As a Malaysian who believes in multi-culural diversity without sacrificing core religious principles, I found it troubling that DAP’s Lim Kit Siang accused RTM via its Panorama Programme of promoting polarising viewpoints and cultural misrepresentation by ‘purporting to depict a typical Chinese Malaysian family preparing for Chinese New Year when it showed a Muslim Chinese family’.

Various similar statements at Lim’s blog and and the DAP website echo DAP’s stand that the RTM programme is part of a long-running broadcasting scheme to subjugate the non-Muslim Chinese audience into converting to Islam.

Well then, using DAP's logic, there are enough reasons for typical Malay Muslim families to accuse many of the morally-corrupt reality show programmes on TV, regardless of the target audience, of encouraging their youngsters to run away from Islam.

A seasoned politician like Lim should know that unlike RTM 2, RTM 1 is targeted at the Malay audience and thus, the absence of Islamic elements will likely cause the channel to lose its appeal.

Imagine what kind of shared values and visual appeal will Chinese New Year celebrations bring to Muslim audiences if there scenes involving liquors and pork and deities.

As long as the principles of non-Buddhist Chinese are not violated, there are no reasons why they can't be restricted from being depicted celebrating the Chinese New Year. The Panorama programme provides its majority Malay viewers an insight into the similarities that tie Chinese familial values with positive Islamic virtues.

Apart from astrological forecasts and worshiping rituals, there is a lot of room within Chinese celebrations that can be shared. There are sizable numbers of Malays in Malaysia who are trying to rediscover their Chinese roots without sacrificing their Islamic belief, and it is disheartening to hear voices that treat this honest attempt to fulfill that need as discriminative proselytisation.

Without doubt, DAP has the right to be given fair representation in all government-controlled media channels. But it seems that DAP's fight about freedom of speech is selective for a particular group of the society.

The party, which has been known to directly lambast certain Muslim parties for being extreme in prohibiting Muslims from enjoying non-Muslim celebrations, has never bothered to repair its perception as a racially chauvinist political party among Malay and Muslim voters, and its latest opposition of broadening Chinese New Year appeal to Muslims only proves that very reputation.