslim friends.

Then in the evening, they will get together again to break the fast. From the very onset of the idea, as is typical of Malaysians, friends have been discussing what they would eat to break their fast.

But they are determined to do it together, with their neighbours, workmates and friends, regardless of race or religion. The citizens who break fast together stay together.

In addition, this initiative calls for participants to do something kind to someone during the day. At heart is the idea that if you do something nice for someone, you will get the same in return at some point.

After months of an environment where retribution seemed to be the order of the day, it was time to reverse that by consciously doing something good.

It could be as simple as offering to babysit, shop for a house-bound neighbour or help someone at work or something more complicated, as long as it’s an act of kindness.

When the project was launched last week, the first 50 people to sign on all said the same thing: the hate and violence exhibited by some people recently are not typical of Malaysians.

We do not solve things through anger and recrimination. Nor do we allow anyone to exploit our differences and divide us.

While our strength is our diversity – and that diversity should always be respected – our national project ever since Sept 16, 1963, so to speak, is to unite.

So Fast for the Nation is exactly what we need.

It is a community-driven grassroots initiative, one not tainted by politics and with genuinely sincere objectives.

Basically it upholds the basic Ramadan thrust of restraint and calmness. In other words, we’re saying it’s time to chill.

Initiatives like this should not be confined to one day a year only.

We can easily think up many similar ideas. Already there have been groups of Muslims going to visit Hindu temples, or inviting non-Muslims to break the fast with them at suraus.

We need to reach out to each other more in natural ways, not at glitzy manufactured events.

Most of all, we need to show that hate is an emotion that is alien to the ordinary Malay-sian.

When we have seen people from all sides behave in the most debased manner, we have to rise above them. And show them what Malaysia is really about.

Happy Birthday Malaysia!

Merit comes from making right choices

2009-09-04T16:40:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday September 2, 2009
Merit comes from making right choices
Musings by Marina Mahathir

Living the faith is not just about avoiding what is prohibited, but more so about doing the right things where morals and ethics are concerned.

IN this month of Ramadan, one naturally focuses on questions of faith. And indeed, with several controversies in the papers, we can’t escape it at all. Every day our lives seem to be increasingly circumscribed until the question of choice in our lives becomes irrelevant.

There are some people in our midst who seem to think that the only way to fulfill our religious obligations is by removing any sort of temptation or challenge in our paths.

Since we are prohibited from drinking, the answer is therefore to remove any form of alcohol from our sight so that we may never have the opportunity to be tempted by it.

Or, to disallow young Muslims to attend events sponsored by alcoholic beverage companies.

The assumption is that by the mere presence of liquor, we would abandon all inhibitions and imbibe.

This suggests two things. One is that the religious education of the young must be so inadequate that they feel totally uninhibited when faced with what they should know is prohibited.

Secondly, our faith is essentially a weak one since it can never restrain us from breaking rules.

There are other faiths that have food prohibitions as well. Many Hindus and Buddhists don’t eat beef. There are people who take no meat at all.

Yet, living in a world of carnivores, where the beef burger is ubiquitous and most people are oblivious of others’ dietary restrictions, they stick to their diets throughout their lives. Do they have stronger faith than Muslims?

I’m trying to imagine a world where our faith is supposedly secured by having absolutely no temptations or challenges at all.

We can ban every form of alcohol (including medicinal ones), we can cull every single pig in the land, but does that mean we will be able to float about blissfully certain that we now have a place in heaven?

In countries where alcohol is completely prohibited, an underground system invariably springs up and people

drink much more, perhaps because it is illicit.

People who are used to ham made from turkey meat and bacon from beef tend to assume, when they travel to other countries, that all the bacon and ham there are also made from the same meats.

Children who have never seen pigs gush over the cuteness of those little pink animals with the funny snouts.

But faith is about more than just prohibited drinks and foods. It is also about morals and ethics. Every day we are faced with choices that challenge our sense of morality.

Do we pay a little extra to the officer in order to expedite our applications? Do we beat the red light, thus endangering other people, just because we are a little late? Do we keep quiet about a mistake we made and let others take the blame?

It is our faith that is going to provide us the answers to these questions. And sometimes these questions can be difficult to answer. Does that mean therefore that we should just get rid of them so that our faith need never be tested?

It would be nice to get rid of corruption completely so that we never have to deal with it. But do we hear of anyone calling for a ban on it? Or mobilising religious officials to catch anyone giving or receiving a bribe?

If our faith directs our way of life, then ethical and moral questions should dog us every day. How is it that those calling for people who drink to be whipped have nothing to say about people who neglect to repay loans? Or who leave their children in destitution?

How is it that the voices that bay for rock concerts to be banned are not just as outraged by the existence of the homeless and the hungry?

Faith, as someone said, needs to be exercised regularly. Otherwise it gets flabby. In what way can it be exercised if we think that living in a religious utopia is what we should aim for?

Is it better for our faith to be exercised by the trivial rather than the big moral questions of poverty, illiteracy and violence?

God said in the Quran, “if it had been His will, He could indeed have guided you all”. (6:149)

We could all be perfectly good if He

had so willed it. But we are given

choices because that is how we earn our merits. We have the opportunity to think about what we should do and then decide.

In that way we have the chance to think about what ethics we want to apply in our lives. Take away that choice and we never have to think about morals and ethics. What sort of human beings would we be then?

Following Jakarta in tackling AIDS

2009-08-24T09:47:00.000+08:00

Wednesday August 19, 2009
Following Jakarta in tackling AIDS
MUSING by MARINA MAHATHIR

The openness and inclusiveness of the Indonesian local organising committee have been impressive.

IT was a subtle but significant moment for those of us who have worked in this field for a very long time. When Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of Indonesia, fifth most populous and largest Muslim country in the world, addressed his “brothers and sisters living with HIV”, all of us sitting in the audience couldn’t help our prickly eyes.

In the dramatic setting of the Garuda Wisnu Kencana park in Bali, President Yudhoyono was opening the 9th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP). No head of government has deigned to open the conference since the 5th in Kuala Lumpur in 1999. But the Bali conference was exceptional in so many ways.

Before the opening, the First Lady of Indonesia, Ibu Ani Bambang Yudhoyono, hosted a lunch for several AIDS Ambassadors from abroad in her capacity as National AIDS Ambassador. This means that she is committed to upholding the AIDS cause in the country, talking about it and ensuring that the best prevention, treatment, care and support programmes are employed in Indonesia.

At the official opening, she read out a declaration by all the AIDS Ambassadors and Champions present at 9th ICAAP, committing themselves to being advocates for AIDS, particularly in fighting stigma and discrimination against those most at risk of infection and those living with HIV.

The President’s speech itself set the tone for the entire conference where the fight to contain the spread of AIDS in Asia and the Pacific had to be based on human rights principles, protecting the rights and dignity of those most at risk of becoming infected .

As at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS in 2001 where many countries, including ours, fought to have a listing of the most vulnerable populations excluded from the resulting document, Indonesia has no problem talking about injecting drug users, sex workers, migrant workers or even men who have sex with men.

Indeed, in my two years working with the Indonesian Local Organising Committee, their sheer openness and inclusiveness impressed me. Indonesia, again unlike us, has a National AIDS Commission (NAC), an autonomous body that reports directly to the President, headed by a powerful and very HIV-savvy woman Nafsiah Mboi.

The NAC is a multi-sectoral body, comprising not only doctors and academics but also the private sector, NGOs and representatives of key affected groups including people with HIV. In fact, the NAC has even provided office space for the local networks of these community groups in the same building.

These communities, including youths, were present in all areas of the organising of the conference. They worked on many of the committees, in the secretariat office and as volunteers. And the entire conference was enriched by it.

Indonesia’s AIDS epidemic is younger than ours but has also expanded at a much faster rate. In Jakarta, HIV rates among injecting drug users is exceptionally high and in the far-flung province of Papua, sexual transmission has taken a great toll. Yet, with the help of donors, Indonesia has responded to the challenges with greater speed and much less angst than we have.

Every province now has an AIDS Commission replicating the National one and does their own programmes to deal with HIV issues that may be different from other areas. In this way, there is no one-size-fits-all programme handed down from a central authority. Needle exchange and methadone programmes in Bali for instance have greatly reduced the incidence of HIV among drug users there.

At the ICAAP, we talked about successful programmes, new challenges and were also reminded of the gaps. At the last plenary, just as Ibu Nafsiah of the NAC was speaking, we were interrupted by a demonstration calling for drugs for Hepatitis C, a common co-infection for many drug users with HIV. It was a peaceful and polite demonstration and Ibu Nafsiah immediately responded that she would look at the Hepatitis C issues in Indonesia and find ways to redress them.

Rarely do we ever see a government official take note and act so quickly as she did.

If Indonesia does well, we in Malaysia benefit too since our people have much interaction with one another. If we do well, Indonesia gains too.

Unfortunately while we are committed to fighting AIDS, we also fight shy of a very crucial part of that battle, the protection of the rights of those vulnerable to and living with HIV. Unlike Indonesia, we don’t have government policies specifically addressing human rights issues. Indeed the words rarely get mentioned in government circles.

Health is a human’s right. If we protect the right to health of the most marginalised and vulnerable groups of people in our society, we will advance the health of the entire nation. When will we understand that?

Before acting, take a deep breath

2009-08-07T15:35:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday August 5, 2009
Before acting, take a deep breath
Musings by MARINA MAHATHIR

FORGIVE me if I’m repetitive but sometimes repetition is the only way to get some things into people’s heads.

Yoga may be banned in the view of some in this country but there’s one practice in yoga that can be helpful to everybody. And that is breathing.

There are many instances when before we do anything, it’s really helpful to take a few deep breaths because it helps to clear our minds and allows that moment of hesitation before we do something unwise in haste.

There are lots of people who could really have done with three deep breaths this past week. Breathing helps to engage the brain, and the brain is always needed when making decisions.

Thus it was that non-breathing on the part of those in power led to the ugly scenes of thousands of Malaysian citizens being water-cannoned, teargassed and arrested at the weekend.

There are those who complained about the inconvenience of such demos because mostly it prevented them from driving into town to go shopping. Perhaps the complaints are wrongly directed at the demonstrators.

Rather it should be directed at the police who put up road barriers and blocks a full day before the planned demos and caused traffic jams long before a single protestor put a foot down on a street.

Would it not have been better to simply issue warnings that since a demo is expected, people intending to go into the city should just take public transport?

Oh, but the demo is illegal! Being illegal doesn’t exactly stop it from happening, not when people don’t believe it should be illegal.

So if you know something is going to happen anyway, all you can do is ensure that it happens in an orderly manner with the least inconvenience as possible.

Which goes back to the breathing. If those in power had only taken the time to breathe deeply, their brains might have given them a smarter and unexpected plan.

And the plan would be to actually allow the demos to take place but within certain limits.

So one demo could have taken place at Dataran Merdeka, and only there, within specific and reasonable time limits.

The other rival one could have been allowed to take place in another venue also for a specific time limit.

No one from one group should be allowed anywhere near the other. (The Prime Minister later offered stadiums for these demos, a bit belatedly).

This has tremendous benefits because it allows people to vent what they want, and at the same time pulling the carpet from under them completely.

It also allows better crowd control and avoids unnecessary actions like water-cannoning and tear-gassing. And you don’t get stupidities like children being handcuffed and lawyers not being allowed to talk to those arrested.

There may be those who believe that we should stick strictly to the law. But as someone once said, the law can be an ass.

Just because a law is there doesn’t preclude using one’s brains to think of wiser ways to handle a situation. And sticking strictly to the rules isn’t necessarily the wisest thing to do.

Ultimately it is about showing wisdom, a virtue that, unfortunately, our leaders have consistently failed to show.

The law is also supposed to be neutral. Despite the neutral-sounding noises before the two planned demos, one demo did not materialise, which had two effects.

One, it made the actual demonstrators look bad because there is nothing to compare them with.

Two, it allowed for some overwhelming smugness on the part of the lone pro-ISA supporter, claiming to represent 100,000 others, who apparently could hand over his memo at leisure and unmolested. (It turned out his claim that he had delivered the memo was untrue.)

He did still feel the need to hide his T-shirt, which says plenty about his ideas about openness.

What did the tear gas achieve? It lost at least 20,000 votes for the government, even more if you count those not participating but concerned anyway. It lost the votes of those who inadvertently got caught in the mess.

But here’s the thing. While the middle of the city was all eye-stinging chaos, the rest of the city functioned as normal.

People went out lunching and shopping as they would any Saturday, all the while keeping tabs of what was happening on their mobiles.

The city did not shut down; nobody felt any fear of the consequences of such demos. At the same time, they were not oblivious to what the demo was all about.

Which is a sign of the maturity of our people. While the doomsayers are trying to paint demos as the end of all civilisation, the public proved they are indeed civilised, more so than politicians anytime.

Two sides of the same coin

2009-07-10T09:03:00.000+08:00

Wednesday July 8, 2009
Two sides of the same coin
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

When human rights is sacrificed supposedly on the altar of security, nobody feels safe anymore, not even the enforcers.

READING up on the subject of policing and human rights the other day, I came across some interesting documents.

The Commonwealth Human Rights Report on Police Accountability in 2005 describes a concept that is new to me, that of democratic policing.

This is defined as the idea that the police are protectors of the rights of the citizens and the rule of law, while ensuring the safety and security of all equally.

This definition is not new. In 1996, the UN International Police Task Force declared: “In a democratic society, the police serve to protect, rather than impede, freedoms.

“The very purpose of the police is to provide a safe orderly environment in which these freedoms can be exercised.

“A democratic police force is not concerned with people’s beliefs or associates, their movements or conformity to state ideology. It is not even primarily concerned with the enforcement of regulations of bureaucratic regimens.

“Instead, the police force of a democracy is concerned strictly with the preservation of safe communities and the application of criminal law equally to all people, without fear or favour.”

It follows therefore that if we are to call ourselves a democratic country, the functioning of the police is very central to our perception of ourselves.

We can no longer defend our democracy by simply saying that we have elections every five years, but must also look at how our public institutions behave.

To quote the Commonwealth report once again: “As the primary agency responsible for protecting human security, the police are particularly responsible for turning the promise of human rights into reality.

“The failure of the police to properly perform their duties has a significant effect on the ability of citizens to enjoy the full spectrum of all their human rights and can also impact negatively on the ability of governments to deliver on their mandates.”

In other words, in a democratic society, it is quite possible for the police to be the main human rights agency in the country.

People have a right to safety and security, so ensuring that they are able to go about their business safely is a human rights job.

Making sure that their complaints are seen to quickly is another, as well as seeing that investigations are done properly so that justice can be served.

But this only happens if law enforcers see citizens as essentially good people. However if the attitude is that citizens are just one seething mass of potential lawbreakers, then a problem arises.

How do you protect people when basically you think people are just waiting to be bad?

This seems to be the basic difference in perspective between law enforcers and citizens.

Law enforcers believe that people cannot be trusted to behave themselves and therefore must act before they break the law.

Citizens on the other hand believe in what is just and fair and cannot understand why they should face punitive action just for believing that.

Yet, I have seen citizens gather to discuss difficult and sensitive subjects with greater civility than I have seen law enforcers. That is perhaps the other insight.

Civilians learn that the right way to behave is always to be civil even when you heartily disagree with others. Uniformed personnel see things in more black and white; there is simply no room for disagreement.

This inevitably puts law enforcers and civilians on a collision course. Civilians don’t see why things cannot be in the open; law enforcers prefer things to be kept in the dark so that they will always have the upper hand.

Civilians think that they can be trusted to not create chaos and disorder; law enforcers don’t believe so.

This is why we see otherwise peaceful demonstrations become disorderly after the police have acted, not before.

Most people also have a sense of natural justice that forms the basis of their concept of human rights. Even children have a sense of what is fair and what is not.

Yet, there are some people who think that human rights are “ideals” that cannot be realised if we are also to think of security.

The funny thing is when human rights is sacrificed supposedly on the altar of “security”, nobody feels safe anymore, not even the enforcers.

As an example, Israel has never been able to feel safe since it took away the rights of the Palestinians to live in their own land. More tough measures to ensure Israeli security have done nothing to ease the situation. The same can be seen anywhere human rights is suppressed.

Perhaps it is time for major re-education of law enforcement on what human rights means. And that their disregard for it reflects badly on the political masters they serve.

Injustice through the tar brush

2009-06-29T09:49:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday June 24, 2009
Injustice through the tar brush
MUSING by MARINA MAHATHIR

To stereotype through one’s shared identity does not do justice to every individual; we all live with multiple identities.

SOME months ago, I had an interesting session with some young people belonging to an evangelical youth movement. Our conversation was on stereotypes.

At the heart of racism, I said, are stereotypes about people because they belong to one race or religion. And the thing to remember about stereotypes is, every time you stereotype someone, someone else somewhere is stereotyping you.

I’ve been talking about racism all last week. Prof Aneez Esmail gave a talk on how Britain has handled race relations at a public forum and a closed roundtable session.

In both cases, we Malaysians proved that, aside from politicians, we are quite capable of discussing race with maturity and rationality.

Prof Aneez stressed that he was not here to tell us how to conduct race relations in Malaysia. Rather, he was relating his own experience of racism as an immigrant to Britain, and how he went about challenging it.

His challenges led to recognition of much institutional racism in the medical profession and at universities. Empirical evidence about the racism was key to his success.

He proved that hospitals were 10 times more likely to offer jobs to applicants with white names than to those with non-white names.

A similar study in Australia published only recently showed the same thing among employers there.

The issue of racism is considered so sensitive in this country that the general prescription is that we should not talk about it. This has only led to mounting tensions when problems remain unresolved.

Ironically, politicians are not censored in the same way as others, even though they seem to be the ones least likely to be capable of rational discussion. As a result, they have led to a further heightening of tensions.

Having said that, I believe that many of us are sincere in wanting to grapple with the issue of racism all round. Everyone feels hard done by in one way or another, whether officially or unofficially.

Prof Aneez stressed that we all live with multiple identities. I am not just Malay or Muslim, I am also a woman, a wife, mother, daughter, activist and whatever else I do and am.

So to stereotype through one’s shared identity does not do justice to every individual. All Muslims in the world may share some common beliefs but not all common traits.

Not all men are chauvinists. Not all Chinese are hardworking. Not all Indians can sing like Shah Rukh Khan, and so on.

The point is when we group people under one single shared identity, we invariably label them with the worst traits of that identity. Worse still, we then refuse to recognise the good in the other identities that they carry.

Thus, when we have prejudices against one group of people, we ignore the individual good traits that they might have under their other identities.

We might dislike someone just because we have prejudices against his race, while ignoring what he may have done for charity, or his expertise in his job, for example.

The other point is that when we say we want to eradicate racism, we must mean that for everyone. We cannot accuse someone else of racism while not recognising it in ourselves.

What’s more, we cannot reject racism among our fellow citizens but allow it against foreigners. Why is it okay to hurl epithets at Indonesians, Africans and Bangladeshis when it is not at Malaysian Malays, Chinese or Indians?

Racism is racism, no matter whom it is directed at.

While we are reflecting on how we may solve our internal racial issues, we must also reflect on why it is that we stereotype all Indonesians as criminals, all Africans as thugs and all Bangladeshis as poor labourers.

And why it is that we are not ashamed of ourselves when we do this?

Perhaps we don’t realise that over in Indonesia, all Malaysians are stereotyped as cruel and inhumane.

Africans think we have something against black people.

And, in Bangladesh, as much as they admire Malaysia, they also wonder why we treat their people so badly.

Stereotypes don’t take into account that individuals may think differently; they tar everyone with the same brush.

Prof Aneez pointed out that it is not

possible to totally eradicate racism but we can do a lot to make it socially disapproved of.

We can take pro-active measures to mitigate the impact of institutional racism with time-limited quotas and affirmative action.

For example, we could introduce affirmative action to bring in more non-Malays into the civil service and police force with special incentives as well as punitive measures for non-compliance by those institutions.

The lack of candidates cannot be an excuse but an unacceptable lack of effort.

All we need is political will. And therein lies the problem.

Veiled view of equal rights

2009-06-11T13:44:00.000+08:00

Wednesday June 10, 2009
Veiled view of equal rights
MUSING by MARINA MAHATHIR

US President Barack Obama showed that he was mindful of who he was talking to. If only people did the same back home in our neck of the woods.

THIS is one of those surreal moments. Over in Cairo, the first American President with Hussein for a middle name was reaching out to that large diverse community he collectively calls the Muslim world and saying pretty much all the right things.

President Barack Hussein Obama greeted everyone with Assalamualaikum and was met with applause. (Meanwhile, at home, people wondered if he would be arrested if he ever tried the same thing here.)

He quoted from the Quran (in English, without citing chapter and verse, so no complaints from the conservatives here) and acknowledged that women who choose to wear headscarves were not necessarily unequal to men.

Meanwhile, at home, a political party decided that women who do not wear headscarves are not only not equal to men – any man – but also unequal to women who do wear headscarves.

And that’s saying plenty since all women, covered heads or not, are irredeemably inferior to men. According to them, to be a woman is to be a bit disabled because it renders us unable to think for ourselves especially about religion.

And if interpretations of religion are making our lives miserable, then we should just shut up and bear it, because that’s what life is like for the disabled. Who are we to complain about that when, after all, it was God who made us disabled?

Isn’t that odd, when God gave us the strength to bear children and put up with infinite patience the foibles of men?

When men admit to weakness in order to justify supremacy – as in women should cover themselves so that men cannot be tempted – you have to wonder who are the disabled beings here.

Obama is a very smart guy. He knew exactly how to word his speech because he has a vast new audience he needs to win over, Muslims.

He neglected to use the word “terrorist” even once, causing much foaming at the mouth in Tel Aviv.

He admitted that America did some meddling they shouldn’t have in Iran, and he acknowledged that Hamas actually has “some” support.

Perhaps he could have gone further; for instance, by acknowledging that bombing women and children in Pakistan is helping

to recruit new Taliban members. But for a new beginning, his words were mostly the right ones.

Translating words into action is another matter of course.

But words matter and when spoken so publicly; people can always hold you to them. Choosing the right words showed that he was mindful of who he’s talking to.

If only people did the same back home in our neck of the woods.

Instead we get a party that is supposedly trying to be open to all Malaysians calling for the investigation of a women’s group to check whether or not they are really Islamic. If not, their group should be banned and the members rehabilitated.

Oh my! A group that has always fought for equality and justice for women has to be put on trial as unIslamic. The group that has made people aware of the difficulties of women in getting fair hearings in our religious courts is deemed wrong.

So what sort of rehabilitation is needed? Are we to be punished until we agree that women are inferior beings and do not deserve fair treatment? Do we have to be waterboarded until we plead to put on headscarves?

Obama cited Kuala Lumpur as one of the capitals where economic development is possible without compromising culture and traditions.

I’m not sure he knows what he’s talking about.

He obviously does not know that in our country we can use Internet technology to spread alternative news, and at the same time, to the theme of Star Wars, deride women as lesser beings.

Of course we agree with him that women should be educated, but never about religion, unless it’s the prescribed patriarchal version of it. Everything else would be just not kosher. Women who demand (shock, horror!) justice should just be lobotomised.

I’m still waiting for a good explanation as to why Muslim women should not be treated justly.

Especially when we believe in a God who is the epitome of justice and fairness. Al’Adl, the Utterly Just, is one of the 99 names of God.

The worst part of all this is that attitudes such as these are not limited to political parties who want to impose a mono-religious form of government.

These attitudes also exist among those who otherwise put themselves in opposition to such a party.

You hear the same things at their general assemblies as well.

The danger is that these entities want to engage one another.

To engage, one seeks to find common ground. Is discrimination against women one of them?

Sports and studies do mix

2009-05-31T13:42:00.000+08:00

Wednesday May 27, 2009
Sports and studies do mix
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Our children need to be assured that three A’s and a good sports record are more than fine; they are just what the country needs.

THE Education Minister announced recently that there will be a limit to the number of subjects students can take for their SPM. Well, it’s about time!

I have never understood how students can take 16 subjects and more. In my day, you didn’t actually need more than five subjects because your overall grade would be based on the aggregate of your top five subject grades.

Typically, we would take about eight subjects at most in order to have some leeway in our potential total. There was no reason to take more than that.

If someone got seven A’s, they were pretty much regarded geniuses. Today, there are people who get more than double what the geniuses of my time did. But are they doubly smart?

I spoke to officials at some private tertiary institutions and they confirmed what I have always feared: that students entering university, particularly those doing very technical subjects, had to do a lot of remedial work in their first year before they could really be considered up to par.

Their 15 A’s were simply not “real” A’s.

In my time, the students who got seven A’s were immediately offered scholarships to do matriculation in Australia, after which they went on to university there, mostly in the sciences or medicine.

I don’t hear of those types of offers to current students with multiple A’s. Perhaps, it is because often their English is just not up to the mark.

Or, perhaps, their A’s are not quite of the same standard as the fewer ones of old.

I often wonder why our media don’t do follow-up stories on our multiple-A students a few years later.

Would it be because there is really nothing to follow up, that they all fizzled out when it came to real studies?

I’m not saying that they did not work hard to get their A’s.

But perhaps, when getting as many A’s as possible became their sole goal in life, they could not thrive in higher education which demands less rote work and more actual thought.

So limiting the number of subjects a student can take would be the first step.

The next step would be to raise the standards of our education all round so that to even get one A would mean something much more than the current five or six A’s.

The other thing to do would be to provide space for our children to shine in ways other than the academic.

I am glad that the Education Minister has also said that we should improve the standard of sports in our schools. The low standards that we have today are, of course, related to our obsession with examination results.

How do we force our kids to get at least seven or eight A’s without stopping them from doing anything but study?

We have now created a culture where if you shone at sports, you’re not considered as smart as if you were a pale child tied to your desk and books.

Yet it is possible to combine both; indeed one complements the other, Nicol David being the best example.

If one does sports, one is simply fresher and healthier, and therefore more alert in class. We have to go back to the days when sports were compulsory.

At the same time we should stop the nonsense where we are more concerned about what our children wear to play sports than actually ensuring that they play well.

When we make our girls dress in uncomfortable clothes for sports, they are unlikely to find playing games very attractive.

Nor should we keep presenting sports to our girls as something unladylike.

If we are serious about training world-class athletes and sportspersons, we should equip them with the best training and equipment. Otherwise, let us just forget it.

Sports, as has been pointed out by others, have other benefits besides health and fitness.

One of them is the fact that they are able to create team spirit and unity in ways no amount of Rakan Muda activities can.

We root for an athlete because they are Malaysian, not because they are of any ethnic or religious subgroup. We are all collectively proud when one of our sportspeople does well overseas.

Sports are, and have always been, “one Malaysia”. I would venture that one of the reasons we have so much disunity is precisely because getting many A’s in exams is a solitary sport, not a team one.

It’s not too late to reverse the damage.

Just put our money where our mouth is and change our children’s mindset by telling them that three A’s and a good sports record are more than fine; they are just what the country needs.

Hot heads don’t solve anything

2009-05-25T14:40:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday May 13, 2009
Hot heads don’t solve anything
Musings by Marina Mahathir

After the events in Perak last week, where everybody seemed to lose all sense of proportion, the appropriate thing to do now is to chill.

GERTRUDE Stein the writer once said: “Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” Stein lived from 1874-1946, so this was way before what we now call the Information Age. So you can imagine how much common sense we lose these days.

Nothing seemed to exemplify this loss more than the events of last week.

Everybody seemed to lose all sense of proportion and was reacting in ways that were totally unwarranted.

The chief culprit would be the police.

Why was there a need to arrest someone who was asking people to wear black clothes? Since when has wearing black been classified as dangerous?

Then we should arrest all those women in top-to-toe black burqas walking around, both local and tourist.

So wearing black was meant to be a political statement, and that was deemed offensive.

But people wear political statements on their bodies every day, whether in the form of slogans on T-shirts or even the very clothes they wear, especially on the head.

Are we going to go around and arrest everyone?

And what was the need to arrest people who bring a cake?

So you don’t like the joke. But, by any measure, cakes are not dangerous weapons, except perhaps to those with high cholesterol.

If I were a policeman with common sense, I would have taken the cake, said thank you, sent the cake-deliverers on their way, and then dumped the cake in the rubbish bin. End of story.

Instead, the police gave the cake deliverers exactly the publicity they wanted.

Even worse was the reaction towards students protesting against the arrest of their lecturer.

Was there a need for armed policemen?

Private university students are generally a docile lot, bent on getting the degrees their parents paid so much towards.

But surely loyalty to, and support for, their lecturers is something to be encouraged?

Instead they were made out to be troublemakers.

What is likely to have happened now is that those 20 students, having now observed an injustice first hand, have become politicised.

No guesses on how they will vote in the next general election.

It only got worse. People holding vigils got arrested. People sitting in coffee shops got booked. Lawyers trying to provide legal advice got taken in. Does any of this make sense?

The minister concerned may praise the police for “keeping the peace” but the cost of it is deep anger at the police and the Government, none of which will be soon forgotten.

There may be outward peace but absolutely none deep inside the psyche of the people affected, nor among the observers.

Yet how much would it cost the minister to instruct the police to exercise restraint? Nothing at all, yet it reaps greater rewards.

In fact, if anyone needed arresting, it was probably every single person inside the Perak State Assembly, regardless of political affiliation. The crime? Bringing down the dignity of the entire institution of the State Assembly.

How can screaming, shouting, trying to strangle people and tearing up money serve as a good example to the public?

Increasingly, I think the common sense thing to do is to dissolve the entire assembly, have new elections and hope that none of these people get voted in again.

What is most interesting about this episode is how information is now gathered and passed around. I followed the proceedings in Perak on Twitter, the microblogging application.

Various people were twittering up what was happening, and these were relayed to a large audience.

All this information was not only first hand but being sent out much faster than any mainstream media could ever hope to do.

The news alerts from newspapers that I received on my mobile seemed already stale when I got them.

This is the new challenge to the Government.

You can get the mainstream media to report what you want, you can try and go after blogs and online news portals, but with the advent of Twitter and social networking sites like Facebook, and individuals posting up news as soon as it happens, it is almost impossible to counter any of it at the same speed.

Even photos and videos can be uploaded right after they have been taken and passed around.

The appropriate thing to do right now is really to chill.

Everyone needs to go to a yoga class to calm down.

Hot heads never solved anything so every politician should go for compulsory head clearing sessions.

Common sense should prevail. And perhaps it will tell us that asking Perakians who they actually want to govern them is the only sensible thing to do.

Justice for the deserving

2009-04-29T10:05:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday April 29, 2009
Justice for the deserving
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Being religious means having honesty, integrity, sincerity and many other virtues that come with it. The Quran underscores that to be just is what being a faithful adherent is all about. And justice is not limited to only those of the same faith.

SYMBOLS , as we know, can be potent. One of those that many set great store by is the tudung, meant to signify religious identity and piety.

Presumably that identity comes also with religious quality, that is, you expect that anyone who wears it to display a certain level of behaviour and integrity.

The other day I had an experience that taught me never to expect too much from symbols. As I was about to pay for some coffee, I noticed the young female cashier had rung up a more expensive price than that quoted on the menu on the wall.

Fully expecting there to be a legitimate reason, I asked her why. To my shock, the look on her face spelt guilt and she hastily changed the price of my coffee.

It may well be that she was told by her management to add a little something to each bill because I don’t see how she could have personally benefited from it. But the point is that if one takes on religious symbols such as the tudung, one therefore needs to ensure that it means something.

Dishonesty is not one of them.

Which goes back to that old argument about form and substance in religion in this country.

It is perhaps unfortunate that Islam is the religion that most lends itself to public symbolism, mostly through dress. Even more unfortunate is the fact that the focus has entirely rested on women’s dress and not anything else.

So while we may take on the tudung as one step towards heaven, we don’t insist that it carries more weight than that, that is we expect honesty, integrity, sincerity and many other virtues to come with it.

The question will always be, does a dishonest person who wears a tudung or a kepiah have a better chance of going to heaven than one who doesn’t?

And if the answer is yes, then we have something seriously wrong with our value system that prizes the outward rather than the internal, the form over the substance.

One of the major themes of Islam is justice.

Over and over again, the Quran underscores that to be just is always what to be a faithful adherent is all about.

In Surah An-Nisa, Verse 35, God says: “O ye who believe! Be ye staunch in justice, witnesses for Allah, even though it be against yourselves or (your) parents or (your) kindred, whether (the case be of) a rich man or a poor man, for Allah is nearer unto both (than ye are). So follow not passion lest ye lapse (from truth) and if ye lapse or fall away, then lo! Allah is ever Informed of what ye do.”

It says nothing about whom one has to be just to, except that they be those who deserve it. Certainly justice is not limited to only those of the same faith.

Thus, I welcome the announcement that minor-aged children of people who convert will be brought up in the original religion that their parents were when they got married.

This is to stop the sort of vindictive men who try to inflict as much as misery as they can on women they no longer love by trying to take away their children in any way they can.

Unfortunately, the state has only helped to support this vindictiveness by mostly refusing to decide on what is just.

But as they say, the proof of good intentions will always be in the pudding. These announcements must translate into fact.

Already the negative noises are out, alleging doom if certain processes are supposedly not followed. Forgotten is the fact that those processes may not be necessarily just.

Almost all these voices are, interestingly enough, male.

These are the same people who insist that a woman’s primary role is to be a mother. Of course, if her husband converts to Islam and takes away her children, her mothering role becomes nullified.

He suddenly becomes the martyred single father, even though he created the situation in the first place and can easily find another woman to tend to his brood.

Meanwhile, the mother remains married to the father of the children she is forcibly separated from and cannot move on.

And this is what people call the Islamic thing to do?

I hope the Cabinet cracks the whip on these issues once and for all. No doubt this will require Parliamentary approval and that will take time.

But so much misery has been caused by these injustices and what suffers most is the image of Islam as a religion that upholds justice and equality. It is not possible to be unjust and call oneself a Muslim. Unless all we care about is the form and never the substance.

Cabinet needs more estrogen

2009-04-16T10:54:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday April 15, 2009
Cabinet needs more estrogen
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Chile, and to a lesser extent, Bangladesh have led the way for more women to be given greater say in national affairs.

OPPORTUNITIES, as they say, don’t come very often. And when they do, one should always grab them with both hands.

Thus it was with our new Prime Minister and his Cabinet. It was an opportunity for a real makeover. But it was lost.

In 2006, for the first time in its history, Chile elected its first ever woman president, Michelle Bachelet.

That was the opportunity that the Chileans grabbed to do something different. It was indeed a landmark event because Chile is seen as the most conservative country in Latin America.

But as one news report put it, her election “reflected a profound socio-cultural change”. Indeed, on election night, hundreds of thousands of Chileans packed the streets of Santiago to celebrate her historic presidential victory.

Grandmothers could be seen throwing confetti from their balconies. Housewives with their entire families in tow could be heard screaming, “We’re going to clean up house.”

Ah… wouldn’t that have been nice here? Then Bachelet grabbed her own opportunity. She selected a 20-member Cabinet comprising 10 male Ministers and 10 female Ministers. It’s the first of its kind in the entire Western hemisphere.

“This Cabinet reflects the new style of government I’ve proposed,” Bachelet said, as she announced her choices. They included women in the key portfolios of economy and mining, as well as in her own two former ministries, health and defence.

Not that Chile is the only country to make such brave choices when it comes to selecting a Cabinet. Nearer home, Bangladesh has done pretty much the same, though not quite to the same extent.

Last December, Bangladesh held elections after almost two years of an interim government. The people voted in Sheikh Hasina Wazed as their prime minister, not for the first time in their history.

In turn, she appointed a 32-member Cabinet that included four women. Not many women, but still it is interesting what portfolios they were given: Foreign Affairs, Agricul- ture, Home Affairs and State Minister for Labour and Employment.

Sheikh Hasina herself will look after the Defence Ministry, Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry, Establishment Ministry, Housing and Public Works Ministry, Religious Affairs Ministry and Women and Children Affairs Ministry.

So, without being wholly original, we could have been much more innovative. We could have improved on the last Cabinet’s three women Ministers by having more this time, not less.

Furthermore, although there are several women Deputy Ministers sprinkled among different Ministries, it would have been good and indeed courageous to have given women Ministers greater responsibilities in portfolios beyond the normal ones that women are given.

After all, if other developing countries can trust women with, say, Home Affairs and Defence, why can’t we? (And we could have done with a Gender Empowerment Ministry, to reflect better what needs to be done.)

Part of the problem is of course our women politicians themselves, who seem disinclined to demand greater participation, even saying they won’t lobby for any positions.

It seems odd when the Minister in charge of ensuring that Malaysia complies with its responsibilities under the Convention for the Eli- mination of Discrimination Against Women, which calls for a minimum of 30% female participation in decision-making, is herself coy about demanding enough and better positions for women.

That’s called not grabbing opportunities; definitely not a Michelle Bachelet in the making.

Overall, the new Cabinet is simply not interesting enough. When you have the facility to appoint people from outside by making them Senators, then actually the world is open for you to pick and choose from a much larger field.

There is as much abundance of talented women outside politics as there is a dearth of them within it, whether in the private sector, academia or NGOs.

But it depends on what the approach is for forming the Cabinet; to fulfil political requirements or to use the best talents. Whatever it is, there is no sizzle in it. (Having said that, Obama chose a Cabinet that has many old hands in it, too.)

Perhaps we should look at other advisory bodies for some spark. There is an Economic Advisory Com- mittee that is supposed to be formed. Perhaps there should be others on different issues where talent could be brought in.

There is the National Women’s Advisory Council that should be seriously revamped and made more independent.

There should be an Advisory Council on Young People, which should have nobody over the age of 30.

How about a total revamp in the way we approach the drug use issue, by taking it away from Home Affairs and putting it under Health, as Iran does?

Overall, this is a Cabinet that is over-testosteroned. We need more estrogen. I hear the Opposition is setting up a Shadow Cabinet. Let’s see if they trust women any better.

Making an unworthy sacrifice

2009-04-01T09:19:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday April 1, 2009
Making an unworthy sacrifice
Musings by Marina Mahathir

Money politics is an open secret, in fact, not a secret at all. What’s worse, many are not interested in even hiding the fact of vote-buying. Sadly, the younger generation is into it as well.

I WAS out to dinner with a friend last week during the Umno general assembly and naturally was waiting to hear the election results. To my surprise, my friend’s colleague, who could never qualify to be an Umno member because of his race, asked me how it was going.

This proved to me that the elections last week were of interest to more than just Umno members. Who was elected to hold posts was important not just to Umno members but also to the rest of Malaysia.

If only Umno members realised that, perhaps they might have behaved better.

There can be no doubt that some of those who won posts smell bad.

Indeed nobody needs to be making allegations for the simple reason that the perpetrators of corruption, and those who sold themselves, were not interested in even hiding the fact.

Some were even found guilty of using financial inducements to get votes and yet they were still allowed to contest.

Others managed to get away with it, at least from those who would waggle a finger at them. But for those on the receiving end of the largesse, this was simply par for the course.

How else do you explain the delegates who had the temerity to say that the euphemism “money politics” should not be eradicated? After all, it was just payment for their “sacrifices”. Never mind that the compensation for their alleged “sacrifice” was more than they could hope to make in a year.

These are the very same people who can demand that their religion be defended at all costs but forget that hypocrisy is the worst betrayal of that same religion. These were people who cheer in agreement when their leaders exhort them to abandon such wanton corruption only to then smugly demand payment from those who need their votes.

To say that this behaviour is an open secret is to deny a fact: it is not a secret at all but has become the norm. People are quite willing to sell their very souls for money, not least because there are just as many people willing to buy from them.

Does anyone care that the rest of the country is watching all this? Not in the least, because they got the positions they wanted. Do they even consider how they have sold out not just themselves but that party they so depend on to survive? Probably not even for a nanosecond.

Those of us who criticise are in turn condemned for being too comfortable to understand what it means to be faced with these rich opportunities. Where else, they say, are we going to get this chance to make this sort of money?

Yet these are the very same people who believe themselves to be pious because they make their wives cover their heads and they intend to use some of their ill-gotten gains to perform their pilgrimage.

Halal and haram are only for food, apparently not for dubious ways of earning money.

To say that it is only the older ones who are doing this while the young remain untainted is incorrect.

It is the younger generation who has been the worst perpetrators, stroking their already paunchy bellies in glee at the rewards coming their way. The rewards of the afterlife are for others; let them enjoy their fancy new cars, watches and wives now.

I shudder to think of a future generation that thinks that such impunity is the norm. A generation that believes that the only way to get ahead is not through hard labour but through ensuring that they say what the person who pays them most wants them to say.

Happily they slapped each other on their backs at their own good fortune for having hooked onto the person most able to reward their greed.

Do we really need proof of all this? All we need to do is to look at who won and review their credentials.

Do they have any substance at all? Few do.

Have they shown any leadership skills? No.

Yet they got elected. What more can it mean than that their electability factor must have been very discreet?

Of course, there are some who seem to have leadership skills. Who can talk and even make a show of being humble, who is now cast as the underdog that won.

But then Hitler had leadership skills too.

AIDS missing ‘acquired’ impact

2009-03-19T09:26:00.000+08:00

Wednesday March 18, 2009
AIDS missing ‘acquired’ impact
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Our mindsets are determined by the words we use or don’t use. And words can also set our minds a certain way.

RECENTLY I had the pleasure of listening to one of our national poet laureates recite a poem about the birth of his daughter. It was of course in Bahasa Malaysia, and it was lovely to listen to the cadences of the language.

I don’t know very many languages that can sound quite as beautiful as the Malay language. I remember enjoying the movie Puteri Gunung Ledang precisely because of its poetic script.

At times like that, I wished I could speak my own language more elegantly than I do. I grew up in English-medium schools, including the elite government boarding school I attended for two years.

Young minds: Students attending a public speaking workshop. If we accept that every child has a right to education, then we adults cannot impede its access to knowledge in any way.

Some years after I left school, the switch to teaching entirely in Bahasa Malaysia was implemented. But during my time, the only Malay I had at school was during Bahasa Malaysia classes.

Worse still, as a Science student, I had absolutely no exposure to any literature in either English or Malay. Going overseas to study of course did nothing much for my Malay.

It was only years later, when I started to work in HIV outreach and when I had to communicate to audiences that did not necessarily understand the issue, that my Malay got the polishing it very much needed.

Even so it was a frustrating endeavour, not so much because I could not speak, since with practice my Malay improved, but because the vocabulary I needed in Malay was simply inadequate.

Just take the translation of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, for example. In Bahasa Malaysia, it comes out as Sindrom Kurang Daya Tahan. Which sounds fine except that a very key word, “acquired”, did not get a look in.

I don’t know why that is. But by not translating the word “acquired”, Malay-speaking audiences are likely to make a conceptual mistake in understanding how HIV operates.

English-speaking audiences realise that HIV is not something a person is born with nor that it occurs naturally within us. It is an infection which one can only acquire by doing something risky.

But Malay-speaking audiences are more likely to miss that point with the inadequate translation. I don’t know this scientifically, but sometimes I wonder if this missing word is the cause for much of the stigma associated with, and discrimination against, people with HIV.

People who study linguistics know what I mean. The words we use or don’t use reflect our mindsets, or they can set our minds a certain way.

So it’s not an issue of what language we use, but how well it copes with current ideas and concepts. Bahasa Malaysia is trying hard to keep up but it does that mostly by simply taking on English words.

I was shocked when years ago I was told that it is perfectly acceptable to call the TV programme, 3R, Respek, Relaks dan Respon.

Even if these words alliterated better than Hormat, Santai dan Balas, they still sound odd, but somehow also younger and cooler.

In many ways, this underscores the problem we have in keeping the teaching of Maths and Science in Bahasa Malaysia.

Unless we are not expecting our students to get very far in these two subjects, there is no reason to teach them in English.

And perhaps they won’t want to advance in these subjects if we keep teaching them in Malay, Chinese or Tamil.

But what if we have students who want to be mathematicians or scientists? At what point do we switch them over?

Or do we simply tell them that they can only go as far as our language can cope with mathematical theories and scientific concepts.

Does this then mean we can never hope for any Malaysian to become a Nobel Prize-winning scientist or mathematician?

I think that we should turn the whole question on its head and look at it from a rights-based perspective.

If we accept that every child has a right to education, then we adults cannot impede its access to knowledge in any way.

That means that if we insist that our children learn science and mathematics only in the vernacular, then to ensure that they have exactly the same rights as every other child in the world, we would have to make certain that they can access all the knowledge they need all the way to PhD level and beyond.

In other words, we would have to translate the global body of mathematical and scientific knowledge into Malay.

Why should other children have the possibility to study at Harvard University when our no-less bright children can’t because of their language?

One way to overcome that is to set up a Harvard University branch in Malaysia teaching entirely in Malay. If someone comes forward to do that, then that whole language debate becomes null and void.

Solve disputes the right way

2009-03-11T08:50:00.000+08:00

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Wednesday March 4, 2009
Solve disputes the right way
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Politicians have been shoving and calling each other names. We’ve said big countries shouldn’t bully small ones and yet at home, a group of able-bodied men thought nothing of behaving aggressively towards an old man in a wheelchair.

SOME time ago, my nine-year old called me from school in tears because another child, much bigger than her, had shoved her.

I happened to know the mother of the other child so I called her to find out if mine had done anything to warrant it. She was appalled that her child had decided to solve a problem that way.

So she talked to her child and the next day my daughter received an apology.

Among decent right-minded people, we know that the way to solve disputes is by talking and not by pushing and shoving.

What’s more, one side cannot take advantage of the other because of any perceived weakness such as size or disability. That is not a fair fight. It’s called bullying.

If parents do not instil this sense of fairness in children from young, as my friend did, they will grow up to believe that might is always right and aggression is the only way to solve problems.

Judging by the amount of bullying we now see in schools, obviously not many children are receiving this lesson.

But who can blame them? Today we see adults who are in leadership positions and who should know better behaving no differently from schoolchildren. School bullies, to be exact.

Of late, politicians have been shoving, calling each other names and doing everything gross and crude to gain an advantage over their political adversaries.

And when called out on these, they refuse to apologise, thereby setting new levels of low in political culture and behaviour.

We used to shout out that big powerful countries should not bully small ones. Yet at home, we see a whole group of able-bodied people behaving aggressively towards an old man in a wheelchair.

Apparently this behaviour is warranted because he said some bad words about the group.

Does this warrant such aggression? Isn’t this a bit like saying that girls who wear miniskirts deserve to be raped? Or maybe this group of thugs does believe this.

Do their leaders admonish them? No, they provide excuses instead. They cannot control their followers, they said. That is a bit like Israel saying they can’t control what their F16s hit on the ground in Gaza.

Leaders who say they cannot control their followers do not deserve that title.

Is it really too much to ask for a return to civility in our politicians? Do we seriously need all this bad-temperedness just because they can’t get what they want?

It’s like watching a bunch of kindergarten children stomping their feet because they did not get the candy they wanted. Not one mature adult in the bunch.

I don’t know what bubble our politicians live in that they seem totally oblivious to the rest of us.

Don’t they realise that we, the public, are watching and forming opinions? And more importantly, already making decisions about whom we will or won’t vote for?

I, for one, will not vote for anyone who acts like a thug, for the simple reason that if I consent to a thug leading my country, I will only feel ashamed. How do I defend such uncouth people to foreign friends?

If such uncivilised people had other redeeming factors, such as fresh and new ideas on how to lead the country, that would be something. But they don’t even have that. Instead, all we can expect is more of the same and worse.

There are some countries in the world where politicians are so incompetent and governments so ineffective that almost everything is run by NGOs and civil society organisations.

The schools and hospitals run by these NGOs are excellent while those run by the government are abysmal.

While I am impressed by these efforts, I can’t help thinking that it is also an indictment of the governments, which have failed to meet any of their people’s needs.

Our problem in Malaysia is that we are so used to the Government doing everything that if it becomes incompetent, we have nothing to fall back on. Private sector services are expensive, so they are not a viable alternative for most people.

Looking at the type of people vying to run the Government these days, is there a single person who we can even look up to? Who we feel has the qualities we can admire in a leader? Who has some sort of vision of where we want to be in the future? Who isn’t constantly compromising something or other for political expediency?

I may sound naive about current political realities but maybe it’s time for a new type of politics. Otherwise, given the type of simian behaviour we are seeing these days, we may well turn into a banana republic.

Great to be making history

2009-02-18T16:14:00.000+08:00

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

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Wednesday February 18, 2009
Great to be making history
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR

Some 250 scholars and activists – women and men – gathered in Kuala Lumpur to launch Musawah, a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family.

WE DON’T always know when we are participating in something special and historic at the moment it is happening.

But this past weekend I have been privileged to be part of one such moment in time; Musawah, a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family was launched here in Kuala Lumpur.

Not that everybody appreciated the import of this moment.

As 250 scholars and activists, female and male, gathered in KL from some 47 countries to discuss what can be done to ensure that the equality and justice inherent in Islam is brought to the fore in all policies related to the family, there were people who claimed that what we were doing was “insulting Islam”.

The logic that ensuring Islam treats all its adherents, male and female, equally and justly is viewed as somehow insulting to the religion escapes me completely.

The Musawah (“equality”, not as some allege, “sameness”) gathering sought to find, within Islamic texts and jurisprudence, solutions to the contemporary problems facing women and men in ways that ensure that justice is served.

As many of the scholars pointed out, Islam brought justice to the society it was revealed to via Prophet Muhammad, especially to women.

If women feel that they are being treated unjustly in many societies today, it is not a failing of Islam but of interpretations of the religion that ignored its essential just and egalitarian spirit.

And the lives of many Muslim women today are pretty miserable. In many countries, women have little say over their lives, treated as they are as properties of their fathers, and then of their husbands.

They often cannot be educated, nor take jobs, nor have the freedom to choose when to marry or how many children to have. To protest against any of these conditions has often meant that these women have had to suffer violence or worse, death.

In many countries, honour killings, where men kill female relatives for perceived insults to their family’s honour, still occur and are explained away with so-called religious reasons.

In others, women are still subjected to female genital mutilation in the name of religion, despite the fact that the Quran says absolutely nothing about it.

Our own Muslim women may not suffer the same extreme humiliations but nevertheless do not always receive the justice that they deserve, and Islam extols.

Women abandoned by their husbands and bringing up their children single-handedly still cannot be considered guardians to their own children. Their husbands can summarily divorce them without much notice or with provisions for their living and that of their children.

Attempts to amend these laws to make them better for women have thus far been derided as “changing God’s laws”, never mind that they were already amended from the originally just ones to ones that are far less fair to women.

It was exhilarating to learn from these learned scholars that God does not discriminate between men and women, both His creations, the proof of which is in the Quran itself.

Nor does it allow for men to mistreat women, enjoining repeatedly that women and orphans be always fairly treated.

Even more exhilarating was to listen to people from Morocco, Turkey and Afghanistan talk about the strides they have made to better the lot of their societies by making family laws more just and equitable. None of this was easy, and took a very long time and hard and dedicated effort. But it paid off.

Today, Morocco has a family law that describes marriage as “an equal partnership” between a man and a woman.

Turkey, which is governed by an Islamist party, has a civil and penal code that were amended to ensure that women were treated as equals in the law and not as passive recipients of whatever male jurists decided.

Even Afghanistan managed to pass a law that gave women the right to contract their own marriages, rather than through their male relatives, despite a lack of stable government and institutions.

All of these countries did it while adhering to Islamic teachings, thus showing that Islam is no barrier to justice and equality. It is thus puzzling that anyone should be critical of this effort, as if leaving Muslim women mired in suffering is desirable.

Even more bewildering is that there are women who think that striving for justice and equality in Islam is somehow wrong, as if God means for the feminine gender to be discriminated against.

I came away energised by this meeting, secure in my belief that my religion will never abandon my sisters and I whenever we are in need. If they were not before, our eyes have been opened to the glory of Islam where God loves women equally as much as He loves men.