Jacob Sinnathamby
The Malaysian Insider
May 12, 2011

MAY 12 — Let me understand this correctly. Some discredited blogger put out something incredible about Christian pastors wanting to take over Malaysia and that fountain of all rubbish, Utusan Malaysia, published it.

There is no evidence that any such plan is in the works, and yet today, at the so-called fruitful meeting between Najib Razak and church leaders, the church leaders had to give the when-it-suits-him leader of all Malaysians an assurance that Christians respected the position of Islam in the country and had no desire to dispute it.

How wonderful. The rascals who stirred up this rubbish have not been taken to task but the “victims” have been asked to give some undertaking not to misbehave.

This is akin to your house being robbed and your family harmed but having the police sympathise with the robbers.

Najib is playing to the Malay/Muslim gallery here. He probably was briefed by Special Branch that Umno ground is restive over this discussion on the position of Islam and he needs to show some leadership.

But surely the PM should be playing a non-partisan role here. In this instance, it is clearly his Umno blogger and newspaper which have tried to stoke anger against Christians, and they have done so with lies and fiction.

So instead of asking for assurances from Christians about a nonexistent threat, he should have apologised for the actions of his supporters.

The more conspiratorial of us will believe that Najib sought the meeting with Christian leaders only as window dressing, to extract some assurance which can be a headline in Malay papers tomorrow. Something along the lines of how Christians accept Islam’s position.

Of course, the objective of those reports will be to reinforce the rubbish about Christian pastors meeting in Penang to bring about a Christian country.

I wonder whether today’s meeting was fruitful only for Najib.

* Jacob Sinnathamby reads The Malaysian Insider.