“You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense... Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.”

- Joseph Conrad

COMMENT | It is very easy for comfortable middle-class urban (especially non-Malay) audiences to mock PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang.

His atavistic reading of Islamic dogma is denigrated by non-believers who falsely assume that eventually people – the Malay polity – will see through the lies and realise what PAS and Hadi are.

See, that’s the problem right there. When people show you who they are you should believe them. Hadi is the personification of the kind of Islamic governance the people who vote for PAS want.

This is not about Hadi but rather how a certain growing section of the Malay/Muslim polity believes in religious governance to the exclusion of anything else.

This is about PAS and tangentially whoever works with PAS. I sometimes make the mistake of saying religious extremist coalition but the reality is that the first principle of this coalition is set down by PAS...