BUKIT GANTANG Nothing original had ever come out of KJ

I beg to differ, Khairy!

Oleh Aziz Ahmad Shariff

Nothing original had ever come out of Khairy Jamaluddin. The chameleon that he is has turned many shades many a times throughout his short struggle to reach the lofty heights of UMNO.

His latest diatribe aimed generally at the Malays but not specifically at the delinquent stalwarts within UMNO is cause for concern.

Rich, well-heeled and born unto this world with a silver spoon in his mouth, pray tell me what credentials has he to remark that Malays have a siege mentality and should now forsake itself off their constitutional rights?

He had the audacity even to label his shallow views as “The New Malay Dilemma?’
I believe in all earnest the dilemma that eluded him is his own. The unfortunate accident of birth that placed him and his mindset aeons away from the real plight of the Malays since Merdeka – a plight that brought to consent from the nation’s fathers for a helping hand and subsequently affirmative policies to see them through.

Paradigm shift, he says? Yes, the need to defend Malay rights by the Malays and also on behalf of them by many enlightened non-Malays is actually a paradigm shift in motion. The Malays of today have taken stock of their situation and the paradigm shift that they have invoked is, among other things, to assert their entrenched rights.

Is it really siege mentality or an accepted form of modern survival (of the fittest)?

All countries and societies are not devoid of siege mentality. The rationale of having a standing army, ethnic laws, and right wing (or left wing political parties) to protect certain interests (openly or discreet) only show their state of mind.

Perhaps, Khairy as a person has yet to realise the pattern of offensives perpetrated by the non-Malays?

The fact that we have UMNO, MCA, MIC Makkal Sakti, and the NGOs focused on protecting certain things is evidence of the presence of siege mentality...ideas like the utopian views of western classical tomes on government much studied and glorified at ivy league universities, Oxford and Cambridge are all but just lofty dreams of dreamers...

It is not such a mentality that pulls down or stops some Malays from progressing; it is their lethargy in the all out pursuit of excellence and the pandered mindset.

Believe it or not, siege mentality is even thicker within the Chinese and Indian societies. Just look at the various clans within the sino creed and the caste system among Hindus. More often than not, defensive stance taken by these clans only reflects their aversion to the perceived or real incursions into their turf.

The word ‘special’ contained in ‘special Malay rights’ does not make the Malays special. It merely means that they are an exception for purposes of the affirmative policies. ‘Special’ here does not necessarily mean the cuddled and coddled lot. As such what Khairy was getting at during his policy speech at the Umno Youth assembly were just semantics. It was all fluff sans substance.

Reasons for the Malays needing affirmative action are many and disparate. Things such as the Chinese irredentist propaganda, that the bulk of Malays came from Sumatra and that the race as a whole is as much an immigrant population as the Chinese, is to repeat an unhistorical assumption which never had any foundation in fact.

Perhaps, to partly elucidate the green mind of Khairy and other detractors of Malay defensiveness it would be best to read the ‘declassified’ excerpts from observations of the British administrators at the turn of the last century available at the British Archives in London.

Time and space will not allow me to highlight the rationale and concerns of the British, Malays and the Rulers that espoused the idea of Malay ‘special’ rights, but after exhaustive research it was found that the idea was not a vague notion but based on the realities that was pre-independence Malaya, which took into consideration fairness to an unfairly treated Malays in a land they owned but virtually adrift in an ocean of Chinese dominance.

Source: Malaysiaaktif.com