Light At The End Of The Tunnel
27 August 2008 | 1,306 viewsMahathir says this is his blog:
36. There is a tendency among Malays to regard the discrimination in their favour [ie. the NEP] as a privilege, as a recognition of their superior status. I think this is wrong. The discrimination is in order to give them a kind of headstart so that they can catch up with other races. To me, it is shameful to have to be protected because we do not have the capacity to compete. We are not Red Indians to live on reserves. We should regard it as a temporary expedient to be done away with once we have achieved the capacity to compete on our own.
37. However, we must give time for ending the NEP and it should be done in stages. I hope that the time will not be too long. In the meantime, serious efforts by the Bumiputeras must be made to avail themselves of the opportunities. If this is obviously not being done, then, as with entrance into the universities, the discrimination must end.
Okay, dude. I give you that.
But I also say that you need not wait too long, for the time “we must give for ending the NEP” has just about been used up.
I say that the “serious efforts by the Bumiputeras to avail themselves of the opportunities” have, by and large, not been made, and any further effort is unlikely to result in any noteworthy improvement.
Since those efforts don’t seem to be happening, I refer you to what you say in Para. 34, “We cannot expect the non-Malays to patiently wait and give up their opportunities until the Malays decide to become serious … That would not be fair.”
I therefore invoke the “escape clause” as laid down in Para. 37 of your post, “If this is obviously not being done, then … the discrimination must end.”
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad says it must end.
I now ask you if there is any Malay leader who will lead us, and is strong enough to lead us, in ending the discrimination.
I see none from UMNO or PAS.
I see only one man, and he just got elected to Parliament on Tuesday.
Dear Tun, it is unfortunate that you do not want to be around if and when he becomes Prime Minister.
Anwar Ibrahim cannot be trusted and will betray us, you say?
If that were to be the case, then we — not KJ or UMNO or even you — will bury him. And we will bury him deep.
But Anwar Ibrahim is a risk worth taking.
For will it not be a glorious day, a joyous day, and truly a day to remember, when we Malays, with confidence and pride, once and for all consign our crutches to the history books, and stand strong and tall on our own God-given feet?
24 Responses to “Light At The End Of The Tunnel”
1 harry 27 August 2008 @ 2:31 pm
Anwar is the only HOPE for better Malaysia! There was obviously divine intervention and Rakyat prayers were answered. Thank God!
To the corrupt BN leaders, start packing! You can run but you can’t hide coz we gonna get you and take back what you have stolen from us.
2 daffodils 27 August 2008 @ 2:38 pm
Kudos for these comments.
“For will it not be a glorious day, a joyous day, and truly a day to remember, when we Malays, with confidence and pride, once and for all consign our crutches to the history books, and stand strong and tall on our own God-given feet?”
It will be a day when you can hold your head high and say, “I did it on my own”
Competitiveness will bring out the best in a person. So let everyone marshall all that they have; their talents, strength, discipline, energy and time to propel themselves forward without any special privileges.
3 anomie 27 August 2008 @ 3:25 pm
U must give shit to this Mamak – thought there are rumours that NOT all the trashes in CheDet are written by him!
The old man tried to twist a fact in Para 1. Affirmative action by its very nature must involve discrimination.
In para 2. he gave Para 1 some explanations. Fine.
Then in para 3,4 & 5 he tried to add some more weights, using sports as example.
All this time he ‘forget’ conveniently to mentioned that affirmative action SHOULD be inter-groupings, NOT intra-grouping as applied in bolihland.
The discrimination should be blind to the differences in groupings! All groups should share the same affirmative/discrimination irrespective of the skin colour.
Example; in golf handicap is given because of the skill of the players, NOT because he/she is black/white/brown.
Similarly in boxing, classification of the boxing match has to take into account the weight of the boxers in order for a fair fight. There is NO requirement for a light-weight Black boxer to fight a heavy-weight White boxer. This is NOT discrimination!
Likewise in horse-racing!
So where’s the take?
In his twilight year he still want to argue like dead chicken.
This Mamak didnt shine any light, instead he is building a fire.
4 aaa 27 August 2008 @ 3:27 pm
amen, aisehman.
5 kent 27 August 2008 @ 4:13 pm
aisehman,
Actually i see 2 lights at the end of the tunnel. One attributed to yesterday’s winner.
The other? should be accorded to the Progessive soul like you. Without any one of you, we will still be living under nazism.
The world is moving ahead. Komunis is no more. But UMNO/BN still lives in pre-komunis era and govt still using komunis law like ISA/sedition/printing act.
Last but not least, i dont think Tun even has a right to fart. He brought us this low. All hell broke loose in his era. The current admin is just continuing the “tradisi”.
Yeah, let’s get rid of all discriminatory law (not just gender ones lah Pak Lah), and this time we “juang” for real!
Merdeka!
6 Merdeka Child 27 August 2008 @ 4:32 pm
“We cannot expect the non-Malays to patiently wait and give up their opportunities until the Malays decide to become serious … ”
More than that, the discrimination has hardened the resolve of the non Malays to overcome the handicaps in areas where they have been discriminated against. Education for example. Deprived of equal opportunities in higher education, they have either scrimp and save to go overseas or join private institutions. They valued these hard earned higher qualifications so much so that most of them excel in them and use them to build successful lives and careers.
In formulating such discriminatory policies we forget we are dealing with human beings. They are not a statistic that we can sideline and ask to forgo their well being so that another group can catch up. Each and every person wants to better their station in life. Each and every parent want their child to have the best educational opportunities possible so that they can lead a better life than their parents. They are not a faceless number but a person with hopes, dreams, ambitions, and a desire to better themselves.
7 KakiAyam 27 August 2008 @ 4:38 pm
I look forward to the day for the removal of DEB, not solely because of the discrimination, but most importantly to be able to see our fellow Malay Malaysians standing proud on their own feet…
That will be a joyful day and we will sing praises to the Lord.
KaKiaYam
8 still there is hope 27 August 2008 @ 5:06 pm
I am now an old man…still working and past the retirement age. My wife and I have struggled through these years to put our 3 children through school, university and give them a simple start in life. We did not have the access to those ‘priviledges’ than Tun speaks about, but we managed, but just barely. In our minds we have resigned to the fact that this ‘discrimination’ will be perpetual and woven so deeply that to entertain any thought of it being removed would be futile. In our hearts now, twinges of hope…but we may not be around long enough to see it…but still there is hope. thank-you
9 msleepyhead 27 August 2008 @ 6:10 pm
AI ‘may’ lead but that does not mean the entire civil service manned mainly by Malays will allow that to happen.Cost of living is getting higher but salary is not, they have to find more ways to complement their civil servant income.
10 michael wong 27 August 2008 @ 6:15 pm
You said it well, friend.
11 Gan 27 August 2008 @ 6:36 pm
An awakening dream for all Malaysians and the start of a nightmare for BN !!
Thanks to all for making the PP victory a reality.
I agree with Kent – whilst there are many who still believe they deserve the crutches, I believe there are equally many like you, Haris, MIS, Din Merican & many who believes otherwise.
We will need to continue to strive to ensure the light at the end of the tunnel continues to illuminate Malaysia ever so brightly $ shadow BN to oblivion.
12 Crankshaft 27 August 2008 @ 8:00 pm
For will it not be a glorious day, a joyous day, and truly a day to remember, when we Malays, with confidence and pride, once and for all consign our crutches to the history books, and stand strong and tall on our own God-given feet?
Dude, when you start saying shit like that, I feel proud of you, man.
13 Godfather 27 August 2008 @ 8:53 pm
The mamak is up to his usual rantings again.
Aisehman, I pray that you are right, but the thieves in BN will never give up their right to steal in the name of the NEP. Stealing has become an impossible habit to break. The only way is to replace the federal government wholesale.
14 noywns 27 August 2008 @ 9:00 pm
That will indeed be a proud day when 26 million Malaysians can pull the naton forward in concerted effort, and not have a significant number insist on using crutches when the only way to improve your running legs is to..well…run.
I agree with anomie that Doc M is disingeneous in using the golf example – handicap to allow competition not fast and free favors that is, largely, taken up by UMNOputras, instead of giving fair play to all disadvantaged citizens.
Aisehman..we look eagerly forward to that proud day! May it come real soon!
15 Leithaisor 27 August 2008 @ 9:02 pm
Aisay, Aisehman…
You make a great deal of sense. A mountain more sense than “Apa nama…” Dr Mathatir.
Heck, I would even go as far as to say that Malaysia would have done a great deal better if you had become PM rather than the 22 years of Dr M.
Certainly, 100% surely, the Malays would have become a much more advanced and progressive race than the many years of NEP abuse, crony practices, and patronage politics ala UMNOputra have done. Jauh lebih bermaruah and di kagumi.
Heck, the Oxford trained SIL should have come to you for an intensive course too.
We would all have been so much better off, and I don’t mean in the sense of wallets fat with crony money.
16 hamzah 28 August 2008 @ 12:07 am
well said merdeka child, 100% sokong!
17 lucia 28 August 2008 @ 12:25 am
hate to say this but i don’t think the malays…well some of them (esp. umnoputera!) will ever want to consign their crutches to history. no no. never. to them the NEP is like a god given must have ‘gold’ to them as the ‘bumi putera’ of the bolehland.
if the non malays were just as much open their mouth to say to do away with the crutches, hell will break loose for them. example, when lim guan eng made a remark about NEP (he did not say to abolish it too but just review it), the umnoputera… all the top umno ministers, mind you, protest like mad.
it’s sad. non malays touch on doing away with NEP, they will flex their muscles of them being the ‘tuan’ of bolehland and deserve the NEP. and if malays touch on doing away with NEP, they will accuse the malays as being a traitor to their own race.
will it ever end?
18 Noob 28 August 2008 @ 8:15 am
CheDet is right. It’s shameful to need to be protected. But the question is, are all bumiputra protected? and benefitted from the NEP? From my humble point of view, the answer is a BIG NO!! I see a lot of my bumiputra friends, malays, they have to work hard to get where they are also! Just like non-bumi. The NEP only benefit the selected few!
19 walla 28 August 2008 @ 11:15 am
It’s rich of him to say all that now that he’s out of the post and the party. Why didn’t he say it when he was helming this country’s administration and corrupting every institution with the runaway excesses from loaded interpretation of that policy?
Headstart so that the beneficiaries of the NEP can have the capacity to compete? Was there ever one instance when Umno came out and told a malay who has benefited from it that he has been given a headstart and he has been deemed capable enough to compete so that the NEP gifts will stop tomorrow? Any?
The NEP was a quick-fix fast-start shove to placate the malays after they had been stoked to incendiary level by power-mongers who had executed a coup d’etat on Tunku. What it turned out to be was virtually carte blanche power to award favours, licenses, permits, commissions and all sorts of corrupt practices to those who would support the political givers and so maintain their power base. How were the poor malays at the bottom of the pyramid served?
They can talk about the creation of a middleclass for the malays. Are the singapore malays worse off than the malaysian malays where it really matters? What about the indonesian and thai malays? You want to compare down, or up? Isn’t comparing up what being competitive is all about in the first place? And as for the man, why didn’t he say anything during the cabinet meeting when one minister lamented at the need to pay a runious sum just for a piece of paper called an AP, looking at silky girl? Today because of the NEP, parts cost and fail, imports cost and impoverishes, and they are still trying to cook up a national car policy when the thai’s have already created a money-making detroit of southeast asia in a region where we are the ones having the biggest car market.
To rub salt, those who actually processed the data, and that included holdings, assets and funds of actual owners and their proxies, have attested in private that the NEP targets had already been reached long ago. Except that the wealth has somehow found its way into the hands of a few which has only resulted in national disunity, what more the difficulties faced by the malay AND the non-malay middleclasses today to try and survive, let alone compete.
The NEP created a mindset that is hard to shake off. Ask anyone if he is given a gift would he say no to continue receiving it when the corner of his eye espies others enthusiastically continuing to hold out their hands for theirs?
And the number of those who assume it is their right to be given those gifts will continue to grow just because their religion allows four wives, and that has nothing to do with supporting three poor single women. They argue that since the state guarantees gifts for life, the more the merrier. Look at the poor kid looking lost without the slightest clue of customer service standing listlessly at the petrol station.
Look again at the malays today. See how many kids they have who go around without direction and purpose. See how many middle-aged malays obese to an embarrassment. The NEP corrupted minds, erased interracial and interfaith goodwill, created pressure without solution, and propagated its own weaknesses until this country has become unrecognizable from the past. That has nothing to do with towers and cars. It has everything to do with ability. ‘Capability’, some had said.
The NEP cannot be sustained in today’s intensively competitive and porous world. A carpet trader wrote that the malays considered it their greatest achievement to be able to compete with other malays. That is self-pollinating delusion. What real standards have they set? Today if one is irrelevant to the open world, one is irrelevant, period. Go to Cyberjaya, and see who are doing the real work.
You have language, race, religion, culture, rights and politics all brewed into how the NEP is interpreted and applied. Small wonder it’s hell for everyone.
Especially for those others, the non-malay citizens, who have had to work twice as hard to make half as much just because some politicians want their shopping sprees in London every month.
The biggest crime that the NEP has done to the rakyat of this country is in education. We have lost too many of the finest minds and entrepreneurs of this nation from brain drain when it is brains that is the most important asset for a country of our profile. Every single fucked-up Umno politician and his ilk has tried to skirt around this issue with all sorts of doublespeak to hide laced misdeeds behind. The matter of places, courses and merit admission to the public universities has already been debated to death. No point talking about them. But since that’s what those monyets would like the most, consider what has recently happened in Uitm. Why not just make it 110 percent so that the 10 percent can be given to nonmalays without touching the 100 percent to malays if in the first and ever place they would want to apply? If the govt can blithely offer places to foreigners in order to raise the THES ranking of local uni’s despite the blatant rejection of more-than-qualified local non-malays, citizens at that, why not do something right for once beyond the racism of blinkered fascists?
It’s not just the NEP. The whole notion of ketuanan melayu and malay rights and the whatever of ‘forefathers’ is being used as a tool to whip up parochial emotions, divide the hearts of brothers, and split the citizens so as to continue the rule of the mighty who have displaced the mat sallehs as the tuans of tomorrow. A lot of nonmalays have forefathers born and died here too. They also paid most of the taxes and set the standard on how to uphold law and justice. What about them? What about the indian plantation worker whose great granddaughter today works at a tender age as a receptionist to whom she tries to type your particulars and you notice how frail and thin she is from undernourishment? Your eyes brim with tears for what we do to one another.
If someone is down, regardless of race, jump in and help. What has color got to do with bad luck? What has a formula got to do with anything? Did the problem come in a size apportioned as a formula in the first place?
The NEP is a hindrance against the goodwill that would have been nurtured by everyone to jump in and help simply because no one who suffers from it will support anything that is seen to be unjust. It may achieve an artificial feel-good in the beginning for the malays who have been given, but when it runs out as they enter the world of work, they will soon find out how important it is to have real teamwork between everyone. And because of things like this, the country will get a bad name and people who would have invested more here are investing more elsewhere.
A country should also have a ‘headstart in order to build capacity to compete’ with other countries, too.
Just wait. Today it’s NEP. Tomorrow it will be religion and theocracy. There’s no end, simply because some self-anointed fear has embedded itself that if it ends, all will be lost. All is ALREADY lost.
Just ask yourself a simple question. Those who say they will defend your NEP and ketuanan ‘rights’ – where did their money come from for all those bashes overseas, private highclass education for their children, flashy cars in garages of big mansions, stocks and shares and property and proxy licenses? Where did all this come from, canopied under the application of NEP for the malays?
Don’t cheat the nonmalays anymore. They form 49.7 percent of the population.
20 Best Quote in Malaysia: 08/27/08 « Best and Worst of Malaysia 28 August 2008 @ 11:17 am
[...] Filed under Quote ·Tagged Aisehman, Best quote On Anwar’s return to the Parliament, Aisehman has this to say For will it not be a glorious day, a joyous day, and truly a day to remember, when [...]
21 daniel 28 August 2008 @ 12:32 pm
Good shit, dude.
22 juslo 28 August 2008 @ 3:20 pm
u should write speeches for anwar, bcos i swear u could have written “i have a dream” (MLK), “Ich bin ein Berliner” (JKF), n – what the heck – even “What To The Slave Is The 4th Of July?” (Frederick Douglass) n the Gettysburg (Lincoln)!! (with a little bit of mark twain’s humour/sacarsm thrown in…)
may the sun descend upon our great land soon… very soon…
23 Bigjoe 29 August 2008 @ 9:45 am
Take the billions each year given to cronies of BN and put it into paying teachers, chosen meritocratically, more money and given more facilities in rural areas and the problem is solved. Period…
24 frankie 29 August 2008 @ 9:58 am
If I am a racist, I will wish that the NEP will never end because by then the Malays will never learn to stand on their own. Without the crutch, they going to be nowhere. But calling an end to the NEP will make the UMNO leaders jumping up and down brandishing keris to us the non malays for being kurang ajar and dare to question the malay rights. So what can we do, just keep quite and work our butts off to become even stronger and establishing even stronger network.
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