BN Youth must be more 'radical' says Khairy

BN Youth must be more radical, said the movement's chief Rembau parliamentarian, Khairy Jamaluddin, in supporting Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak's 'moderation' policy.

"Be radical but in the centre. We used to be radical at the extreme, but today we are radical but at the centre... radical moderates."

This, he said, is because the issue that is important at this point in time is not self or racial interest, but the interest of all those in the land.

"The issue is how to solve problem based on national interest, as promoted by our prime minister," he said.

However, Khairy ( right ) clarified that this does not diminish the role of BN component parties in taking care of their specific racial grouping.

"It does not mean that I no longer fight for the Malays, or YB Wee Ka Siong no longer fights for the Chinese.

"We still fight for our interests as Malays, Chinese and Indians, but in a way that does not conflict with national interest," explained the BN leader.

The prime minister had raised the call for moderates to re-claim the future from the extremists, urging world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York to join him in creating a resurgence of the silent 'moderate' majority and drown out the minority voice of extremists who continue to fan conflicts worldwide.

Reject radical Umno leaders

Meanwhile, an MCA Youth delegate from Kedah Tan Chee Hiong instead called for the Chinese party to boycott Umno leaders who use make use of racist issues to gain support in jockeying for position.

"MCA should not forget Umno leaders who make extremist and racist remarks when they are climbing to the top. After their have reached the top, they then repackaged themselves into moderates," he said.

Tan urged the MCA to boycott the leaders for at least 10 to 15 years.

"We should mobilise the party during general elections and sabotage those leaders," he suggested.

This, he said, is to prevent new Umno leaders from taking the racist shortcut to attain power.

"If not there will be more (leaders) like Ibrahim Ali (, who are the pet ( left) creatures) brought up by Umno."

While he did not point a finger and name names, Tan made it very clear who he was speaking about.

"Including the one who sat on the stage with us just now," he said, in a thinly veiled reference to Khairy who was the only Umno leader to do that during the Chinese party's youth wing AGM opening ceremony.

Despite his current moderate stance, Khairy has been known to be more radical in his past, especially under the tenure of his father-in-law Abdullah Badawi as prime minister.

Racist shortcut to power

At the time, while playing deputy to then Umno Youth head and current Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, Khairy was part of the Keris-waving crowd and made several comments which could be construed to be racist.

Among others ,he reportedly said that the rise of the Chinese can be a problem for Malays and alluded that the latter were being very generous with the MCA in giving them seats to contests.

Khairy re-invented himself after the fall of his father-in-law to Umno infighting and reinvented himself into the voice of the middle ground, or moderation, that he now espouses, as he struggled to find a niche in the new Najib regime and vied for Umno Youth chief.

But ,Khairy is not alone in the racist-to-moderate category of Umno leaders, as Najib himself once brandished a Keris in Stadium Merdeka vowing to "bathe it in Chinese blood" before his rise to power and re-branding as the voice of moderation.