At the SSS (Support, Sympathy and Solidarity) Candlelight Vigil for DAP MP for Seputeh Teresa Kok demanding her immediate release from Internal Security Act held at Ipoh Timor Garden East, Ipoh on Thursday, 18th September 2008 – the eve of Teresa’s seven-day incarceration – I said that a key MCA operative in Puchong had lodged a police report making false allegations against Teresa over the azan controversy on Thursday, 11th September 2008, which triggered her ISA detention the next day on Sept. 12 at 11.18 pm.
I repeated this the next day at Teresa’s media conference on her ISA release at DAP PJ hqrs the next day at 3.30 pm. Is or was the “key MCA operative in Puchong” a MCA member? Let MCA leaders tell Malaysians.
Suddenly, MCA leaders like its vice president Datuk Ong Tee Keat have become very bold and courageous in throwing challenges wanting me to prove that “police reports lodged by members of an MCA division in Selangor had led to the detention of DAP’s Seputeh MP Teresa Kok under the Internal Security Act (ISA)”. (New Straits Times online)
But not a bleat from them when Home Minister, Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar virtually told them to shut up and declared that there is not going to be any repeal or review of the ISA.
The MCA Central Committee met on Tuesday, 16th September 2008 and called for “a comprehensive review of the ISA so that it will apply strictly to cases relating to terrorism and subversive elements”.
Why didn’t the four MCA Ministers formally table this proposal at the Cabinet meeting the next day on Wednesday, 17th September 2008?
Are the MCA leaders just playing to the gallery in making public calls for the “comprehensive review” of the ISA, just for newspaper publicity but which MCA Ministers have neither intention nor political courage to pursue in Cabinet as a fundamental matter of principle?
MCA leaders are trying to raise a hue-and-cry over the identity over the “MCA operative in Puchong” whose police report one day earlier had triggered off Teresa Kok’s ISA detention.
Teresa had already revealed the identity of the “MCA operative in Puchong” concerned at the KL-Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall on the occasionn of the “head-shaving protest” by 18 justice-and-freedom-loving Malaysians expressing their outrage at the unjust, undemocratic and unlawful detention of Malaysia’s most famous blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin, the Hindraf 5 and other detainees under the Internal Security Act.
The ball is now in the court of the “bold and courageous” MCA leaders.