COMMENT Like a canoeist facing rapids, Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin paddled on one side of the issue of the government’s interfaith panel (“let’s give them a chance to work”) and then on the other (the panel is “small fry” ) to placate the concerns of critics who charged that it detracted from Islam’s constitutional stature as the official religion.

In the process, he sounded even less convincing than he did recently when in avowing he was ‘Malay first’ ...