It’s funny in a gruesome kind of way watching Umno/Barisan National (BN) try and worm their way out of the deadly fix they so deservedly find themselves in. After 55 years of stealing, lying and cheating, all they can think of in their desperation to save themselves is even more of the same.

So they gaily go on stealing on every front from massively fraudulent public projects and purchases through monopolies and commissions on licences, tolls and permits to police and other street-level corruption, all the while falsely claiming to champion truth, virtue and justice.

NONE For example, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, current head of this god-forsaken regime, or what former PM Dr Mahathir Mohamad recently so accurately called “the devil Malaysians know”, keeps using the name of the Almighty to rally his accomplices and supporters.

“God will love us if we strive in an organised manner,” he told a meeting of Pekan Umno delegates recently, “we have to administer with efficiency and systematically, and work hard as well”.

“Since the party’s inception 66 years ago,” the regime’s propagandist ‘news’ agency Bernama reported him as declaring, “Umno has been receiving the blessings of God to strive for the nation’s prosperity... we are the most successful party in the world. Without being boastful and arrogant, we have to be grateful and humble that our successes have been with God’s blessings”.

'Putriotism', not patriotism

Far from religious myself, I personally couldn’t care less how much sanctimonious claptrap that Najib or anyone else goes on with in claiming divine support for himself and his minions. But it does make me wonder how members and cronies of the Umno/BN regime think they can reconcile their multifarious corruptions and other past and continuing crimes with their claims to be God-fearing defenders of Islam.

Or, speaking of hypocrisy, how anyone pretending to be a minister for education, as Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin does, could have the effrontery to announce the introduction of a new history syllabus designed to produce not truth or understanding, but “patriotism”.

By which Muhyiddin means not ‘patriotism’ at all of course, as in love of country despite all its faults, but ‘ putriotism ’, or love of the Umno/BN regime’s revisionist, self-glorifying version – or perversion – of Malaysia’s history for its own somehow both sacred and criminal political purposes.

NONE Similarly blatantly hypocritical was the almost simultaneous release by Muhyiddin and his education department of a so-called education “blueprint” that was hailed by one of the foreign experts apparently hired for the purpose, former South Korea Education Minister Byong-Man Ahn, as beyond anything his country has ever attempted.

But any pretense by Umno/BN to reform Malaysia’s notoriously inadequate public education system, let alone any official will or capacity to achieve such a glorious goal, was almost immediately revealed as ludicrous by the release of a set of “guidelines” to help parents to identify gay and lesbian “symptoms” in their children “so that they can take early corrective measures".

Published jointly by Yayasan Guru Malaysia Bhd and Putrajaya Consultative Council of Parents and Teachers Associations, and reportedly endorsed by the Education Ministry, these guidelines are as mistaken and misguided as they’re malicious.

According to a report by Sin Chew Daily that was quoted in Malaysiakini , the guidelines warn that “once children have these symptoms, immediate attention should be given.”

Attempts to deflect hatred to blameless groups

azlan However much attention parents were may or may not be moved to give, however, reports of these outrageous attempts to profile and proselytise allegedly gay and lesbian children attracted such a storm of scorn and protest in the alternative media that a spokesman for Yayasan Guru Malaysia Bhd, Hasnul Hadi Abdullah Sani was moved to disown the “guidelines”.

“We have not come out with any guidelines,” he lied, “it is just an explanation for teachers on how to cope with the problem. We were merely giving advice, it is an awareness programme,” he added, denying that such a programme would lead to discrimination to students seen as having lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) tendencies.

But on the contrary, most of us perceive this latest offensive against LGBTs as just another, if especially outrageous in being focused on children, in the series of attempts by the Umno/BN regime to deflect popular hatred from itself to other entirely blameless groups.

To any of all of a wide variety of classifications of people including Jews, Christians, Chinese, Indians, foreigners, the CIA, Western powers, socialists, anarchists and Communists, who can be falsely claimed to be hell-bent on opposing Umno/BN’s in its cause of “protecting” Islam, the Malay race and even Malaysia itself.

As clever as the regime apparently imagines its use of this tired old fascist trick to be, however, it is clearly only serving to inflict even more damage on the already deeply-discredited and openly despised Umno/BN itself.

In fact, all that the attempted witch-hunt against suspected LGBT children suggests to even more of us than ever is that it is high time to rid Malaysia, not of perfectly worthy people comprising the country’s social, racial, religious, sexual or other minorities, but of career criminals, professional bigots and moral perverts posing as politicians.

In other words, civilised Malaysians will be happy as well as gay in either or both senses of a much-abused word, when Umno/BN members and cronies are finally flung out of power and back into their closets, or better yet where by rights they belong, behind bars.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia’, ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’, ‘Missing Malaysia’ and ‘1Malaysia.con’.