Following the recent flurry of irresponsible remarks by UMNO leaders and sedition charges on dissenting voices, Lim Kit Siang, MP for Gelang Patah, has asked if the BN government has gone “bonkers”.
“The top agenda for the Cabinet meeting tomorrow should be to answer the question right-thinking Malaysians have been asking the past week, whether the Malaysian government has gone bonkers,” he said in response to the ramp up of reckless remarks and sedition charges under Prime Minister Najib Razak’s leadership.
Negeri Sembilan Mentri Besar Mohamad Hassan at the Rembau UMNO division meeting had said that “three days after the opposition (Pakatan Rakyat) forms the Federal Government, it will have its first cabinet meeting, where the main agenda will be the reunion of Singapore with Malaysia. He said that this could be done with an increase of 89 non-Malay parliamentary seats without having to amend the Federal Constitution in Parliament.
Lim called this a preposterous lie, saying that the speech was reckless and irresponsible.
Lim also slammed Minister for Agriculture and Agro-based Industry, Ismail Sabri Yaakob saying that the speech he delivered during the Gopeng UMNO delegates meeting on Merdeka eve “indulged in fear-mongering” , when Ismail had alleged that the Malays were “under attack” in Malaysia.
Ismail had also lamented that Malays were divided into UMNO Malays, PAS Malays, PKR Malays and DAP Malays but wished that they were to stand united.
“It is most shocking and just unbelievable that Ismail could give such a speech which is totally antithetical to Prime Minister Najib Razaki’s 1Malaysia policy to build a Malaysian where every Malaysian regards himself or herself as Malaysian first, and race, religion, region and socio-economic status second,” Lim said.
The DAP Parliamentary said that Ismail, who has been in Najib’s Cabinet for more than 5 years was a “total failure as far as passing the 1 Malaysia test is concerned”.
“Even more shocking is that Ismail’s racist speech is totally at variance with the Merdeka Message of Najib delivered also on Merdeka Eve, in a “live” speech instead of traditionally in pre-recorded messages, to make “eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart” connection with all Malaysians about national unity and patriotism,” he added.
Lim also deemed irresponsible Home Minister Zahid Hamidi who said that “Malays are paying the price for being kind to non-Malays”, and that “non-Malays are getting increasingly arrogant and are insulting the bumiputras, the royalty and Islam”.
Zahid said, “We allowed them to be indebted to us without needing them to pay it back; they are now insulting Islam and the Malays under the pretence of democracy, freedom of speech and globalisation”.
Lim regarded Zahid’s statement as a reckless attempt to distort and racialise the aspirations of Malaysians for good governance, rule of law, political freedoms, human rights and economic justice as a battle between Malays and non-Malays.
He asked if the Attorney General will charge the three UMNO leaders under the Sedition Act since all the aforementioned statements reeked of sedition.
Mass arrests and sedition prosecutions
Recent examples of abuse of power, Lim says, are the arrests of 157 members of PPS in Penang and the sedition prosecution against Professor Azmi Sharom.
“Who will believe Najib that he and his government truly regard the scholars and intelligentsia as the country’s most important pillars, when his Attorney-General can haul an academician to court under the Sedition Act, which had never been done by the other five Prime Ministers (not even in the 22-year Dark Age of Tun Mahathir) in the past 57 years?”
“And what is Azmi’s sedition offence?” Lim asked if academic freedom in universities had stooped to a level where law lecturers cannot give their opinions about a legal case.
Azmi Sharom is a Universiti Malaya professor of law who had commented about the 2009 Perak constitutional crisis in a news portal on August 14, saying; “You don’t want a repeat of that, where a secret meeting took place” and “I think what happened in Perak was legally wrong. The best thing to do is do it as legally and transparently as possible”.
“Have we reached a stage where lawyers defending Azmi Sharon may themselves run the risk of committing sedition just by defending Azmi’s view on the Perak constitutional case?” asked Lim Kit Siang, reiterating that the Cabinet meeting tomorrow must “let the Malaysian public know whether the Barisan Nasional government, starting with the Cabinet, has gone bonkers!” -The Rocket
