As long as the BN regime maintains the Sedition Act, by rights it should be used against former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad before anybody else. Not just for his patronage and support of race-hate groups like Perkasa, but for his repeated racist rants like his latest against Malays.

Who the hell does he think he is to brand millions of people of a particular ethnicity, or indeed any ethnicity, as “lazy”, shameless and lacking in integrity?

And who do his accomplices the Umno/BN regime think they are to try and silence critics and opposition figures with their accursed Sedition Act, but fail to employ it to shut Mahathir up?

If there is any group in Malaysia that is lazy, shameless and short on integrity, it’s not any sector of the populace, racial, religious or otherwise, but the members, supporters and cronies of the ever-ruling regime itself.

In fact most of them deserve shutting-up quite as richly as does Mahathir himself. And not just shutting-up as in silenced, but shutting-up as in jailed.

Mahathir should have been tried years ago for not just repeated acts of sedition, but the many other crimes that have been persuasively alleged against him, including, at the very least, repeated abuse of power and massive corruption.

And if there is any single figure in Malaysia who should emulate the Japanese he is always citing as his standard of excellence, it’s himself.

“You see the Japanese, they have a lot of shame, not ashamed of being naked, but ashamed of failure. If they fail to commit a duty, they commit suicide,” he remarked during his diatribe against Malays, who he accused of “not being embarrassed even if they fail their examinations.”

Leaving aside altogether Mahathir’s well-known obsession with nakedness, it seems to me that if any single living Malaysian who should be ashamed to have failed to do his duty it is the man himself.

In fact so far from doing his duty to Malaysia during his premiership and ever since, he’s done nothing but the dirty on the country by deliberately and systematically destroying its judiciary, police, mainstream media and other institutions for his personal and political benefit.

But there’s been no sign whatever that he will ever take responsibility for his shameful misdeeds, let alone consider committing harakiri.

In fact all he commits is one hypocrisy after another, as in the story he told to illustrate what he claims to be Malays’ lack of integrity in handling money.

“I run a bread shop now, after my retirement. And I had to fire my manager because they ( sic ) tried to take some money on the side. I experienced this myself.”

Self-accusatory remark

What a ludicrous and self-accusatory remark this was, in light of the fact that it is common knowledge that corruption, fraud, embezzlement, theft and other ‘leakages’ during Mahathir’s 22 years as prime minister cost Malays and other Malaysians somewhere between RM100 billion and US$100 billion.

And into a very bad bargain, at least two of Mahathir’s own sons received massive bailouts of their then failing businesses, and Mahathir himself is reputedly so unaccountably rich that he’s commonly known as the 44-billion-dollar man.

So what does he think he’s doing and who does he think he’s kidding in accusing ordinary, everyday, honest Malays of lacking financial integrity?

It would be far more appropriate, in the old ‘it takes a thief to know one’ department, for Mahathir to confine his financial suspicions to the other recent target of his wrath besides Malays, the national so-called investment fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

As he wrote in his blog, truthfully for a change, “the money for 1MDB is not from the country’s surplus. It is a debt. Billions of ringgit in debt that is added to the already-high national debt.”

Debt is certainly the theme of 1MDB. This highly secretive entity was reported recently by Reuters to be “struggling under a US$11 billion (RM35.51 billion) debt, and is not generating enough revenue to even cover interest costs.”

Of course Mahathir’s aim in blowing the whistle on this scam was not to advocate the kind of financial integrity he claims Malays are lacking, the better to divert attention from himself, but to continue his current assault on Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak.

He recently very publicly announced that he was withdrawing his support for Najib on the grounds that his leadership is weak and ineffectual, and the gathering storm surrounding 1MDB, of which Najib is head of the advisory board, is a welcome element of his campaign.

A campaign that most of us perceive as some kind of last-ditch Machiavellian, or rather Mahathirvellian, move to elevate his son Mukhriz to within at least sight of the premiership.

But even Mahathir must realise that Mukhriz, even though he’s been installed as menteri besar of Kedah, will be politically dead meat once his doting old dad’s gone.

Typically, all the mealy-mouthed Mukhriz could muster in support of his aged father’s anti-Najib bluster was the groveling claim that such criticism “came from love for the present leadership.”

“I want to convince Datuk Seri (Najib), and I think Datuk Seri is also aware that the criticism by my father, Tun Mahathir, is made out of love and intended to give strength to Datuk Seri,” Mukhriz said.

Sycophantic but unconvincing

He pressed on in this sickeningly sycophantic but utterly unconvincing vein with the remark that “only those who loved a person would criticise the person concerned with the intention of making the person to ( sic ) correct mistakes that had been made.”

Perhaps, just as this was supposed to satisfy Najib, it may also have been intended to mollify Malays unjustly and thus insultingly accused by Mahathir of being lazy, shameless and lacking in financial integrity.

But I doubt the ‘tough love’ story will work. More and more Malays, like their Malaysian brothers and sisters of Chinese, Indian and many other ethnicities, are sick to their stomachs of Mahathir and his malicious lies.

So it’s high time that Najib used its Sedition Act to shut the man up. Or, better still, that Malaysians of all races and creeds finally united to shut up Mahathir, Najib and the rest of the celaka BN regime behind bars where they all belong.

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', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.