“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”

- Thomas More, ‘Utopia’

PAS friends of mine have been writing to me and saying that I am being unfair to PAS. They claim that calling their party a religious cult and branding their style of politics as Umno collusion is extremely partisan. Amanah is a DAP creation and while in Pakatan Rakyat, PAS was a team player until it was “bullied” and vilified by DAP after the passing of Tok Guru.

While I dispute this narrative, I think it is pointless hammering on PAS for deciding to go teirnown way. Instead, I will hammer on PKR for maintaining this charade that there is value for Pakatan Harapan to continue working with PAS.

Mind you, this has nothing to do with PAS. For whatever reasons, they have chosen to recalibrate their politics and while I disagree with it, this is still a free country and political parties are free to choose whom they align with. However, the problem here is not PAS, it is PKR. When I questioned why Harapan was still working with PAS, I acknowledged two salient points:

1) “Harapan should have learnt this lesson a long time ago. PAS construes the alliance as weak. They were always a virulent anti-Anwar strain within PAS which looked at the coming together of the supposed liberal reformer and convicted 'sodomist' - to their minds one and the same - as anathema to their zealotry.”

2) “People talk about the Umno DNA within PKR but they forget that the only reason why the opposition was able to get itself off life support after the brutal beating they took during the short-lived Abdullah Ahmad Badawi glory days was because of the support of PAS.”

PKR's Batu MP Tian Chua claim that there is nothing to be alarmed about PKR attending PAS’ mega rally points to the dysfunctionality of the opposition. There is enough evidence that the opposition only makes gains in elections when Umno is weak and the opposition is united.

While I understand that PKR is in a difficult situation when it comes to PAS, the reality is that PAS is preying on the weakness of the opposition front and will happily turn the tables when the time is right for them, and most definitely, link up with Umno.

Also attending that rally was Parti Ikatan Bangsa Malaysia (Ikatan), which in my opinion is the political wing of the outsourced thugs of Umno. Take the “simple” issue of PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang’s “not hudud” amendment recently adopted by the Najib regime.

The public stand of Ikatan’s president Kadir Sheikh Fadzir (who was absent at the rally) on this issue was: “Justeru, semua pihak jangan cuba nak main ‘game upmanship’ (tunjuk siapa lebih hebat) dengan DAP, selain membuktikan siapa paling anti-Islam dan Melayu semata-mata untuk meraih populariti.

“PAS adalah parti besar dan antara yang menunjangi politik negara selain Umno, justeru sudah tiba masanya PAS tunjukkan taring mereka.”

How does it look? We just had the MCA issuing a stern reprimand (or whatever that was) to the representative who “walked out” at the Perlis state assembly vote. And now we have PKR attending a rally that ultimately descended into a DAP and Amanah bashing rally.

In other words, PKR thinks there is nothing to be alarmed about when it attends a rally that supports policies that they are supposed to be against and attacks their political allies.

Meanwhile, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia's attempt to play bridge builder has achieved nothing beyond giving PAS the opportunity to vent at their former ally and recalcitrant children. Which of course is fair enough, since Amanah has declared open season on PAS and DAP has made its disdain publicly apparent...