Cyber anarchist with a belligerent agenda

You don’t look for rational debate or constructive criticism in Malaysia Today but if the blood and gore of politics is your preferred hors d’oeuvres, RPK’s thoughts and his rabid following are the bottom feeders chomping on each other’s contentious existence.

AZMI ANSHAR, New Straits Times

RAJA Petra Kamarudin’s reign as king of Malaysian “gutter” journalism is still smouldering but only in his belligerent website, Malaysia Today, where legions of fanatical fans drool obsessively over his outlook and dross on who’s who of national politics.

It does not matter what RPK postulates or who he assumes hostilities against: his prose is read and commented on with the fixation of piranhas devouring a hapless prey.

RPK has long dropped pretentions that his works are solidified by ethical journalistic standards. His mantra is to write whatever is plausible as long as there are enough suckers who believe in that plausibility.

True or false, right or wrong is not a cause, only an inconvenience. His legionnaires devour his stuff as the gospel truth anyway; with some commenters appearing to be bordering on being certifiable.

You don’t look for rational debate or constructive criticism in Malaysia Today but if the blood and gore of politics is your preferred hors d’oeuvres, RPK’s thoughts and his rabid following are the bottom feeders chomping on each other’s contentious existence.

RPK is the expectorant of such atrocious chinwag that you’d think that he was hammering away one political thriller after another on his laptop on the same wavelength as Frederick Forsyth or Robert Ludlum, only that he deludes himself into thinking that his manuscripts are non-fiction.

In his apotheosis, RPK launched fantasist allegations against politicians, lawyers and academicians. He even goaded the Special Branch to detain him.

For now, RPK has degenerated into a common fugitive, on the lam since he bolted months back from appearing in a criminal case that was about to try him for defaming the prime minister’s wife and two others for being involved in the murder of a Mongolian femme fatale.

But bolting from facing the rap has been a typical RPK method of operation. He had previously bolted from confronting a slew of libel suits stemming from his vexing stories. He seemed to view contemptuously all these affronts as legal claptrap.

RPK’s nonchalant snub against these suits allowed the plaintiffs to win huge by default, including RM2 million in damages awarded to a university don whom RPK venomously thrashed. At one time, he vulgarly bragged that he was worth RM100 million in damages, cheerful in the thought that he didn’t give a hoot about paying a single sen to the plaintiffs. 

But the disturbing truth is that RPK was well prepared for these legal entanglements — there’s probably not a single asset — land, house, car, shares, bank accounts — in his name or it would have been confiscated by the courts.

So who does RPK think he is? And how on earth can he get away with it?

In the first place, RPK does not play by the rules as other journalists. Write something wrong or malicious, the weight of the law will make our survival untenable. 

But then, RPK is no journalist: he is what a blogger described as the “ultimate literary assassin” and he does so with the impunity of his contempt for the system and rules that we swear to uphold. 

If this was a football game, RPK would commit foul after foul, ultimately slapped with a red card. However, he would refuse to leave the field and insist on staying put on the farcical creed that his rights were impinged by the referee and he still possesses the locus standi to continue playing. 

But RPK didn’t get this far alone. His website is still running and his flight to illegal freedom (reports claim he and his wife are holed up in a swanky part of London) may have had help from well-heeled personalities who used him to fulfil a troubling agenda, people with so much surplus funds that wasting it on million-ringgit flashy sports cars on a whim is quite normal.

You can be astounded at the muckraking of corruption, deceit, stupidity and abuse that RPK exposes regularly but be queasy, too, about his amorality and twisted code of honour.

So how does a future victim of RPK’s vindictiveness get justice? At this rate and based on available legal tools and platforms, none appears workable, at least to cut the legs of his remorselessness and unrepentant smugness.

So what’s left? Courts of law have been tried and one is still trying hard, with the help of police who know his general whereabouts in London but cannot pinpoint his location.

But once caught, be sure that the RPK melodrama will hot up in the inevitable extradition hearings. RPK would almost certainly hire a Queen’s Counsel for his defence, and apt to use the “persecution” card, that the Malaysian government has been rankled to get him.

And that stunt would surmise the bold yet cowardly nature of Raja Petra — belligerent hit-and-run anarchist.