Rafizi Ramli: Pakatan must face ‘Monster’
KTemoc Konsiders
UMNO’s greatest political achievement since its election shock in March 2008 has been the favourable wake churned up by the current Allah word controversy.
Much earlier, leading up to the May 2013 election, it fumbled left and right as it sought to assure Peter (Butrus in Arabic or Petrus in Indonesian) in the Heartland and Paul (Bulus in Arabic or Paulus in Indonesian) in the East.
Yes, while it was not quite robbing Petrus* to pay Paulus* or vice versa, Najib was doing a frantic juggling act so as not to upset his Heartland as well as ‘Fixed Deposits’.
* I am using the Indonesian versions since the Catholic Church has shown its ‘commitment’ to an Indonesian word which it (in the person of Fr Lawrence Andrew) claims as a local or Malay word, wakakaka.
In my post Allah, Elohim or Yahweh? Fr Andrew stated “The new Malay bible weakens the argument for using the word Allah because some groups are trying to substitute God with a foreign name, whereas Allah is the Malay word for God and has been the accepted translation for centuries^.” The alleged word was ‘Elohim’.
Do you get that, where Fr Andrew said ‘Elohim’ was a foreign word (he’s right ‘coz it’s Hebrew) but that ‘Allah’ is a Malay word? Malay word???
^ And didn’t the Catholic Church use Latin in its Mass for centuries too? Didn’t Catholics use to eat only non-meat dishes on Fridays for centuries too? What language is being used in Catholic Mass today? What may Catholics eat on Fridays today?
But no more, UMNO is no longer fumbling or juggling, no, not since Fr Lawrence Andrew had defied HRH Sultan of Selangor, if not legally then a la in-your-face lèse majesté, by pronouncing that the churches in Selangor will use Allah to refer to the Christian god in its Malay sessions in direct open defiance to HRH’s fatwa.
What a delightful boon to a struggling fumbling juggling UMNO and a struggling fumbling juggling Najib. In one delightful fell swoop Najib achieves the following:
- divert Heartland’s attention away from the rising costs of living, issues of GST and the dreadful TPPA, etc
- rallied the Heartland back to its political fold
- smite Pakatan asunder, rendering PAS and PKR to be at odds with DAP, ulamas to split with Erdogens in PAS, Muslims and non-Muslims in PKR and DAP to not see eye to eye on issue, etc – I mentioned this in my post The cock-a-doodle-doo story.
… without doing anything, in fact by actually doing nothing …
… thanks to one man ….. Fr Lawrence Andrew.
No one in the Heartland gives a f**k about the legal, etymological, historical and logical arguments or international opinions. All they see, hear and learn (bullshit or otherwise) have been that Christians are pushing arrogantly into Muslim territories and showing much disrespect to HRH Selangor.
While sweetie Marina Mahathir stuck her lovely neck out for the Catholic Church as she would for the downtrodden, the underdogs and the marginalized, and Zaid Ibrahim spoke out loud for commonsense and the the rights to worship without fear or favour, and Waythamoorthy (ooops sorry lah, wakakaka) … the Pakatan Muslims have been caught uncomfortably between the Scylla of the Christians and non-Muslim minorities and the Charybdis of the Heartland, as I mentioned in my post The cock-a-doodle-doo story.
Things are heating up real quick and nasty and as I warned in my post The elephant in the room that the humongous pachyderm sitting on many non-Muslims’ heads, one they either have refused to or couldn’t see, would be the probable threat to the security of this country brought about by the ‘perception of the Malays’ (true or otherwise) of Christian proselytizing of the followers of Islam.
As I wrote, this in fact is the bloody elephant in the Peninsula Malaysia (Malaya) room.
