Today is April 1 or April Fools’ Day. As part of April Fools pranks, some newspapers report fake stories to fool the readers.
This was what I thought when I saw the New Straits Times Page 10 headline and report: “KIT SIANG ‘PRETENDING TO BE ELECTED LEADER’” with a second headline “Only those who are blind and naïve cannot see that the DAP adviser is a dictator, says Hamzah”.
I realized that this was not a April Fools’ Day prank, however, when the other UMNO/BN owned and controlled mainstream media also carried the same story, making the top of Utusan Malayia Page 13 with the headline: “Kit Siang seorang dictator?” and the Berita Harian which devoted the whole of Page 9 to “Kit Siang pemimpin dictator: Hamzah”.
Clearly, this was deadly serious business – part of a massive propaganda psy-war against me!
I immediately thought of the BN Director of Strategic Communications, or to be more accurate, the BN Director of Strategic Lies, Datuk Abdul Rahman Dahlan, who in his desperation to demonise me as guilty of all sorts of misconduct and misdeamenours, has roped in a Federal Minister and UMNO Supreme Council member, Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainuddin to join in the “fire” on me.
I do not know why Abdul Rahman chose Hamzah and why Hamzah tamely agreed to be Abdul Rahman’s pawn to attack me, as I had not said anything offensive against Hamzah, but I welcome and am prepared to take on all comers from UMNO and Barisan Nasional who want to engage in a political exchange with me.
As BN Director of Strategic Communications or more correctly, Strategic Lies, Abdul Rahman is trying a variation of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels’ infamous definition of Nazi Propaganda – that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
Abdul Rahman is varying Goebbels’ thesis to “If you tell a lie big enough and get more leaders repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
UMNO Information Chief Tan Sri Annuar Musa was Abdul Rahman’s first guinea big to repeat Abdul Rahman’s lies in Parliament, and Cabinet Minister and UMNO Supreme Council member Hamzah Zainuddin has become Abdul Rahman’s second guinea pig.
Who will be Abdul Rahman’s third and subsequent guinea pigs? We will see.
Today, I want to give Abdul Rahman Dahlan my third lesson in “strategic communications” – 邪不胜正 (Evil cannot triumph over good).
Abdul Rahman had self-assigned himself as the BN Director of Strategic Communications without any agreement or meeting of the BN Supreme Council in July 2015, and for the past 20 months, had done nothing to deal with the most “strategic” issue of the government-of-the-day, the country’s largest financial scandal, viz the 1MDB international money-laundering scandal which has made Malaysia the butt of national and international ridicule, mockery and contempt as a global kleptocracy.
If Rahman wants to talk about “resignation” or “retirement”, shouldn’t Abdul Rahman resign as BN Director of Strategic Communications for being unable to address the most “strategic” problem facing the government, unless the office of BN Director of Strategic Communications is indeed to concoct and spread “Strategic Lies”!
I am sure Abdul Rahman does not want to be reminded about his disastrous debut as BN Director of Strategic Communications in July 2015, where he virtually made a “strategic error” a day in his first week in this new-fangled position, including:
1. To regard former Sarawak journalist Lester Melanyi as a “god-send” not only to end Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s intractable woes from the long-standing 1MBD scandal but an excellent occasion for him to surface as Najib’s new right-hand man replacing Jarjis Jamaluddin and Lim Kok Wing. Rahman broke the first rule in failing to check on Lester’s antecedents. Within 48 hours, he acknowledged Lester’s dubious character, which was why he could pen the infamous description “it takes a scum to know another scum”, defaming in the process not only Sarawak Report’s Clare Brown but also the Sarawak leaders of Barisan Nasional and even the Prime Minister himself.
2. To accept Lester’s video as gospel truth – or to use Rahman’s own words, “solid evidence of ‘a mission to criminalise Najib and 1MDB” – when other more discerning UMNO/BN leaders have refused to fall prey to Lester’s ramblings and hallucinations. In his first-day debut as BN strategic communications director, Rahman made big play of Clare’s alleged incriminating email to Lester confessing to forgery of 1MDB emails and documents but this was only “a one-day wonder” as Rahman had since been too ashamed to talk about it after the issue had been debunked by Clare.
3. Lester told Rahman that he had worked actively with Sarawak Report’s Clare Rewcastle-Brown to falsify documents for use on the website, but Rahman never asked for examples of such tampered documents – a reflection on Rahman’s gullibility and total absence “strategic” sense.
4. Rahman accepted without question Lester’s claim that only 10 per cent of the 1MDB documents on Sarawak Report are genuine while the remaining 90 per cent are all “created by Malaysian people, the opposition people”. Rahman clearly did not realise the vast and serious implications of such a statement, which raised the question why it had not been possible to expose the lies and falsehoods of the various 1MDB allegations for the past seven years if 90% of them were baseless? A “strategic” failure indeed.
Can Rahman reveal where is Lester Melanyi now?
It would make a good April Fools’ Joke if Lester Melanyi could appear before Abdul Rahman today!