Behind Perkasa's pig obsession

The Perkasa protest against rapper Namewee took place two nights ago outside the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. Not coincidentally, this heritage building is symbolically identified with Chinese guilds. Little surprise then that Umno Youth had threatened to burn it down in 1987, around the time of Ops Lalang .

Perkasa, quite predictably, threw the ‘ Cina babi ’ slur at Wee Meng Chee and one Malay ‘warrior’ even insulted a friend of Namewee with the taunt “ Saya nampak muka kamu macam babi! ”

Arman Azha Abu Hanifah, the Perkasa Youth chief, and his gang had brought a stack of photos where Namewee’s face is superimposed with a pig snout. They burned the photos amidst shouts of “ Namewee babi! ”

Is there a religious overtone to the ‘pig’ smear, given that pork is haram to Muslims, you think?

If you’ll re-examine the two recent controversial ‘ balik Cina ’ incidents, you’ll see in them not only race-baiting but religious bigotry as well.

The Bukit Selambau principal Ungku Aznan Ungku Ismail saw red over non-Muslims eating publicly during the puasa month; Kulaijaya principal Siti Inshah Mansor said Hindu prayer strings were like dog leashes and ordered the prayer bracelets of her Indian students to be cut from their wrists.

Both the principals were displaying religious supremism.

Only as recently as Monday, there was another uproar over alleged comments by Biro Tata Negara (BTN) deputy-director Hamim Husin: “The si mata sepet that has never gone to a mosque or surau only has one vote. The si kaki botol that only knows how to go up to Batu Caves up and down only has one vote.”

Note that both allusions to Chinese and Indians contain an underlying religious overtone too. In Hamim’s comment that the slit-eye race does not “go to a mosque or surau” (except Teo Nie Ching, hence the big drama over her visit), the emphasis is equally on religious prejudice as it is on ethnicity bias.

According to Hamim’s caricature, Indians going to Batu Caves to pray are drunkards. Again, the haram factor - liquor is prohibited by Islam - comes into play.

‘Balik India’, ‘balik Cina’ conundrum

For Lim Kit Siang, Malaysian First means never to have to be told ‘ balik Cina ’. The Malaysian First-ers hate to be called ‘ pendatang ’.

Mohd Ridhuan Tee bin Abdullah has Chinese skin tone and Chinese facial features. Yet have you ever heard anyone, even his worst enemy, yell at him to ‘ balik Cina ’?

Ridhuan is a Malay-speaking Muslim. In Nusantara, Malay is the language of the land and Islam the religion, and therefore Ridhuan in speaking the language and embracing the religion clearly belongs here. The ‘ balik Cina ’ jeer does not apply to him.

If being Malaysian First is to avert the ‘ balik Cina ’ gibe, and Ridhuan is the last person anyone would tell off to return to China, then Ridhuan must be a model Malaysian First-er.

Another Malay-speaking Muslim is Zambry Abdul Kadir. As the public is now aware from the recent controversies, Indian schoolchildren in national schools have been told by their teachers to ‘ balik India ’.

Zambry is dark like a south Indian and looks typically Tamil. But you don’t hear the Perkasa types yelling at him to ‘ balik India ’.

On the contrary, he's a member of Umno, a communal party for Malays. Zambry’s party appointed him as Menteri Besar when it has more than two dozen other Perak state assemblymen possessing more ‘authentic’ Malay antecedents.

Umno could have made any one of the 26 Malay Aduns, or either one of the two Malay ‘BN-friendly’ Independents chief minister but instead installed this Indian-looking fella as CM. (Food for Malaysian First-ing thought, eh?)

So what is the secret of Zambry’s success? Another politician who paved the way for him clues us in.

Mahathir Mohamad wrote in The Malay Dilemma : “Even when the Chinese adopted the language, dress and part of the customs of the Malays, they were not acceptable because of religious differences.” (The stricture appears still in force with the selendang -wearing Teo not being acceptable, even four decades later.)

Mahathir also wrote in his 1970 book a prescription for the ‘ pendatang ’: “The immediate loss of original culture, language and racial characteristics is insignificant when compared with the privileges to be gained as citizens.”

Going back to Zambry: He declares he can’t speak any Tamil; evidently he will not be practising those parts of Indian culture that Islam considers syirik ; and as for ‘racial characteristics’, the BTN deputy director-general has stereotyped Indians as ' si kaki botol ' and of course we know that observant Muslims don’t drink.

Islam factor in demography tweak

Project M is the issuance of a deluge of blue ICs to new settlers in Sabah during Mahathir’s tenure. These immigrants are not necessarily Malay but they’re invariably Muslim.

Dr Chong Eng Leong’s book on Sabah population statistics is most revealing of the Mahathirist agenda. Chong, by the way, is the man who won a landmark court judgment in Sabah for his challenge to phantom voters on the electoral roll of the then Likas state constituency.

To demonstrate how the population in Sabah has ballooned beyond belief, and spiking during the height of the Mahathir era, let’s compare with the steady population growth in Johor. They’re two states with roughly the same number of residents today.

The population of Johor has multiplied 2.07 times or doubled since 1980, whereas the population of Sabah has multiplied 3.26 times or a whole lot more than tripled in the corresponding period.

Between the years 1970 and 2000, the Kadazandusun-Murut population in Sabah increased by 162 percent, the Bajau/Irranun by 344 percent and the ‘Malays’ by a whopping 1,552 percent.

Many, many bumiputeras were created by Project M. These newly-minted Sabahans may be merely first generation immigrants from Indonesia or the Philippines to come here but as Muslims, they get bumiputera status - the year 2000 census records them as ‘native’.

Malaysian First-ers must be green with envy.

As one blogger has put it so well, Malaysian First requires doing a Ridhuan Tee. If you, like Ridhuan, no longer harbour Chinese characteristics, then nobody can ask you to ‘ balik Cina ’.

Below is a word map of how DAP has been preaching Malaysian First in the hope of gaining privileges as first-class citizens:

Selendang , surau visits, pilgrimages to the Nik Aziz ‘shrine’ untuk mendapat petunjuk dan hidayah , Caliph Umar Abdul Aziz, Chinese/Indian MPs quoting Quranic verses, ‘ amar makruf nahi mungkar ’, praising the greatness of Islamic civilization and governance, Lim Guan Eng photoshopped slaughtering cow in Islamic ritual, PAS prayer for Lim to convert to Islam, khalwat with proponents of Islamic state.

It’s baffling that while the staunch DAP supporters are eager to diss the 1Malaysia concept as empty rhetoric, they fail to see that Malaysian First is simply the flip side of the coin doing the very same sloganeering. Which is why I’ve always been referring to both combined as 1Malaysian1st.

The Mahathir mantra, just to remind you again, goes: “The immediate loss of original culture, language and racial characteristics is insignificant when compared with the privileges to be gained as citizens.” ( The Malay Dilemma , page 171, Marshall Cavendish edition).

Mahathir made a prescription, Kit Siang is taking what the doctor says as a cure for racism and religious bigotry, and the First-ers are so obediently - being typical Malaysians - swallowing their medicine without question.

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HELEN ANG used to be a journalist. In future, she would like to be a practising cartoonist. But for the present, she is in the NGO circles and settling down to more serious writing and reading of social issues.