What the hell is the third word?
The Third Force
That’s what some of my critics have been asking me repeatedly. And it’s not the only issue they have with me.
In the thick of a bruising media-fuelled spat between Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad and Dato’ Seri Najib Tun Razak, I got my fair share of criticism from them, delivered in subtext and all manner of expression. One defining expression of doubt came in the form of a question that was put before me by an associate – “Why the hell are you defending the Prime Minister?”
Such expressions sharpened into convictions as the war of perception grew roots that crawled into social media pages that were UMNO-based. The administrator of one such page – Biro Penerangan Pemuda UMNO (Biro) – had once requested me to be its editor, giving me a free hand to run the page the way I deemed fit. In terms of reciprocity, I brought the administrator of Biro, who seemed quite the staunch Mahathirist, into a page that I had created quite a while back – Towards GE15.
Some months after I began whacking Mahathir publicly, the Biro’s administrator removed me from his page while he continued to publicly espouse some key positions I thought were glaringly anti-Najib. Some weeks ago, he poured scorn over an article that was posted in Towards GE15, in which Raja Petra Kamarudin (RPK) wrote against corrupt practices in the MACC. This prompted the page admin – me and my Malay partner – to relieve the Biro’s administrator from his role as editor of the page altogether.
Today, I find the Biro administrator singing heaps of praise for Najib, almost as if it dawned upon him in a dream what both RPK and me have been writing about since the cows came home – that not only had Najib not committed a crime by transferring US 1 billion or so into his personal account, he did not owe an explanation to the public.
And that is how it has been. Mahathirists from UMNO and MCA literally sobered into reality in a dream on the 10th of December 2016, when it became apparent that the only persons who would be doing any amount of moving in UMNO would be Mahathir, his son, and Muhyiddin – out from the party.
But some of my onetime associates and affiliates remain critical of me to this day. I often get the impression that their support for the Prime Minister is largely show and tell and less of a mainstay. In other words, they are pretending to be with Najib, and may well be working from within the shadows against him – I can’t be certain.
So we have two issues here – the spat between Najib and Mahathir, and the brunt I bore defending the Prime Minister. Let us first sum up the spat and see how I ended up in the picture.
Sparkled by foreign media reports that forayed into the Malaysian conscience, the Prime Minister was unfairly accused of conduct that allegedly transgressed beyond the bounds of moral and criminal law. It was my mission – as it was Malaysia Today’s – to defend the Prime Minister, seeing that slander had piled against him on the basis of editorials that were subversive against him and the government of Malaysia.
Now that you understand my role in the spat, let us get on with the rest of this article.
It goes without saying, that I have informants who collectively constitute an intelligence pool of writers, politicians and non-politicians, most of who aren’t in the business of fame or celebrity. Those I liaise with have delivered insider information – non-classified – from time to time, helping me put two and two into proper perspective and ensure that it registers a four.
Notwithstanding the intelligence, I’ve been criticised heavily in recent times by persons from UMNO other than those who were once my associates or affiliates. But I might add – being criticised is never a thing to lose sleep over. In fact, getting rapped over an editorial piece simply helps embolden the writer to furnish better structured and researched articles, perhaps even Pulitzer-ranking pieces.
So you can understand why this isn’t a payback piece. As a matter of fact, this article was written to scale my journalistic principles into proper perspective, with the hope that it reaches out to my critics who have since marked my name with an asterisk. According to them, The Third Force may be a threat.
You see, there are hounds from within UMNO and MCA who aren’t too happy about the fact that I used to be their kopitiam partner but now call myself The Third Force. These people – literal nobodies within the parties they represent – are working very hard to undermine my credibility by spreading a word or two on how I may be harbouring a secret agenda.
The general contention seems to be that The Third Force is a “guy who may bite you back the same way he supported you, so beware.” According to them, “we don’t really know this guy or his agenda or why he’s so upbeat about defending the Prime Minister.”
Some have even gone so far as to accuse The Third Force of being “Najib’s blue-eyed boy” or “that macai who’s been given enough moolah by the Prime Minister to paint him up as a God.” Rest assured, I have never met Najib in person, much less spoken to him. But to Najib, I have this to say – “Beware, Dato’ Seri, for these persons are villains who don’t twirl moustaches, and are therefore difficult to spot. They clothe themselves in good deed and are well camouflaged.”
But it is just as well that there are people who have opined in my favour. According to a fan base I know of, The Third Force has since “introduced a brand of journalism that must be respected for what it is.” To those guys – some who are from the press – I have nothing but my deepest gratitude and utmost respect.
To those who have been beating me up, let me say this – never bring a spoon to a sword-fight. As I wrote this, I evoked a mental image in which you guys were sitting right in front of me as I sat expressing myself calmly. Perhaps, this how I should write from time to time.
Anyway, let’s get on with some of the misconceptions:
Misconception # 1: I am pretending to support the Prime Minister
Get this in your head – I am able to tolerate the Prime Minister and his politics, but lean more towards Tuan Guru Dato’ Seri Haji Hadi Abdul Awang. But don’t get me wrong. Tolerating Najib isn’t tantamount to disliking him. In a queer sense, tolerance can be a statement of support, but just of a different kind.
The word support – on the text alone – refers to a form of external influence that compliments the object or subject matter being discussed. Beyond that, it is as necessary as it is fair that we analyse the context within which the word is used to better understand where a given author is coming from.
For instance, “The homeless shelter is supported by donations,” stands to mean that there is a homeless shelter that is being provided for or maintained by means of donations. It would be erroneous to assume that I hate the shelter simply because I chose not to offer its management a donation. Perhaps, I’m just a poor guy who barely has enough to make ends meet, but would surely donate money or food to the shelter if I had funds in excess of what was required for me to survive.
Despite not being able to donate money or food to the shelter, I may yet like the shelter and ‘support’ its activities from a moral standpoint. That is to say, I may like what the shelter does, to a point that I would defend its existence in any way other than that which requires me to donate money or food. Herein, we have a contextual form of ‘support’ – moral support, which is sometimes driven by a feeling of like or approval for an activity that is being conducted. There may be many other reasons why one would choose to morally support the shelter, but we shan’t go into those.
So while I can’t support the shelter financially – a form of provision – I may support it morally, which is in fact, another form of provision. While one form of provision has to do with a feeling of like or dislike, the other doesn’t. Let’s stretch this point further.
Support can also mean to tolerate – as in the case of a company that supports strife between two of its engineers. It simply means that the company can afford to accommodate or tolerate the strife. But in this case, the word support does not denote a liking or fondness, in that the company cannot be construed as liking or enjoying strife between its engineers. Sounds weird, but that’s just how it is.
And I can go on and on, but you get my drift – we have to be clear on the context within which a word is used, so that we may be succinct in our delivery and comprehension. In the same breath, don’t be too quick to judge me when I say that I am able to tolerate Najib but like Hadi better.
The dilemma here in Malaysia – as is the case with every other country whose political system is sectarian – is the customary requirement for those on a political mission to remain neutral or be aligned to a single political unit. Rest assured – I’m not neutral.
By virtue of this, it is customary that I declare my allegiance to the principal protagonist of a political sect – any sect – of my choice. And since I’m required to pick a leader I resonate with most, I pick Hadi. So in a sense, I support Hadi and yet, am able to tolerate Najib and his politics. I support one, and can tolerate the other. But read the fine-print on this, and you will see that I do, in fact, support them both – just in different ways.
Misconception # 2: I am being paid by UMNO
After reading the above, you’d be an idiot or a moron to think that Najib or UMNO funds me. So let’s just jump to the third misconception.
Misconception # 3: The Third Force claims to be an investigative journalist – but isn’t. He’s just out there to seek fame
The fact that I have declared myself to be a Hadi supporter proves that I’m not out to seek fame. To be honest, I couldn’t give a hoot about glitz or glamour – they mean nothing to me.
If I were out to seek fame, I’d surely have sworn heaven and earth that I supported Najib and UMNO, and that I have successfully defended Najib together with RPK. I would have added that Najib owes me a pat on my back and that I’m a hero.
But truth be told, it was all RPK from the beginning and very little of me – RPK more or less walloped Mahathir straight back to his gossip grapevine, while I wrote a piece or two, here and there.
But our mission was one – to serve justice to the politically oppressed. In the case of Mahathir and Najib, the former was the oppressor, while the latter was the oppressed. All Malaysia Today did was to boldly go where no journalist or writer had gone before – to the dumps where Mahathir had propped a ladder, then straight up its rungs from where we pooped on him.
Now, on to the investigative journalism bit:
The kind of investigative journalism that I am involved in relies heavily on some form of intelligence information, from which I seek the truth and expose oddball contrivances that require urgent attention. Back in 2015, we had a group of legacy has-beens and some hero-wannabes who conspired to wage a war of perception against the Prime Minister, the economy and the currency.
Exposing such contrivances may not necessarily constitute as an end product to investigative journalism, but certainly construes as one. Having said that, bear in mind– there isn’t always hard proof that something had occurred the way an investigative journalist says it did – and that’s a fact.
When the US launched a war against Iraq on suspicion that there were weapons of mass destruction being stockpiled at certain locations, it did so based on intelligence information that was available. As the story goes, President Bush had intelligence analyses available to him from all elements of the government, including the CIA and the FBI.
The national Security Council members in the US had that information as well. It was, according to former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, all shared and supplied, and never certain – if it were a fact, it would never have been called intelligence.
That is to say, intelligence reports aren’t factual. If they were, we’d call them factual reports and not intelligence reports. But they are honest assessments – evaluation that made available to an investigator, based on information that has been sieved to the bottom and scrutinised. Quick decisions may be necessitated – prematurely at times – when a threat is clear and present. In such an event, the onus would be on the investigator to assess the gravity of a situation and decide quickly if the intelligence is sufficient to warrant a decision of any nature.
And that was my predicament back when “The RM 2 billion ‘donation’ Mahathir kept a secret from you” was published. Back then, the intelligence I had from my informant suggested that certain officers from the special branch were complicit with Mahathir to topple Najib by means that were undemocratic. This was later proven to be true – both the no. 1 and 2 from the Special Branch were subsequently removed and were said to have conspired to subvert the institution of premiership.
Given the gravity of the situation, it became necessary to expose to the public how a plot had been contrived by two Tuns – Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad and Tun Daim Zainuddin – at a roundtable in London, late in 2014, to dislodge the Prime Minister from office by cunning and forced cause.
Going back to the war in Iraq, and conspiracy theories aside – by the time the dust had settled on the President’s desk, it became apparent that no weapons of mass destruction existed. Yet, the President was duty-bound to address a threat his defence secretary had warned him would jeopardise security on American soil.
Be that as it may, President George W. Bush went on to become very unpopular immediately after the war on Iraq was declared over. He suffered a high-velocity nose-dive in approval ratings, attributed to a whisper that he had conspired with Rumsfeld to plunder Iraq of its black gold – oil.
Anyway, that is how it is with investigative journalists.
I have never sought popularity or fame. If anything, much of what I do puts my life at risk and is financially draining. But what I do, I do in the best interest of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong and the Prime Minister of Malaysia, based on an aggregate of intelligence information my team assembles and sieves to the bottom, simultaneously eliminating as many untruths as possible.
But sometimes, journalists tend to fall into an abyss of untruths, where you’d find persons like Dato’ Nik (a.k.a. Bul) sitting there, waiting to tell you how Najib was guilty of some of the crimes he was accused of. At least, that’s what he personally related to me some months back, as we sat discussing Malaysian politics together with Aspan Alias and two other persons I prefer not to name. According to Bul, who admitted that Tengku Tan Sri Razaleigh Hamzah was his boss – RPK was quite the opportunist, who would write anything for money.
But today, we find the Tengku denying claims that Bul was his aide. So who is bul-shitting here? Bul, or the Tengku? Perhaps – just perhaps – both these clowns have gotten so old, that they don’t even remember how they had once covered each-other’s backs, or the fact that they were recently in Bangkok while RPK was there.
Maybe – just maybe – they were on a spy mission, but by the time they got to Bangkok, they forgot why they had gone there in the first place. Well, I’m convinced that they were in Bangkok – because I was there too, meeting up with RPK, who told me that he had seen two old farts that looked a lot like Bul and the Tengku.
Misconception #4: I don’t have the right to be the Third Force
Oh yes I do.
Like I said, The Third Force isn’t about fame. It’s a philosophy – one that is correct.
‘The third word of the force’ – a phrase I coined – is the word of the commoner. When a citizen feels misrepresented, he or she begins to display a new set of attitudes that translate into a force – The Third Force – that stands between political groups vying for control of the State. By virtue of this, anyone who feels misrepresented may contend for or against the state if he or she so wishes. And the word that he or she speaks would effectively be the third word of the force.
And a last bit – if I were seeking fame, I’d just sign off each article as Raggie Jessy – which is exactly who I am.
