The curse of Dr Mahathir?
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It seems we are in the season for cursing and curses, wakakaka.
Recently PAS did the unusual in having a prayer session to curse UMNO. The cursing itself was not unusual as you can bet such curses would be a norm during the period running up to an election, be it for the state or party. It was only unusual because PAS announced the cursing session openly, wakakaka.
I wonder whether UMNO pollies bought some tangkals (azimat) from Pak Bomoh Awang Mohd Yahya to neutralize the PAS curses. wakakaka. Well after all, more than a few UMNO, PAS and PKR pollies (not Tian Chua or Sivarasa though, wakakaka) consult bomohs prior to any election on to their respective chances – see my posts Religious Devotion of Malaysian Politicians and Doctor is in – by appointment only!
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wakakaka |
Anyway, many were shocked by a prayer session being used, or as they believed, misused for cursing. But actually, cursing has been part of the Abrahamic religions for eons, with the most dramatic being good olde Moses laying down the evil word on the Pharaoh with the god-given curse of 10 plagues.
The 10 plagues (or god’s curses manifested) started with the mild, just the River Nile turning red with blood, but escalated in harshness with each succeeding plague until the most drastic and evil of all occurred with the 10th, when the god of the Hebrews murdered every innocent first-born in Egypt, human and animals (Exodus 11:4-6 – KJV):
And Moses said, Thus saith the Lord, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt:
And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts.
And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.
That was worse than the Chinese ‘harm kar ch’an’, a genocidal curse on the family line of one’s enemies – very barbaric and only uttered by low class Chinese [low class in character, mentality and behaviour, wakakaka].
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Of course if you leave it to the Judaists and Christians, they would tell you god punished those Egyptians because … yadda yadda yadda …
… but really I wonder, which creator god (supposedly loving, compassionate and forgiving) would do that to his own creations.
Answer: Of course only the god of the Hebrews. And it would be hardly surprising that such a Hebrew god would call his Hebrews (and thereafter, Israelites, Judeans, Jews) his ‘chosen people’, as we have come to learn from the OT bible, one incidentally written by, would you believe, the Judeans, wakakaka.
If you ask the Japanese, they would tell you they are god’s children, where their emperor is descended directly from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu and their islands created by the Japanese gods Izanagi and Izanami.
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Amaterasu |
Not to be outdone, an ambitious UMNO man with the moniker of Reezal Merican, undoubtedly eyeing some high positions with all its trappings (wakakaka), decided to make a name for himself by copycat-ing the Judean (Jewish) claim and declaring that Malays are mukhtarin, god’s ‘chosen ones’, and of course (the principal motive and objective) UMNO has been anointed by god as the equivalent of Moses, presumably to lead the Malays into some sort of UMNO-ish promised land.
Naturally he omitted mentioning that Moses led the Hebrews wandering around in the wilderness for 40 years, from 1972 to 2012 circa 1350 BCE.
Reezal Merican then openly pontificated “What is there of the Malays before Umno came along?”
What about them living in the glorious golden age of the Malacca Sultanate? What about them being citizens of the amazing Srivijaya Empire before they decided to be known specifically as Malays?
Never mind, obviously he wasn’t asking for answers as he intended his rhetorical question to be the answer as well, to wit, to remind the Malays of UMNO’s Mosaic role.
But Reezal Merican wasn’t the first ‘Malay’ (wakakaka) to claim the ‘chosen’ status for Malays. Harussani what’s-his-name, Perak’s chief mufti, beat him to it by declaring in 2011 that Malays are more special than Arabs in Islam, though he, perhaps merajuk-ishly and grudgingly wakakaka, admitted Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was an Arab.
In the preposterous claim to primary Islamic pedigree, Dr Syed Ali Tawfik Al-Attas, the director general of the Institute of Islamic Understanding, even preceded Harussani what’s-his-name by informing us in 2006, that:
“The Melayu is defined as first being a Muslim and because he’s a Muslim, he follows the customs and traditions of the Malays which are derived from Islam, followed by the language of the Malays which (also) derives from Islam.”
Huh? “… the customs and traditions of the Malays which are derived from Islam, followed by the language of the Malays which (also) derives from Islam …”?
But then in this, I suppose he’s supported by PAS in Kelantan which has prohibited the wayang kulit from showing episodes of Ramayana and Mahabharata because of their Hindu origins.
But hey, perhaps wayang kulit proponents could use Dr Syed Ali Tawfik Al-Attas’ argument that the customs and traditions of the Malays including the wayang kulit and makyong have been derived from Islam and have nothing to do with any other religions.
And just to be on the safe side, the bersanding ceremony should be reviewed to cull off any inherited Hindu cultural elements, while the Malay lexicon must be purged of words such as raja, agama, negara & bangsa, all of which have been inherited from Sanskrit, wakakaka.
Thus, not withstanding Reezal Merican’s oratorical antics, and the Hebrews and Japanese myths, it’s a matter of who wrote the book (or uttered same at a political party’s general assembly, wakakaka) for a race to become god’s ‘chosen’ ones.
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All the above UMNO and UMNO-affiliates’ silliness have risen to prominence only in the last 30 years – more of their cause later.
Back to curses – the one in the Bible I particularly admire for its scary threat is in Deuteronomy 28:22 which warns:
The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.
Gasp … but Deuteronomy 28:30 is quite frightening too in stating: Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: … etc etc …
Wow, the curse of the Hebrew god actually promoted husbands being cuckold-ed and wives committing adultery? No wonder it set those Hebrew men on their murderous rampage in Canaan.
But okay, those biblical curses by god were about 4000 years ago. Today no church or priests/monks would do that … aha … except for those clerics in PAS, perhaps indicating their mentality still resemble the original mould (template) designed during those ancient times, wakakaka.
But let’s forget about PAS and its perennial perpetual problematic obsession with sex and matters sexual such as Shimshon (Samson) and Delilah in a Kota Baru salon, and Dawid and Yehonathan (David and Jonathan, son of King Saul) allegedly cavorting at the KB airport a la 1 Samuel 18:1-4 (KJV):
And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. … Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.
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David & Jonathan |
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David to Jonathan |
A couple of days ago I posted The Curse of Marina Lee Abdullah? Today I though I would write along the same line but with Dr Mahathir as my new ‘Moses’ and his curse, that is the curse of (or by) Dr Mahathir, not that bloke who was confused as to whether he was Egyptian or Hebrew.
I have to confess that, while I had previously penned a bit here and there about Dr M’s ‘curse’ before, and planned to do an improved post, it has been RPK who inspired me to get on with this task by a few paragraphs in his post The journey in life is never a straight line (PART 16).
RPK’s post talks about the Great UMNO Split in 1987 (about 8 months after the nation’s 1986 general election), an irreparable schism brought about by the acrimonious tussle for power between Dr Mahathir and Tengku Razaleigh (Ku Li) which was brought to a finale in UMNO’s 1987 party election. The lines which caught my eyes are:
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Ku Li |
… the mother of all battles looming over the horizon — the contest between Team A and Team B.
And did it prove to be the mother of all battles! Never before had so much money been spent on a party election. Never before had threats as well as blackmail been used to the extreme to make people do the bidding of those who aspired for power. Never before had Umno been brought to the brink of destruction and which it never really recovered from ever since.
The 1987 party contest changed Umno for good and introduced a new culture into Umno that transferred the party from the hands of the nationalists into the hands of the capitalists.
Basically, Umno was transformed from a party of intellectuals and educators into a party of business taukays. Umno became what MCA always was — a money party. Umno sent shivers down MCA’s spine because Umno became more money-driven than even MCA itself.
The new Umno culture became: money talks, bullshit walks. And it has remained that way ever since.
Umno would never be brought back to what it was when it was first formed in 1946. Umno became ‘Umno baru’ in 1987 even before Umno Baru was legally and officially registered in 1988. And this is what many did not grasp at that time …
Leaving aside RPK’s contention in his The journey in life is never a straight line (PART 17) that it had been Anwar Ibrahim who, through his bullying tactics in UMNO intra-party politics, denied us of Tengku Razaleigh as Malaysia’s political head in 1987. Tengku has often been touted as the best PM we never had.
Instead, Anwar endowed the nation with Dr Mahathir’s 22-year premiership, which RPK surmised as a fitting padan muka for poor Mr Manmanlai, wakakaka.
