According to reports, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said that visitors and members of the business community, including those from the United States and Canada, should know that Malaysia was a safe country and was even safer than their own countries. He added that the fact was that several terrorist incidents had occurred not in Malaysia but in the western countries.

This shoot-from-the-hip rebuttal of course missed the whole point of perception by those who perceive otherwise outside, and advise their nationals not to come here  that another suspect named as his deputy in the plot, Idris alias Johni, also studied at the school, and that several teachers at the school, including the principal, Shahril Hat, were detained by police in January this year for their alleged involvement with the Malaysian Mujahidin Group (KMM);

  • Secrecy as US inspectors arrive to quiz terror suspect which tells of FBI agents interrogating Yazid Sufaat at the Kamunting Detention Centre, alleged to have had connections with Zacarias Moussaoui, the Moroccan-born French citizen whom he appointed as the US marketing agent for a Malaysian computer software company as a letter shows;

  • Malaysia itself is holding more than 70 suspected Islamic militants, many of them according to the government itself are allegedly members of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), which aims to set up a regional pan-Islamic state covering Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore and southern Philippines, and one of them who was alleged to be a member was recently acquitted and re-arrested;

  • Our major opposition party is also advocating separating male and female visitors in swimming pools and tour guides in their states, the kind of rules reminiscent of the Taliban.

    • Needless to say, such perception from outside is very detrimental to our image and our economic prospects, but could it be help based on the above?

    The US Immigration and Naturalization Service had already introduced security procedures at airports and borders this week that included photographing and fingerprinting visitors from Arab and Muslim countries including Malaysia that has been lumped in same 'high risk' category as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen Afghanistan, Cuba, Indonesia and North Korea. Even our Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had to take off his shoes for security checks in the US.

    Rightly, this negative international perception should be dispelled. This is however not so easy when the country has vigorously pushed in recent years to boost the number of visitors from the Middle East, attracted in part by Malaysia's policy of visa-free entry for citizens of most Islamic countries.

    How do we stop these Arabs when even if we suspect them we can't just arrest people without hard evidence? We now cannot separate the wheat from the chaff, of militants co-mingling, meeting and planning here, and we now reap the seeds of the policy we have sowed.

    To counter negative stereotyping, the PM had called on Muslim tourists, finding travel in the West difficult since the terror attacks on the United States, to go elsewhere (by oblique reference to Malaysia), but this may be counterproductive and reinforce the perception that sympathisers of Osama are also invited!

    While one of the positive steps is to agree to the setting up of a regional anti-terror centre to demonstrate our strident opposition to terrorism, more however need to be done by way of public relations to stem and reverse this negative stereotyping.

    We cannot afford to be perceived as giving conflicting signals. Admittedly amid the general 'anti-Muslim hysteria' out there especially in the West as described by the PM, it is not easy to maintain a balance in our policy of open visa-free entry for citizens of most Islamic countries policies against those who would take advantage of it as a sanctuary to carry out terrorist activities.