Lending credence to stories

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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 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?

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Inured to violence and death

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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 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.

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No knee-jerk policies, please

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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 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.

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In defence of women’s rights

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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 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.

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It’s not all about the politicians

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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 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.

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