It was with great interest that I read your article concerning President Obama’s decision not to meet with Anwar Ibrahim.

Although I am personally of the same opinion, what drew my attention most were the reactions of my fellow Malaysians.

A great majority of respondents seem to have been extremely disappointed at the decision, if not outraged. All perfectly good and well.

However what disturbed me was the fact that when the US Embassy yesterday opened the floor via Facebook to Malaysians to pose questions to the president of the United States (POTUS), the majority of respondents were in fact Bangladeshis, Cambodians and Myanmarese nationals, all pleading for everything from political intervention to green cards and passports.

And where were these vocal and outraged Malaysians? Aside from my own question, the relatively few Malaysians who did bother to take advantage of this posed some very asinine questions like what advice Obama gives to his daughters (what specifically was something the author seemed to have forgotten to mention) to a poser about how to meet the president at Universiti Malaya.

There was even a rather lengthy and well written plea from a Rohingya refugee NGO for US assistance about their particular plight?

But my fellow Malaysians preferred, it seems, to restrict their vitriol to the ‘safer’ confines of Malaysiakini ’s commentary facilities rather than taking their grouses directly to the one man in the world who should be receiving their missives.

And why, as a leading online independent news source, have YOU not promoted this rare opportunity for your readers and fellow citizens to this opportunity to interact with the leader of the free world? Malaysiakini was beaten to the punch by a foreign NGO and this, more than anything else was a rather bitter letdown by Malaysiakini.

And where was the Malaysiakini editorial team’s own contribution to the effort? Surely it is not beyond the our capacity of Malaysiakini ’s editor-in-chief (or any of your other editors or correspondents for that matter) to pose any number of insightful and pertinent questions to POTUS on behalf of us all?

So while we waste our energy sounding off at each other about the injustice being done to Anwar, POTUS could very well leave these shores, at best with the impression that Malaysia is nothing more than a way-station for refugees in transit, and at the worst, that perhaps Malaysians are really not that upset by the machinations of the BN minority government and that Anwar is not perhaps the people’s champion after all.

Whatever the end result our failure to respond, whether through ignorance, reticence or shyness, will be as much our fault as it is YOURS!

It is my most fervent hope that Malaysiakini will do something to highlight this opportunity to its readers and encourage them to make the most of this moment before it slips past our fingers and another half century slips by before another chance comes round again, if at all!