I refer to the recent raid by the Jabatan Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan (Jawi) on a Kuala Lumpur club during which some Muslim youth were detained and later abused and humiliated. Well, it certainly didn't take long for the Malay Mail report on it to appear on the frontpage of Singapore's The New Paper with a full-page report inside.

I guess the Singapore tourism authorities must be sniggering among themselves at how Malaysia keeps shooting itself in its foot. Guess what the reaction of foreign tourists will be to this kind of a report? Tourism Minister Leo Michael Toyad must be pulling out his hair with despair.

More seriously, what are we coming to? First, mat skodeng , now this. Are we becoming like Iran where the people's morals are policed publicly? Where male religious officials see fit to comment on the clothes worn by Muslim women?

You have to read the report for yourself to find out exactly how these officials conducted themselves. And then wonder how Singaporeans reading the report will react - or what they will think.

I hope that some of the youths who were involved in that incident - or their parents - decide to sue the pants off these officials and the organisation they purport to represent.

Also, I hope that the police will clarify their role in this whole unsavoury episode. Are the police guardians of public law and order or of public morality? Don't they have better things to do like, say, resolving the crime epidemic in our major cities?

More seriously, are all these incidents and initiatives part of a desperate effort by certain reactionary elements to roll back the reformist agenda of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi? When all else fails, cloak yourself in the robes of religious uprightness and morality and go after the evildoers, the miscreants and the deviants.

It will be a brave man who dares to criticise these elements. For it appears to be becoming a replay of what is happening in Iran and what happened not so long ago in Afghanistan.

Will the likes of Kalimullah Hassan ( News Straits Times group editor-in-chief), Zainuddin Maidin (information minister), Hishammuddin Hussein Onn (education minister), Khairy Jamalludin (Umno Youth deputy chief) and Anwar Ibrahim come out with forthright criticisms and comments?

Or will they decide that discretion is the better part of valour? Will it take the prime minister himself to make a forthright statement on what can be done and what cannot be done in this multiracial society of ours?

For all his faults, former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad would not have hesitated to make a stand on something like this.