Friday, January 8, 2010

Shabash UMNO!

The UMNO-led regime tells us that peaceful candlelight vigils are unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Those participating in them – presumably because they are part of an “unlawful” assembly - have on multiple occasions in the past been manhandled, beaten, dragged, abused and hauled away by the so-called authorities.

The UMNO-led regime and its cronies preach to us that street protest is not part of our Malaysian way for addressing grievances.

But of course these excuses for cracking down on the public are only invoked upon those it finds disagreeable. When UMNO goons indulge in illegal demonstrations and violence, UMNO and the regime somehow miraculous become incompetent at unleashing the wrath of the riot police upon these people. Indeed, some in the regime even mysteriously become defenders of the right to free speech!

Now, we get fire-bombings against churches. And what, might we ask, is the justification for such barbaric attacks on these places of worship? Of course we're often told that no religion condones such barbarism. But, let us now realize that we’ve reached another milestone under UMNO: that such barbarism has now also become part of our political reality.

This kind of barbarism is not only now something we find in Afghanistan with the blowing up of the statuses of Buddha or the kind of backwardness one finds in Pakistan with the persecution of Christians and Hindus or the recent violence against Coptic Christians in Egypt. Yes, we too can now claim this distinction of belonging to a class of pathetic nations where we seem to breed such vile and barbaric fanatics who destroy our nation by their despicable deeds.

Thank you UMNO and BN for helping to bring us to such new heights of disgrace and shame.

Now, we are but only another backward nation where religious fanaticism has been so stoked and politicised that we find ourselves reduced to such absurdity that we take petty squabbles about who can use which word to refer to which god - and from there, we find the barbaric among us feeling emboldened by UMNO’s politicisation of religion.

Shabash UMNO.

G. Krishnan