Lessons of Google, Herald dilemmas

The dispute between internet search engine Google and the Chinese government that saw the former refusing anymore to cooperate with online censorship of its content bears instructional value for the crisis in Malaysia concerning the use of the term ‘Allah’ by the Catholic weekly Herald .

In 2006, the American company Google agreed to the Chinese government’s precondition of online censorship in return for the privilege to establish its website in China.

Google felt that the good from enabling 300 million internet users in China access to the benefits of its search engine would more than outweigh the bad from the authorities blocking users’ access to such search requests as, say, 'forced collectivisation of farms' or 'Tiananmen Square massacre'.

This resembled the Malaysian situation wherein non-Muslims were granted freedom to choose and practice their religions but they were strictly barred from proselytizing among Muslims.   

Meanwhile, Muslim preaching to peers and to the nation at large would not only be unhindered but beneficently facilitated because Islam occupies a special position in the constitution as the official religion.

Fair enough.  

When push comes to shove

But heaven forbid that push comes to shove and a Muslim apostate like Lina Joy wants to convert to another religion. She wouldn’t be allowed to, even though the freedom of religion provision of the constitution allows Malaysians to choose the faith they wish to follow.           

This is like China's one-party state wanting its economy to continue to proceed along the lines of the market system its leadership chose for the country in 1978, in diametric contrast to the command economy its previous set of leaders imposed on the nation when they seized revolutionary power in 1949.   

But the party wants the Chinese people to have no truck with the political ideas which are the concomitant of the economic ones that have spectacularly driven the national economy for now 32 years.

Rather like the Umno-led government wanting the Malays to be economically the equal if not the better of their competition and willing that highly desirable reality guaranteeing social tranquility to happen within a relatively free market economy.

If that relative freedom of the market brings in its train what it can be counted on to bring wherever it takes hold – a certain liberty on matters like one's political allegiance, social mingling and religious belief – well, shutters can be installed to keep 'contaminants' out.   

Economic prosperity without individual liberalism

Like their Chinese counterparts, Umno wants the Malays to pluck the flower of economy prosperity without being exposed to the nettle of concomitant dangers.

They want economic prosperity without its Siamese twin, individual liberalism. Increasingly, both the Chinese communists and Umno are thrown back on the absurdity of their one-dimensional approach.  

The latest travesty sees the Umno-led government allowing Borneo Christians to use the term 'Allah' for God, something they have done for decades, while wanting the offending Catholic publication, Herald , to withdraw from pressing its pursuit of the right to use the term on the Peninsula.  

In the Chinese permutation of farce, its government wants Google to ignore that its website was targeted by a cyber attack aimed at its users in the country who are human rights advocates. In return for that insult, Google can continue to maintain its undoubtedly profitable operations.

Now Google and the Herald are each reluctant to be servile to governments who think that they can herd citizens into mental cantons and ghettoes in an age where their promotion is manifestly self-undermining.  

Just as the Chinese government is putting the skids under its impressive economic achievements if it persists with internet curbs on its citizenry, so Umno's pettifogging over Christian use of the term 'Allah' does down not only to the religion it wants to uphold and but also the people whose fidelity it seeks to secure.