A week ago, I challenged former and longest-serving Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who has become the most powerful person in UMNO/BN and the person whom the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak fears most, to a series of seven public debates on his 22 years as the fourth Prime Minister of Malaysia.

This is because of the very clear and systematic attempt to revive Mahathirism, a campaign led by none other than Mahathir himself.

This series of seven public debates with Mahathir will cover an entire spectrum of achievements and failures, in fact national disasters, of the 22-year Mahathir premiership with its host of human rights violations, mega-financial scandals, rampant corruption, collapse of educational standards and the across-the-board subversion of independent national institutions like the judiciary, the police and the civil service in the country during the long night of the 22-year Mahathir premiership.

But Mahathir has declined the invitation to the series of seven public debates in Gelang Patah to examine his legacy and the baneful effect of Mahathirism on Malaysian nation-building although he has no qualms whatsoever to continue to pump racist poison, lies and falsehoods into the mainstream of Malaysian public discourse, including his seditious, inflammatory and baseless accusation against me for wanting to create a racial confrontation by contesting in Gelang Patah and his open call to the people of Johore to make Gelang Patah my “political graveyard”. Read the rest of this entry »