The recent incident when a group of men besieged a church service for young children in Ipoh was inevitable given the decades of racial and religious propaganda by Umno and PAS. Umno takes every opportunity to insinuate that the Malays are weak and that the other races will deprive them of hearth and home.

The truth is that Malays totally dominate the cabinet, parliament, judiciary, military, police, and the huge government bureaucracy. The truth is also that this dominance would have happened even without the NEP or special privileges given the demographics of this country.

But neither Umno nor PAS will give up their racial and religious propaganda war in their mutually antagonistic contest for the right to lead in the eyes of the Malay community. It seems neither gives a damn if race relations in Malaysia deteriorates as a result of their selfish contest for power, influence and wealth.

Unless a new winning electoral formula can be found, we can expect both Umno and PAS to continue to instill feelings of paranoia and mistrust in the minds of Malay voters against the ethnic minorities in Malaysia.

The situation has reached a stage that even cherished and noble universal values such as meritocracy, human rights, equality of opportunity and a welfare system based on need instead of race is regarded as unacceptable, and even viewed as a threat to Malay survival.

The mob that besieged the church in Ipoh were certainly misguided but we need to ask ourselves who it was that had engendered these feelings in the first place. This siege mentality was certainly not given birth to overnight by a few SMS messages.

It is utter hypocrisy for Umno to point fingers at the SMSes when Umno spends millions of ringgit every year on government-sponsored mass media propaganda for political purposes. The truth is that the siege mentality in the Malay community has been carefully nurtured by decades of divisive, self-serving, inflammatory, unethical and scare-mongering racial and religious propaganda.

Let us be in no doubt about who poisoned the minds of the Malays in the first place. The SMS messages may be likened to a lighted match. But it is PAS and Umno who created the tinderbox of hate and fear in their minds.

How long more do we have to wait before Umno and PAS come up with a new electoral strategy and doctrine that does not involve another five decades of demonising and scapegoating the ethnic minorities in this country?