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The real issues which affect Malaysians are the o­nes which politicians rarely bare in public.

Whilst PAS and Umno compete for political supremacy by manouvring themselves in the minds of the Malay vote bank, ethnic relations in Malaysia suffer.

Whilst in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and early 90s, the old reliable strategy of positioning o­ne's ethnic party in the mind of the numerically dominant Malay vote bank as being 'More Ethno-Nationalist than Thou' (exclusivist policies calling for a mono-racial, mono-lingual and mono-cultural Utopia) would have guaranteed a unified voting bloc and de facto political supremacy, the new electoral environment (post-1998, post-Anwar) demands modifications.

It has dawned upon the ruling elite, as it has upon the common person in the street, that even the most exclusionary and discriminatory policies will not ensure a unified voting bloc. In my mind, many Malay Malaysians will still vote PAS even if there were 100 percent quotas for all university education places, and 100 percent quotas for all government jobs.

The issue which will determine voting preference amongst Malay Malaysians in future will be which political party can more successfully position itself as the legitimate Muslim party. The present political discourse suggests that this would mean positioning o­neself as being either more pious, or more Arab, or more anti-Zionist, or more anti-American-imperialist than thou. For now probably any combination of the above will do the trick, at least in the eyes of our local political strategists.

The recent war in Iraq was both an overseas humanitarian tragedy, and local media circus all rolled into o­ne. It was not a worldwide media war waged between CNN-BBC and Bernama-Al-Jazeera . What really matters to major political players in Malaysia is the battle for the hearts and minds of local voters between Umno and PAS. Neither ethnic party could afford to look 'Less Islamic than Thou' lest they lose political legitimacy in the eyes of their constituents.

Hence the daily tirades and laments by our political leaders against the US government, and lukewarm tributes to Saddam Hussein which tried to suggest that perhaps he was not such a murdering and torturing monster after all. If indeed our rhetoric did anything helpful for the Iraqis in Iraq, it would be laudable. Instead our hastily contrived fully publicised and public-funded media foray into Iraq cost another two Arabs their lives in the ensuing violence when our clueless and frightened Malaysian journalists were ambushed by armed Iraqis.

From the tragedy of the Middle East conflict, we now move to the surreal and bizarre.

The present ban o­n the Iban Bible is going to be the biggest international diplomatic and public relations debacle since we banned Steven Spielberg's movie, Schindler's List , in this country.

When word gets out in the international media that we banned a native language Bible belonging to a Malaysian minority tribal people, there will be howls of derision and laughter in the West. This would be tantamount to the Americans banning the Quran in any language in any country, for example like Iraq, Hawaii or Alaska.

However, this isn't likely to happen because firstly, even the Americans are not that stupid. Secondly, the average American voter would consider it morally wrong to interfere with the free and peaceful conduct of another person's religion. Thirdly, American political parties do not need to pander to their ethnic constituents to win their elections. Fourthly, the average American voter would vote against their own leaders in outrage and disgust if ever any of their elected leaders were to consider such a ban o­n any religious text.

My interpretation of the present political theatre in Sarawak is that the Iban Bible ban serves to suggest however indirectly to the dominant ethnic voting group in Malaysia that perhaps their elected ethnic officials are somehow doing their jobs by watching out for any potential threats however obscure and unlikely, to ensure their continued economic, linguistic, religious and cultural prosperity and superiority - that is, 'ethnic well-being'.

Even the Afrikaners evoked the Black African threat in their justification for Apartheid South Africa. Every ethnic leader needs to create or conjure up a communal or ethnic threat to defend his constituents against as it serves to justify re-election in future.

Instead of harping o­n the alleged economic, cultural, religious and linguistic threats posed by the minority immigrant Malaysian communities as was the usual mass media political propaganda fare in the past decades, the new scapegoats in the post-Anwar era have tended to be the 'Satanic' foreign news networks like CNN, BBC , Reuters , AFP and Bloomberg , militaristic Zionist conspirators or power-mad American imperialists.

In a sense such a shift does represent significant political progress seeing that I am, an ethnic Chinese Malaysian, who feel a lot more comfortable about our elected leaders scapegoating non-Malaysian citizens like the Jews, Australians, British or Americans instead of Malaysian ethnic minorities such as mine.

My heart however goes out to my fellow minority Malaysians, the Ibans, who have had to put up with this ridiculous saga where our elected ethnic leaders and their ethnic functionaries make an issue where none existed before.

I believe that all good Malaysian political wayang, however surreal, will have a planned script and happy ending where everyone, all ethnic parties, will feel adequately protected by, and profusely thankful for the timely intervention of our elite ethnic politicians at some point in the new future.

I can o­nly predict that if the ban o­n the Iban Bible persists for any longer than a few weeks, that it will soon become a must-have o­n every bookshelf in the East and West, the new cultural-religious icon, a hot collector's item, and a bona fide symbol of religious repression in a primitive Third World country.

Even non-Christians and non-Ibans would want to read it.

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