— Abdul Haleem Abdul Rahiman
The Malaysian Insider
May 03, 2012
MAY 3 — While the dust yet to settle on Bersih 3.0 the nation seems so drunk. So lost and so confused.
The best news today surely about Nayati Shamelin Moodliar who was released after been kidnapped for almost a week.
This young boy was released after an undisclosed amount of cash ransom was paid to the abductors. During the press conference Kuala Lumpur police chief Datuk Mohmad Salleh have said the following; “The family decided to pay the ransom. The demand was made immediately after the kidnapping. Police are still investigating the case under the Kidnapping Act, and if found guilty, the suspects will receive the death sentence,”
Why is he talking about if found guilty the suspects will be hanged. Have you found the suspects? Arrest them and charge them and then tell us what punishment they will face. After all on many cases before this the only thing you guys found was dead bodies or innocents children.
More on our famous police force. The KL city police released photo shots of 49 suspects who were responsible for the mayhem and violence on Bersih 3.0. Good. Arrest them investigate them and charge them.
Based on the report in TMI Kuala Lumpur police chief Datuk Mohmad Salleh told a press conference today the 49 persons were being investigated for various crimes under the Penal Code related to unlawful assembly and disobeying police orders.
When asked if any policemen have been listed as suspects he said there were no numbers yet but said it was not an issue as there are “no problems tracing” members of the force.
“Where is the proof? Show us. These are only allegations which must have proof,” he said when asked repeatedly about various allegations of police brutality.
I am sure Mohamed Salleh never heard what YouTube is. He must be the kind who use his PC for Word, Excel, Power Point and Outlook alone. He must be using the kind of Smartphone which does not support social media applications. And surely he does not read anything but Utusan Malaysia. Are you confused? I am.
Another big story of the day is Malaysian Airlines and Air Asia share swap deal which now will be reversed.
Let’s not get into details and confuse ourselves even more with corporate jargons and acronym soup. We are already high on acronyms.
We even can publish a book with all the acronyms that been feed to us on daily basis by our government.
We must be the most confused nation to have a such a high profile deal and roll back less than a year? Such a crucial business decision was made and announced without considering or involving all the stakeholders? I know our Ministers are famous for flip flop but we sunk so low now that even public listed companies which at once considered as national treasure taking the stakeholders for a ride.
What is wrong with us?
I am little dumbfounded with all this noise about Astro censoring the foreign content. I am like – what you don’t know that? How long you have been watching Astro? From day one Astro have been censoring all the content. I mean ALL. Your AXN, BBC, Disney, SUN TV, CNN, Celestial and what not.
All this turn-around channels are censored for mainly two reasons. The first reason is to remove all the foreign advertisements and second reason is to remove all so called unsuitable parts of the content.
Unsuitable to whom you might ask? The answer is –it is unsuitable to the gullible Malaysians who always need the big brother to tell us what to watch and what to hear. (also what to read and wear). You might ask who decide this and that is unsuitable for us to watch, hear, read and so forth. We have almost a long list for that namely KDN, LPF, MCMC, and PDRM and so on and so forth.
In fact I will not be surprised if the list is as long as the list of banned books in Malaysia. While amazed me more is – the content provider themselves seems surprised. What? You didn’t notice your broadcast has been tampered all this while? Are you joking? I am not naïve to buy that. Astro in business for more than 15 years now and you are telling me you never knew Astro do chop job on your content?
Talking about censorship I am even more confused.
Yesterday, Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim, the information, communication and culture minister defended Astro’s chop job over BBC’s Bersih 3.0 coverage. He was quoted by TMI that he was stressing that the satellite pay television provider should be given credit for showing only the “best parts” of last Saturday’s protest for electoral reforms.
The irony is his ministry must have also recognised that on the same day almost all the mainstream media (press) were publishing porn acts of an opposition figure. Some even went to the extent of providing URLs of the sites which hosts those porn clips. Tell me if you are not confused.
We have BBC news censored based on local regulations for the sake of national interest but on the other hand mainstream media giving out porn clips URs. Since we are already talking about mainstream press publications – NST might be facing legal suit from Australian Senator for misreporting a three year old speech by him and effectively painting him as anti-Islam.
Forget about misreporting or twisting of the facts. The bizarre is – he was here as an international observer – he spoke his mind – and now we are bashing him as anti-Islam. What has Islam or anti-Islam got to do here?
When you lose the ground to the sensible mass – worry not – there sre always race and religion cards to play with. This is almost a SOP for mainstream media. Just like the SOP of confiscating media personnel’s cameras as what our Home Minister said.
When the whole nation seems like in the royal circus – I was utterly shocked to read a young family of five commits suicide due to financial difficulties. How tragic it can be for a couple who are in early thirties and with three kids (the youngest one is 4 years old) deciding to commit suicide.
There must be something horribly wrong with our system despite all this economic transformation – minimum wage – better FDI better GDP and so on. I am confused.
