“If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”
- Thomas Sowell
While I realise that Top 10 year-end lists are purely subjective, I thought I would put out my top news story and newsmaker of the year and a little commentary as to why I think they are important, if only to me. By no means is this some sort of final word on the issue but rather something I have always wanted to do ever since I started writing for Malaysiakini.
Top news story - the Rohingya issue
What a difference a year and an overwhelming corruption scandal make. A year ago, when the Rohingya people were flooding our shores and creating a humanitarian crisis that was barely covered by the mainstream or the alternative media, then deputy home minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said “tough measures” would be taken to turn these refugees away.
He proclaimed (as reported in the foreign media), “We are not prepared to accept that number coming into our shores and those people who are already in, we are sending them home anyway. I would like them to be turned back and ask them to go back to their own country. We cannot tell them we are welcoming them.”
A year later in a crowded stadium crowded with riled-up Muslims feeding off the misery of a group of disposed people, the Umno grand poohbah (PM Najib Abdul Razak) and his Grima Wormtongue (PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang) are screaming genocide and world indifference. “I will not close my eyes and shut my mouth. We must defend them [Rohingya] not just because they are of the same faith but they are humans, their lives have values,” Najib said (again, as reported in the foreign media).
Of this display of Islamic hubris and political opportunism, I wrote about the history of neglect and abuse by the Umno state towards the Rohingya, the dismal healthcare issues they face in Malaysia, the lack of employment and the general disdain displayed towards them by the various other marginalised refugee communities who were desperately trying to carve up territories with the coddling of the state for various purposes, nothing of which had to do with altruism.
I said: “So really all this talk about championing the cause of the Rohingya is just a load of horse manure. We cannot even look after our own marginalised communities - correction - we seem to have no problem oppressing our own minority communities, so this idea that Malaysia is now some sort of champion for the Rohingya, is honestly, obscene.”
However, what will really haunt us in the coming years, is not the crime and violence of these marginalised Muslim communities but rather the insidious infiltration by Islamic extremists who will attempt to destabilise the Umno state.
Already counter-terrorism analysts are predicting a new South-East Asian theatre of terrorism and my prediction would be that the Rohingya issue will be manipulated by foreign Islamic actors to spark a wave of terrorism that would blight South-East Asian countries.
The fact that the Umno state has chosen to politicise this issue and create a refuge for the Rohingya and no doubt give these people official documents will make it easier for Islamic terrorists to move around the region not to mention create incidences that spark religious tensions in this multi-religious country. This of course is made worse by the fact that the Umno state has always attacked minority communities when faced with possible ejection from Putrajaya.
As I keep saying, a country can recover from corruption scandals but when it comes to the damage Islamic extremism does and the state’s response to it, that is something that could destroy this nation with no hope of recovery...