Utusan Malaysia on Sunday (Sept 26) reported that 20,000 people attended the Mahathir-Perkasa rally in the sleepy hollow of Pasir Mas. The crowd numbers are surely exaggerated but worrying nonetheless.

According to a notice in the Perkasa website, the purpose of holding the rally and enabling a platform for their patron Mahathir Mohamed was because ‘ Islam di hina, Melayu di cabar dan institusi diraja di perlekeh. Masanya sudah tiba, gengam api biar sampai menjadi arang, ayuh semua rakyat Malaysia bersama di perhimpunan keramat ini ’.

Perkasa is inciting its supporters (quite typically) that ‘Islam is being insulted, Malays challenged and the monarchy denigrated’, and thus the Melayu have to bangkit and heed the call to take forceful action/ gengam api biar sampai arang .

The ultra-Malay organization is on a roll. Back in July, MCA vice-president Donald Lim had suggested that a counter-movement be set up to deflect Perkasa’s attacks. Lim’s idea was shot down by Pakatan Rakyat’s (DAP and PKR) top echelon and their supporters (mostly from the DAP camp), who rode their very high horses preaching that ‘you can't fight fire with fire’.

As a result, no one stepped forward to fight Perkasa at all. In the short three months interim since Lim’s proposal fell flat, Perkasa has wreaked havoc and held the country to ransom.

Notably, Perkasa made a series of police reports that has caused a number of individuals to be hauled up for interrogation. Most recently was Nurul Izzah Anwar, and before her Chua Soi Lek, Namewee, Helen Ang and some MCA person, all investigated by police for alleged sedition.

Perkasa even urged the police to act against the the Grace Church in Shah Alam and its pastor for planning to stage a Christian play during the recent fasting month.

Well, nobody seems able to stop Perkasa now — not the prime minister Najib Razak, not Umno secretary-general Tengku Adnan Mansor, not Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin (whose function vis-a-vis keeping the ‘nons’ in their place Perkasa has usurped), and certainly not the BN small-fry, satellite parties.

The Dr Frankenstein creator of the monster — Ayahanda Umno itself — seems split into factions and in mixed feelings over their berserk creature. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, the warning bells rung by Lim were indeed warranted. He saw the clear and present danger.

But his predominantly Chinese and Indian critics in the opposition were more concerned with showing off how wonderfully politically correct they were, and how morally superior they are in their outright rejection of the old ‘race politics’.

Last Wednesday, it was reported that Perkasa wants the harshest punishment to be meted out by the court on three teenagers who splashed red paint at a surau in Taman Pulai Impian Indah, Seremban.

Hartal MSM — our media watch group — not too long ago gave our take on the mitigating circumstances surrounding the red-paint vandalism case. In our posting ‘Charge the ‘surau man’ with assault on a minor’, we reminded our readers that the incident did not occur in a vacuum and that there was a prior action that created an equal and opposite reaction.

True enough, the Chinese boys threw red paint but earlier a group of 20 adult Malay men had a confrontation with the teens that included a 13-year-old girl. The girl in her police report said one of the men from the surau had slapped her brother.

Now it seems it is the hapless teenagers who have become victims of the Perkasa ‘Ketuanan’ agenda. These teens facing the court charges are only 16 and 17 years old. They’re not even well educated. At their young age, they’re not in school anymore but already working.

They are working-class youths who have been marginalised by our racist system. What is Pakatan doing for these poor teenagers of Taman Pulai Impian Indah? Seremban is, after all, a DAP parliamentary seat, and the taman is in a PKR state constituency.

DAP and its supporters have been in a self-congratulatory mode and making a song-and-dance over how marvellous (they think) they are because as Chinese and Indians, they’ve magnanimously risen above race considerations.

Therefore, in reverse race-and-religion allegiance, the Chinese (like Perkasa) had called for the stiffest punishment on these Chinese juveniles as well. (Looks as if they were bending over backwards in a Lim Guan Eng-ish way to make a fine point of it).

We’re betting that the parents of those teens will be turning again to MCA for help just as they did the last time. Perhaps MCA with its service centres network and community orientation will have more heart than the Pakatan politicians who prefer hogging the mike and posing in ‘feel-good’ painted-rust photo ops.

The writer represents Hartal MSM.