On the face of it, I was entirely justified in not coming up with my regular column calumnising the BN regime last week. On my deadline day, Friday, first I had to sit a final anthropology exam, and then spent the rest of the day barely surviving a 42-degree heatwave.

But in actual fact I was simply lost for words. Utterly dumbstruck in the face of the tragic mess in the eternally muddled so-called Middle East, and global outrage and confusion in response to terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Paris and Mali.

And my sense of speechless confusion has been vastly increased since by Turkey’s shooting-down of a Russian fighter-bomber, and the UAE’s recruiting and training of South American mercenaries to throw into the civil war in Yemen.

Thank goodness, then, for the moment of clarity I achieved courtesy of the latest Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who I witnessed on the ABC news praising Malaysia’s 2.6-billion-ringgit-man, Najib Abdul Razak, for being such a staunch ally against terrorism.

This astonishing remark certainly focused my boggled mind.

Starkly raising the question for me, as an Australian citizen, of whether Turnbull could be such a dupe as to actually believe what he was saying, or whether his words of praise were a misguided diplomatic attempt to, as they say, give a bad dog a good name.

If the latter was his intent, I’m afraid it was a total flop. Because it totally fell in line with Najib’s two-faced, survival technique of fraudulently portraying himself to the wider world as a model of Muslim moderation, moral probity and enmity against terrorism, while he simultaneously tries to ‘terrorise’ the Malaysian people into tolerating his lying, thieving misgovernment of their nation.

Lest anyone imagine I’m exaggerating in characterising Najib and his accomplices in Umno/BN as ‘terrorists’, let us remind ourselves that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a ‘terrorist’ is ‘a person who uses violence and intimidation in an attempt to achieve political aims.’

In other words, terrorism is practiced not only by mass-murderous non-government groups like, to name just a few, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram and IS, but by allegedly legitimate but actually illegal and outright criminal governments like those of almost literally countless countries including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and of course Malaysia.

Kleptocracies posing as democracies are dead easy to identify. In stark contradiction of their claims to be governments of their people, by their people, for their people, they are glaringly obviously governments of the people, by the potentates, for the profit of the potentates.

And the potentates achieve and attempt to perpetuate their power to oppress and plunder the common people with impunity by means of violence and intimidation.

In other words, by means of terrorism. By terrorism to the max, as in Syria, where the al-Assad regime has been waging all-out war against its hapless subjects for the past five years, or in comparative moderation, to use that much abused word, as by the Umno/BN regime for the past five decades in Malaysia.

I have no doubt that Najib and his accomplices are perfectly capable of calling out the troops against their opponents and the people at large if they felt they had to.

Capable of stopping at nothing

Najib’s repeated exhortations to his supporters to defend Putrajaya to the death if necessary, and constant threats by his spokespersons of a repeat of the May 13, 1969 riots, are sufficient proof that the regime is capable of stopping at nothing to sustain its rule by fear.

And not just any old fear, but the fear of God, as incessantly and hypocritically invoked by Umno/BN for decades as in Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s urging just days ago for Muslims to “unite to defend Islam’s sanctity”.

Never mind that Zahid and his fellow alleged defenders of the faith are themselves the principal offenders against the sanctity of Islam or any other moral creed, as witnessed by not only their alleged systematic robbery of Malaysians of as many civil liberties and legal protections as possible, but their resort to a constant reign of terror.

Terror that they’re at pains to keep as moderate as possible, of course, so as to avoid exciting too much global opprobrium. But terror nevertheless, to just sufficient a degree to cow the populace into compliance.

Terror through an entire arsenal of techniques from the above-mentioned threatening of non-Muslim Malaysians with a re-staging of May 13 to repeatedly jailing Anwar Ibrahim on trumped-up sodomy charges, randomly slapping critics and opponents with ridiculous sedition charges, and allegedly killing enough ‘suspects’ like Altantuya Shaariibuu, Teoh Beng Hock and others too numerous to name here to sustain what they consider the optimum level of fear in the wider population.

And now the Umno/BN-regime terrorists have the unmitigated gall to try and hide their activities behind a façade of opposition to IS, complete with suspiciously conveniently-timed announcements by the head of their police force that IS suspects have been arrested in KL.

The only consolation I can find in all this is that, as countless revolutions have shown, terror can work both ways. And thus the Umno/BN terror regime has every cause to be terrified of the Malaysian people come the inevitable time that they finally throw off their fears and fight back, and when the international powers that be, including my own thus far apparently clueless prime minister, finally wake up to the crying need to condemn clearly terrorist governments.

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’.