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To believe Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Nancy Shukri is to believe that it is the civil servants who call the shots, who decide how the county is to be run and that ministers are merely the mouthpieces of civil servants. But this is not believable, for people elect their representatives to run the country and ministers are from the ranks of these representatives in the ruling party.

It is appalling that Nancy is unable to comprehend that when she read out the reply by the Attorney-General’s Chambers on Ibrahim Ali she was not acting as a script-reader but re-affirming the AG’s reply and elevating it to the status of the government’s official reply.

In the first place, the question was not posed to the AG but to the minister. So it doesn’t matter where the minister gets the information from. The reply given by the minister is an official government reply. Nancy should get this clear.

If she did not agree with the reply given by the AG as she now wants the world to believe, she should not have gone ahead to give it. And if protocol prevented her from discussing it with the AG, again as she now claims, to confirm that that was the AG’s stand, she should have refused to go against her own conscience which, she now tells us, wanted Ibrahim Ali charged and suffer the maximum penalty.

As law minister, she has a duty to see to it that the law is applied to all citizens in the same way without fear or favour. Since she was not happy with the way the AG was applying the law to Ibrahim Ali and since, according to her, she was helpless, she had a choice as no one was holding a gun to her head. She should have resigned.

The prime minister and/or the cabinet would then have had to look into the AG’s reply. If the PM or cabinet had proceeded to give the same reply, then the public would know for sure that it is the government that wants Ibrahim Ali to carry on his racist and extremist activities for reasons best known to the government.

“Jika hendak seribu daya...”  Yes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. The will seems to be to let Ibrahim Ali and his ilk carry on their agenda of hurting the sensitivities of the non-Malays/non-Muslims. Hence the leaving of no stones unturned to manufacture excuses such as that they are doing it in defence of Islam and are protected by Article 11(4) of the constitution.

Congratulations, Nancy.

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