Sungai Besar Umno division chief Jamal Md Yunos lied when he said the electoral reform movement Bersih planned to “take over” several strategic locations, such as the Prime Minister’s Office and the KL International Airport (KLIA), during its Bersih 5 rally.

The rally took place last Saturday, but what he alleged did not happen. In fact, only an idiot would have believed that Bersih would even dream of doing a thing like that.

Now we know for sure that Jamal is nothing but a loudmouth full of hot air. And he can be dismissed as nothing more than a troublemaker without a cause, plain and simple.

Three weeks prior to the event, he pledged he would bring out 300,000 red-shirts to confront Bersih on Nov 19, but last Saturday, one could hardly spot a red shirt at the rally.

There was a news report of 4,000 of them, armed with wooden and bamboo poles, gathered outside Pertama Complex and that they later marched to Padang Merbok after their poles were confiscated by the police. But that was about all the excitement they caused.

This fizzling-out of the red-shirts counter-rally reminds me of the similar fiasco staged by Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin and his red-shirted group during the Bersih 2 rally in 2011. That time, too, Malay right-wing NGO Perkasa, led by another loudmouth, Ibrahim Ali, threatened to confront Bersih in a counter-rally way before the event but on the eve of the big day, it cried off.

The poor showing by the red-shirts last Saturday was what I had expected. And I don’t think that Jamal’s arrest the night before was the cause of that. If it had been properly organised and, more importantly, if they knew what the cause was and believed in it, many more red-shirts would have come out.

Contrast them with Bersih’s supporters. Their leader, Maria Chin Abdullah, was also arrested the night before, but they still came out in tens of thousands. Because they knew what they were rallying for, and they passionately believed in it. And that was enough for Bersih’s supporters to score a moral victory - not just over the red-shirts, who don’t count for doodly-squat anyway, but, more strikingly, victory over the government’s attempts to intimidate them and derail them from their purpose...