Today on Merdeka eve, I find myself privileged with a platform to articulate my thoughts on the 50 years whole shebang. I don't belong to any political party or any organisation to do with activism. So I'm speaking for me the accidental theorist.

Rap is the in-your-face argot of one young man's alienated world. I will use a gentler idiom to speak of shattered dreams and cowed populace. The words below are from one of my favourite songs 'Nawaitu', performed by 'nasyid' group Rabbani.

Usahlah engkau selindungkan bayangmu

Renungi asal kejadianmu

Berjalan tunduk bukan erti kau kalah

Tebarkanlah serata jiwa

Usahlah engkau persalahkan kakimu

Andainya rebah di bumi mu sendiri

Mungkinkah ada kesilapan semalam

Lafazkanlah sejujur hati

['Nawaitu' lyricists: Azam Dungun & Hamdan Md Noor; composer: Bong]

Sadly, people don't usually get what they piously wish for. They get what they negotiate for. Agitate for. Or litigate for. Lina Joy courageously challenged the bureaucracy, courts and an entire country for a principle. Ordinary yet extraordinary woman, she is emblematic of the lengths one could go to negotiate our citizenship (if one valued this citizenship).

But I will confess why Lina means more to me than a human rights cause. If she had succeeded in setting a precedent, I could have been one of those Malaysians whose life she impacted. I've had two serious relationships and both the boyfriends were Malay.

Like any other Malay, my ex-boyfriend had the word 'Islam' on his MyKad, an automatic procedure. So we couldn't have walked into a civil registry and gotten married.

As conversion was never on the cards for me, a 'You to yours, me to mine' accommodation or non-interference by the nanny state would have suited fine. In neighbouring Indonesia with the world's largest Muslim population, people are free to marry. I can only think of Israel where the state forbids its favoured child to tie the knot with its stepchildren.

Israel reflected in mirror

Israel's religious law 'halacha' mandates conversion to Judaism in mixed marriages. In Israel as here, orthodoxy has a strong grip and religion a state role. Israel is a Jewish state and its unique birth is without parallel in human history. Malaysia is a Malay supremacist state and we're in the process of writing its history now.

Communal partitions segregate Israel's society along religious lines, and in matters relating to birth, death and marriage the Israeli cannot turn to a civil court. There is no recourse to a secular identity in these areas. I can imagine when a Jew and a Palestinian have a dispute, the latter being told to submit to the Jewish ecclesiastical court.

Israel's law recognises and protects Jewish holy sites alone. Cemeteries, seminaries and religious institutions are built for Jews but not for Muslims, Arab-Christians and Druze who comprise over one million citizens of Israel proper.

Adalah, a Palestinian legal aid organisation, in a report titled 'Institutionalised Discrimination' said that during the 1990s, typically 98 percent of the Religious Affairs Ministry budget was allocated for Jewish houses of worship and religious services.

Restaurants, factories and public buildings are obliged to adhere to the kosher practices of Jews, and public space is Judaisized under state policy.

Human rights lawyer Hassan Jabareen notes that Israel's Palestinian citizens inherited a social contract in the form of the country's founding document, the Declaration of Independence. This declaration mentions only the history, culture and collective memory of the Jewish people. (source: Blood and Religion, Jonathan Cook, London: Pluto Press, 2006)

One-fifth of Israel's population is not Jewish. Malaysians have called Israel an apartheid state. What do we call ourselves then?

Against typecast

When worlds collide, as is happening now with Malaysia's races and religions, it will need to be the same outlook that binds us; shared ideas and ideals. There's no reason why we can't cross borders. Only Israel is barred on our passport.

As a couple who crossed borders, we bucked the stereotypes. Notably, the ex-boyfriend is a darned sight more hardworking than me, in fact, the furthest thing from lazy. On the flip side, I'm the one with strong political views; he's not interested in politics. I speak fairly fluent Malay. He speaks better English than I do.

My personal experience of race relations is positive. The two sets of almost in-laws, their families and clan are warm and wonderful people. My Malay friends are liberal, kind and generous, and still talking to me knowing I write on Islamisation.

I've a Malay friend whose kids are entering primary school. She says she worries that her daughters will not have any friends of other races with the education streams having become mono-racial, unlike back during our schooldays. She tells me that in her daughter's class, there are only two Chinese and she has reminded her child: 'Make sure you are friends with those girls. Make them your best friends'.

I have another Malay friend who sent his kid to a Chinese school. He shunned the cash-redolent, fully government-funded national smart schools, and paid the same fees that Chinese parents do to keep government-neglected vernacular schools going.

In their own idiosyncratic way, my friends practise what I don't preach in malaysiakini 'muhibbah'. They harbour no chauvinism and no racial prejudices. I'd like to think we're birds of a feather flocking together.

It begins in the mind

If I've thrown myself into the battlefield of ideas because I believe progressive ideas are the agents of change. Lina Joy had gallantly tried to beat a new path. This country is heartbreaking for all who walk in her shoes. When I cried at her apex court verdict, I suppose I was crying for myself too.

How we react to storms like Lina is our Rorschach test. We have to remember that Malaysia is a controlled, protected and hence artificial environment. Outside our glasshouse, the world does not follow Umno rules, BN protocol and the Malaysian Pavlovian response like the on-cue throwing of stones at Namewee.

Take an enlightened Malay mind like Dr Syed Alwi Ahmad. When he wrote No scientific proof for special creation , my immediate and instinctive reaction was to worry for him as one who thinks the way he does. I'd never before heard any Malay say the things he has in public and in his own name.

What first crossed my mind was 'This man's going to get himself locked up'. Well, if not incarcerated, then get the Namewee treatment for Thoughtcrime because Malaysia at 50 does not act its age but is juvenile in reacting to contrary views. At that time, I hadn't realised Syed Alwi is Singaporean. I simply assumed he was Malaysian since he wrote in malaysiakini.

I cannot be proud to be Malaysian when our national consciousness is welded to fear of people being locked up, be it in Kamunting or faith rehab centres. Always there are the threats by the feudal lords, and invariably the averted eyes, selective hearing and subjugated mind of the serfs.

What they make a crime here particularly religious crime like failing to attend Friday prayers for three consecutive weeks cannot by any stretch of the imagination be construed as crime in countries practising democracy. Malaysia is truly unique, one of a kind.

Umno and its cohorts hollering ISA, Sedition Act and every other ordinance in the book while promising new ones is reaching a crescendo an apt 'Happy Birthday' cheer indeed. Malaysians are also truly unique to have put up with the persistent bludgeoning for so long.

Let's talk politics

We urgently need that mental revolution to pave the way for political reform. To abolish the ISA, OSA, UUCA and the rest of the debilitating three and four-letter words. Repressive archaic laws have become the guillotine in Umno's Reign of Terror.

We saw the beginnings of the Malay mind shift in the PKR Ijok campaign. One of the Malays in PKR's inner circle confided to me his personal crusade (in his own quiet way) was to create such a mental revolution. While I'm reserving judgment on his party, I'm convinced this person at least is genuine. The country must clone him in great numbers.

The Catch-22 is that an open Malay mind like Syed Alwi's does not flourish in our suffocating local climate and opened minds like Lina Joy's, if they remain here, will wilt or be forcibly torn at the roots. The mental revolution and the climate change have to be a symbiotic process so that the Joys can find a place here.

After 50 years, 'building bridges' between communities is cheap talk past its sell-by date. The Malaysian design is a half-bridge, crooked, costly, undulating, detouring to the middle of the sea, and cracking up the other side. If Malaysians want 'muhibbah', just do it; live it as individuals.

All this 'building bridges' talk coming from the side of the mouth is the height of hypocrisy, especially when it is Hishamuddin Hussein warning freedom of expression has its limits, and Umno Youth (of all people!) will not tolerate those who touch on issues affecting national harmony.

That's 'them'. It's the kind of talk that makes The Star 'one of the five most admired companies in Malaysia'. The 'most admired' quote comes from a citation for some 'outstanding employer' award presented by the prime minister two days ago to the newspaper's CEO.

I think we ought to give the 'building bridges' babble a rest. We see the yawning gulf between tiptoeing around sensitivities (meaning that generally nothing can be said) and what's really happening - which is the come hell and high water that vociferous Malay Supremacists get away with. On one side empty talk, on the other, aggressive action.

Chuck the too politically-correct 'sensitivities' indoctrination that has been ingrained in us. Address politics actual with candour.