The ugly Umno Baru Muslim

MARIAM MOKHTAR

Some cynics claim that the crocodile tears shed by Karpal Singh’s former political foes, and their equally effusive tributes, sound insincere.

Perhaps, but their actions cannot be as bad as the disgusting behaviour of the Umno Baru Malays, who have heaped shame on respectful Muslims and at the same time, made ordinary Malaysians bristle with disgust. Karpal’s tragic death has brought out the best and the worst in people.

Umno Baru Muslims are crass and crude. They are intolerant and indelicate. They do not know the meaning of honour and values. They are champions of hypocrisy.

Who are they?

In the last few days, the people who have topped the list of Malaysia’s most hated Muslims are Nawawi Ahmad (left), the Langkawi MP who is also the KTM boss; Kok Lanas assemblyperson Md Alwi Che Ahmad; former Kulim MP and Perkasa strongman Zulkifli Noordin; Perkasa president Ibrahim Ali; and controversial blogger Papagomo, allegedly Wan Muhammad Azri Wan Deris.

As expected, Najib Abdul Razak has neither the strength nor the inclination to punish these men. His inability to call for disciplinary measure shows his lack of judgment and poor leadership.

These ugly Muslims are Umno-Baru’s creation. Financed by a failed Umno Baru party which is funded by an equally corrupt administration, one might well ask, where did the Malays go wrong?

What happened to their core traditional values? Did our decrepit education system fail them? Did they forego decency and the teachings of Islam when they acquired easy wealth?  If they were to be stripped of money and their material goods, would they learn to be respectful citizens again? Is Ketuanan Melayu to blame for their arrogance?

The Umno Baru cybertroopers will claim that Nawawi has apologised and that should be sufficient. What they fail to understand is that the Facebook insult to Karpal should never have been posted in the first place. So, was Nawawi forced to apologise?

Hours after the supposed apology, there were allegations that Nawawi then compared Karpal with Abu Jahal, who is considered by Islamic historians, to be a very violent man who fought early Muslims in Mecca. The posting was in a private Facebook exchange. So now, we have Umno Baru Muslims who are not just insincere and arrogant, but who are also liars.

When the Facebook user remonstrated with Nawawi for his actions “which have shamed Muslims”, an unrepentant Nawawi denied that he had done anything wrong, and adamantly stated, “For me, Karpal Singh is equal to Abu Jahal.”.  Some apology!

The ordinary rakyat have come to be aware of these Umno Baru Muslims – Nawawi Ahmad, Md Alwi Che Ahmad, Zulkifli Noordin, Ibrahim Ali and Wan Muhammad only because they showed their disrespect for Karpal, over the past few days.

Stop them now

What about the more insidious Umno-Baru Muslims who may one day, influence the lives of Malaysians, unless they are stopped, now?

There are the men in the National Fatwa Council, who told Muslims late last year that they are prohibited from using the words ‘Rest in Peace’ because of its perceived religious connotations.

The National Fatwa Council is the Big Brother to Malays. It is bad enough when Umno Baru micro-manages us, but do we need the National Fatwa Council to tell us what we can or cannot do?

Another Umno Baru Muslim who has abdicated his responsibilities as a policeman, is police chief Khalid Abu Bakar(left).

Khalid said he would ignore the abduction of a six-year-old boy, whose mother had been granted custody by the Seremban High Court.

The boy’s father, a Muslim convert, had kidnapped his son despite the court ruling, and Khalid’s glib response was to say, “…it is best if the two can settle their problems privately…”

Khalid was spurred into action, only after the public criticised him. He cannot appreciate that he was encouraging vigilantism. Why is he unable to distinguish between civil and Syariah laws?

Last Wednesday, former judge Mohd Noor Abdullah was afflicted by the “size matters” debate.

He claimed that the “huge” statues in Batu Caves and the Buddhist temple in Penang “threatened Muslims”, because these large idols “hurt people’s feelings” and showed that “your religion is all mighty and powerful”. The former judge displays the sweet innocence of a mentally challenged five year old!

If people, who think like Mohd Noor, were to assume power, would they destroy these statues, as the Taliban demolished the Bamiyan figures in Afghanistan?

Malaysians think that hudud will not affect the non-Malays, but Muslims are increasingly interfering into non-Muslim affairs and recently, a Christian woman in Penang was sued and jailed under the Syariah law.

Karpal is right. Hudud is not for multi-cultural Malaysia. We can’t even dispense civil or Syariah laws properly, and Umno Baru and BN people have been able to escape punishment despite civil laws being in place. Even if hudud were to be implemented, Umno-Baru and BN people will still escape punishment.

We don’t trust our compromised judiciary in civil law, and many women feel discrimination under Syariah law. Why should the ordinary rakyat have faith in hudud? How many Malays really want hudud? The sad thing is that few Malays will openly admit their opposition to hudud, because they do not want to be seen as “going against the religion”. That is a measure of the shallowness of their principles.

If these Muslims, who are afraid to state their opposition to hudud, were more knowledgeable of their religion, they would know that the ‘real’ Islam religion, encourages debate. It is only the perverted Islam of Umno Baru, and other tyrannies, which claims, wrongly, that Islam opposes debate.

The state should be separate from religion. Dr Mahathir Mohamad claimed that Malaysia was an Islamic state in 2001, only because PAS was increasing their influence over the Malays. Mahathir created the mess in our judiciary in the late 1980s and his ban on 20 words, including ‘Allah’, from being used by non-Muslims, continues to divide us.

The ugly Umno Baru Muslim can be found in every facet of our lives. ‘He’ is in education, in the supermarket, in the government department, in the restaurant, in the crony-controlled-companies, in the NGOs, in the mosque, in sports and in the embassies.

The ugly Umno Baru Muslim will come to haunt us in the future unless we exorcise him from our lives, today.