Having suffered the indignity and shame of seeing our country’s name splashed for the wrong reasons in all the major media around the world over the past couple of weeks, Malaysians now are suffering the ignominy of being taken further for a ride and treated like fools.

It’s as if, after the initial blackout by the mainstream media and, later, careful selection of news to be manufactured, there is now a desperate need to go the whole hog and drag out all the tired tricks from a failed magician’s tattered hat to convince an increasingly sceptical populace that black is white, wrong is right.

And all of these moves appear to have fuelled scepticism further, rather than restore the regime’s credibility.

Among the arsenal of heavily discounted tricks they have pulled up so far has been getting an obscure lawyer with a foreign-sounding name, based in Australia, to critique the actions of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) led by their attorney-general (AG) Loretta Lynch.

That the critique of the DOJ by Quintin Rozario is full of holes has clearly been pointed out by local lawyer, Syahredzan Johan.

That it was a report that came from the national news agency, Bernama, surely must have raised a red flag or two among critics of the media aware of the alleged partiality of the agency. Indeed, in the first few statements, the report used adjectives like ‘senior’ and ‘prominent’ litigation lawyer to introduce, describe and lend credibility to Rozario, imploring readers to swallow his spiel.

But a quick check on the Internet reveals that Quintin Rozario is allegedly not such an exotic individual after all, but a Malaysian-born cybertrooper named Gopal Raj Kumar. Or in more appropriate local parlance, a macai (lackey).

But convincing - or, indeed, conning, all of us - surely isn’t the point of the whole exercise.

The point, more than likely, is to raise doubts among the compliant and still-believing segment of the Malaysian public, irrespective of whether they’re in the villages or in towns, Malays or others, working class or middle class.

And initially it probably succeeded.

After all, the simple strategy still is to play up what has been played up numerous times already - the fear of this bogeyman called ‘foreign interference’.

And it is played up largely to a Malay community that is constantly urged to believe that it is under siege and in need of protection. That protection, so goes this warped parable, could only come from Umno and BN, of course.

And this protection is against non-Malay, non-Muslims and, in this case, protection too against a big, non-Muslim, western imperialist country like the US of A.

This is an assertion that has been dragged out almost from the beginning of this saga. The spin had begun when Tony Pua (non-Malay, non-Muslim, opposition), the Sarawak Report (founder Clare Rewcastle-Brown, British, non-Malay , non-Muslim, foreign), The Malaysian Insider and The Edge (opposition media), and the Wall Street Journal (US, hence foreign media) started exposing the alleged multi-billion dollar fraud related to 1MDB.

And, now, the revelations by the DOJ, led by Lynch (US, hence foreign again).

Flimsy defence

Implicit in the continuous spin is the idea that any critique against those accused of being involved in this scandal would be a critique against an entire ethnic community and, of course, the country as a whole, Negara ku, tanah tumpahnya darah ku.

And this flimsy defence needs to be reinforced, among others, by dodgy ‘expert’ individuals (Quintin Rozario and his troubadours, including loud-but-dense Malaysian ministers), media institutions (Bernama, Utusan Malaysia, Malaysian TV stations) and, certainly, religious organisations and their leaders.

Even PAS head and alleged Najib bff, Hadi Awang, has tried to get a piece of the action, reportedly asserting that “1MDB should be probed by Malaysians rather than foreigners”.

But, of course, this regime, battered as it is by the DOJ revelations, is desperate for a lifeline, any lifeline, that it believes will help convince both the compliant and the resistant.

So, other actors, cardboard as those before, need to be introduced.

And the latest - drumroll - is the quintessential Malay-Muslim academic. Or so they would like the faithful to believe.

Umno’s online mouthpiece, Umno Online, recently reported comments made by such an academic, another previously unknown, Associate Professor Hanafiah Harun.

The aim, perhaps, was to assuage the Umno faithful, to appease the restless ones. But the comments reeked of a bad script written for RTM’s best-forgotten ‘Drama Minggu Ini’.

Other media outlets have now carried the report. Predictably, like a blind swordsman flailing away, like a fish out of water, gasping for air, this latest ‘hero’ repeated the tired mantra of ‘foreign interference’, adding the equally predictable religious slant.

Hanafiah is reported to have “cautioned Malaysians, especially Muslims, to be vigilant about allegations against the leadership, especially by outsiders who could have an agenda or wanted to meddle in the country’s administration”.

Allegedly accusing the DOJ of being kafir (infidels) and, for good measure, also accusing them of being fasik (untrustworthy), evidently to lend credibility to his assertions, the good Ass(oc) Prof tried hard to sound serious in this now-common defensive strategy.

But his tiresome comments had no substance whatsoever.

It’s as if the message to the Umno faithful was, “Here is a comment on the DOJ revelations by a Malay-Muslim academic. Being Muslim - and an academic to boot - he must be believed.”

That simple.

I would like to think that even ‘the faithful’ would at least ask, first, what’s this academic’s area of expertise? And, second, on the basis of what research is he giving his opinion?

Which, I would like to think, would then lead them to ask: where on earth are these individuals, clearly devoid of any credibility, being dragged out from?

ROM NAIN is a media analyst and academic who is weary of incompetent, unethical leaders and their apologists and spin doctors in the media who try to get away with murder while professing to rub shoulders with God’s angels.