We are Malaysian too
Whether they like it or not, whether they accept it or not, we are not “pendatangs” but full and proud citizens like anyone else and we don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore.
Dennis Ignatius, Free Malaysia Today
So, a newly-formed coalition of Malay-Muslim NGOs, Barisan Bertindak Melayu-Islam (Bertindak) wants to strip some 1.75 million non-Malays of their citizenship claiming that they had failed to take the oath of citizenship.
In other countries, if it was really necessary to correct such an oversight, a simple ceremony would have been held to remedy the situation instead of demanding that those affected be stripped of their citizenship.
But this is a country where racism and religious intolerance has run amok, where morally and intellectually bankrupt racist and extremist groups masquerade as patriots and righteous men and get away with it.
It’s easy to dismiss them as part of the lunatic fringe, but, sadly, they are the cheer-leaders of a deeper malaise that stains our nation’s honour – the acceptance, adulation even, of racism and discrimination as an organising principle.
So omnipotent is the issue politically that even our national leaders indulge such intolerance and bigotry by refusing to publicly condemn or confront it. Their silence only empowers, encourages and legitimises this evil that gnaws at the very soul of our nation.
Consumed by prejudice
Such is the depth of racism and intolerance that 60 years after independence, and more than 100 years after the last significant wave of migrants came to Malaysia from China and India, there are still groups that are offended by their presence, unwilling to accept the ethnic, religious and cultural diversity that has defined our nation from its genesis.
And so we have this constant griping against minorities, these incessant moves to challenge their right to exist, to curtail their God-given and constitutionally-protected rights, this steady stream of provocation, invective and scurrilous allegations.
They think nothing of welcoming newer migrants from Indonesia, the Middle East, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh by the thousands, make them “sons of the soil” and even vote them into high office but cannot find it in their heart to accept the dwindling Malaysian-born minorities in their midst. They wholeheartedly defend the granting of PR status to foreign extremists but harden their hearts to those who were born here and have lived here for as long as many of them have.
