“What such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.”

― Charles Dickens, ‘David Copperfield’

COMMENT | MCA publicity chief Chai Kim Sen made two rather disingenuous statements regarding the arrest of the teenage bombmaker and his cohorts. The first was oppositional types should apologise for casting doubts on the credibility of the state security apparatus on their claims that there were elements out to violently disrupt the beer festival, and the second was there were some rights that should be sacrificed in order to protect other rights and freedoms.

To be honest, I am not really interested in these statements. The credibility of the state security apparatus has diminished by the words and actions of people entrusted to safeguard our rights; and while there are always situations where “sacrificing” certain rights for utilitarian purposes, this is not one of those situations.

Keep in mind that according to initial investigations this teenage zealot wanted to teach Malaysia a lesson. Therefore, there is the question of the lesson he wanted to impart and what Malaysians actually learnt from his attempted criminal act of religious murder.

The great tragedy here is that in a functional democracy, the lesson he wanted to teach would be dismissed for obvious reasons but here in Malaysia, the state security apparatus gave him exactly what he wanted.

The extremely important lesson that this teenage bombmaker taught Malaysians, and especially the state security apparatus, is that terror works. It did not take a coordinated effort by committed hardened Islamic State types to disrupt a festival in Malaysia. All it took was a middle-class teenager with delusions of grandeur and the right people to “fund” him.

In any other functional democracy, the state security apparatus foils attempts at terrorism and ensures the safety and security of citizens going about their daily lives. However, in the case of Malaysia, the establishment tells us to be grateful to the state security apparatus for essentially caving in to the demands of Islamists who either protest violently - like the leader of the red shirts - or plan an attack on civilians, all in the name of safety and security.

I say “caving in” because this is exactly what happened. What was the objective of this so-called teenage amateur bombmaker?

His main goal was to disrupt the event and kill non-Muslims. We know this because initial investigations as reported in the press reveal he “was motivated by incidents affecting Muslims, and decided that Malaysia had strayed from its role as a true Islamic nation”. We also know from initial investigations that he did not have any contact with any Malaysian or Islamic State militants.

Think about this for a moment. This is made-in-Malaysia Islamic terrorism...