BN Flip-Flop: Bullies at home, cry-babies abroad
Blog KC Chew
That’s the Barisan Nasional (BN) government for you. All bully and bluster on the domestic scene, beating the people into submission with every weapon at its disposal – biased electoral system, bent judiciary, crooked police force, compliant media and all – and then, playing the victim on those rare occasions when the outside world can be bothered to comment on its activities.
That was Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s ploy throughout his 22-year premiership. He ruled the roost through the power of political patronage and corruption plus ham-fisted crackdowns like Ops Lalang, the sacking of top judges in 1988 and the show-trial of Anwar Ibrahim.
At the same time, he claimed that international critics of his methods were just jealous because Malaysia was, as he never tired of claiming, “the envy of the world”.
Now he’s up to his old trick again, claiming that unfavourable international comment on the elevation of Najib Abdul Razak to prime minister is some kind of conspiracy against poor little Malaysia by the big, bad world media. And BN’s latest propaganda chief, Rais Yatim, is happily playing along with this pathetic proposition.
Rais was recently quoted by BN mouthpiece Bernama as making the somewhat weird statement that the foreign media “would use various terminologies relating to the prime minister’s character to give the impression that he was unacceptable to lead the country”.
Having euphemised the situation with the peculiar phrase “various terminologies”, he then went on to make the utterly false claim that “certain issues” which could tarnish Najib’s good name were “mere allegations made up by the media in Europe and the United States”.
