Archive for September 8th, 2009

From cow-headed to level-headed education

By Azly Rahman

How must we re-educate those who protested in such a style against the relocation of a Hindu temple? What gross deficiencies in our educational system contributed to the creation of beings that displayed such hatred?

What then must we do to reverse the evolution of hate groups sponsored by those who wish to sustain the dying ideology of ethnic politics?

These are the difficult questions Malaysian children will inherit. In the cow-head protest there were children involved; those tender young minds who will hopefully understand what respect for race, ethnicity, and religion means. Hopefully they will be strong enough to release themselves from the shackles of hatred, after 52 years of Malaysia’s independence.

We must blame the continuing survival of communal politics for the creation of hate-based groups. Because our Independence is an illusion and Malaysia is an imagined community that is thriving on rhetoric and slogans, we have a fragile system of in-breeding of hyper-modernised politics of hate.
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Can Tsu Koon do what Tee Keat has failed – getting Cabinet approval for a RCI into the RM12.5 billion PKFZ scandal?

I welcome the support given by the Gerakan President and Minister for KPI, Tan Sri Koh Tsu Koon for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the “mother” of all scandals – RM12.5 billion Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) scandal.

This is the first time since the long sorry saga of the PKFZ scandal, which ballooned from a RM1.08 billion scandal in 2002 under Tun Dr. Ling Liong Sik as Transport Minister to a RM4.6 billion scandal in 2006 under Tan Sri Chan Kong Choy as Transport Minister and is now set to mushroom to become a RM12.5 billion scandal under Datuk Seri Ong Tee Keat as Transport Minister that a Federal Minister has acknowledged its gravity as to support the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry.

Can Tsu Koon do what Tee Keat has failed – getting Cabinet approval for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the RM12.5 billion PKFZ scandal to ensure that it will not go down in history as Barisan Nasional and the nation’s most “heinous crime without criminals”?

Or is Tsu Koon taking the easy way out from the mounting public pressure for “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” about the PKFZ scandal to be told, by publicly giving lip-service support to the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry, without doing his utmost as KPI Minister to get the Cabinet to make the crucial decision to set it up?
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