(A different perspective) Freedom According to God, Jailani, Andrew Khoo November 17, 2013 by shuzheng Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. — Laozi A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. — Laozi *** People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. — Soren Kierkegaard Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us… Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most undoubted meaning is for rulers nothing else but a means of realizing their ambitions and venal ends; for the governed it is a renouncing of human dignity, intelligence, and conscience, and a slavish submission to the rulers. … Patriotism is slavery. — Lev Tolstoy Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. — Lev Tolstoy *** On subject matters – governance, nature and rights – the top part of the above quotations are the same as those below. Where they differ is how far apart they are in thinking through these matters: Laozi attempts reconciliation, that people and rulers, for example, are not mutually exclusive. The natural world, plants and animals, the heavens above and the earth below, are mutually inclusive, one dependent on the other. However, western civilization sees those characteristics as adversarial and one source of origin for such thinking is the bible: Man shall have dominion over the world, it says; Eve poisoned the mind of Adam over an apple, giving rise to the male versus female dichotomy. The modern Malaysian mind – in particular among the Shah Alam Malays and Damansara Anglophiles – is largely Western, although persons like Haris Ibrahim and Andrew Khoo, the latter the Bar Council representative on human rights, talk of those rights as if they are universal, that is, Africans and Arabs subscribe to them as well. Like in Malaysia, there are also Anglophiles among the political elite of Africa and especially among the Arabs who share with the West and Christians the same biblical adversarial notions of human nature. Flowing from its most basic, fundamental premise – All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights; Article 1, UDHR – are all the human rights arguments and all their tenets. Today’s human rights notions have biblical origins. In the first drafts of the UDHR, Article 1 read, “All human beings are created (as opposed to be born)…” Here’s Genesis 1:27, “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.” This line is trash, of course: what is it to be created in God’s image? What image is that? It could have been a lie as well: man had created God instead, making God in his image, with man’s attendant, dual qualities, compassionate and violent, forgiving and vindictive, patient and bad-tempered. Andrew Khoo was therefore disingenuous to answer Malaysian Muslim groups that had accused the human rights regime as a Western agenda. The regime, according to Khoo, may have Muslim endorsement, but that’s that: Muslim agreement does not negate its Christian origin as bible-inspired. What Khoo probably means to say is that human rights tend to have universal appeal precisely because of its religious origin, thereby cutting across ethnic and national classes. Khoo’s answer was plainly erroneous, but Jailani Harun would respond to him like mommy’s boy throwing tantrums: “You make me laugh, and sick too,” wrote Jailani, in characteristic Petra Kamarudin childish nonsense and journalese illogic. And the reason for this true-to-type is Malaysian Tinsel racial bigotry, reporters and many DAP, Umno politicians top the list. While Khoo was appealing to human rights supposed universality, Jailani would turn the argument into a domestic racial taunt, a sort of comeuppance. “Your agenda,” he says to Khoo, “is actually clear. Its (sic) about Islam and the non-Muslims in Malaysia. The allegation about Malaysian non-Muslims are under oppression and do not have the total rights to practice their religion, is the motive behind all these craps!“ If Khoo is a piece of crap, Jailani would try to show he isn’t a brat, sick like Khoo, but is actually sane and empirically clever. Here’s how he tried, so he would join PAS and the DAP in importing a Middle-Eastern, Jew-Muslim-Christian conflict into the country, dragging into the boiling conundrum Buddhists and Hindus as well.: Selangor mempunyai penduduk berjumlah 4.8 juta. Daripada jumlah itu orang Melayu mewakili 2.5 juta dengan kapasiti 259 masjid dan 939 surau. orang Cina Buddha berjumlah 1.3 juta mempunyai 1,015 tokong, orang India berjumlah 647,000 dengan 810 kuil berdaftar (bilangan ini belum dicampurkan dengan tokong dan kuil yang tidak berdaftar). Manakala, bilangan gereja Kristian? jumlah 50,000 penganut Kristian (kajian 2009). The veracity of the statistics is doubtful precisely because the un-cited source is a pretense; made up. They are also especially wrong: Selangor’s population counted during the 2010 population census is 5.4 million (59% Bumi, 28% Chinese, 13% Indian) which compares with Jailani’s 4.8 million but 4.4 mn for all three main ethnic groups he mentioned. (So, where are the rest of 400,000? Or 600,000?) Selangor is also convenient for use by Jailani because if he had adopted Sabah or Sarawak as a statistical benchmark to measure freedom of religion, he could then say there are disproportionately far, far more churches then mosques and suraus for East Malaysia’s 5.5 million, more than half being illegal immigrants from the Philippines’ Muslim south. Which is to say that, in his response to Khoo, Jailani had intended to be deceitful and duplicitous like so many Malay and Anglophile bloggers are. Malaysia’s state of affairs on religious freedom is nothing to shout about: Malays such as Jailani can’t choose; young children of parents converted to Islam also can’t choose; its been chosen for them so that this record makes Malaysia atypically worse than or equal to, say, the atheist countries during the communist heydays. In defending Lina Joy’s right to convert to Christianity, Malik Imtiaz received death threats. Yet nothing in Jailani’s dishonest use of fictitious data and in misappropriating Khoo’s answer is the gist in Malaysia’s response to the human rights agenda. The list of human rights is like a Christian shopping list, but this is not for the government to grant. What the government gives, it can also take away so that at risk is that people become beholden to the state. It is all Hobbesian – and very Melayu, the latter, like Jailani, believing that human freedom can be exchanged for a secured place under a boiling Malaysian sun. Chinese and Indians owe the Malays nothing, and vice versa. It is not for governments, Malay or Chinese or Indian, to say what is to be traded, how, when and among whom. Should that happen, it is neo-colonial slavery. In any case, the Chinese (but not Anglophiles and Christians) don’t accept the abstract premise that human beings are born free and equal in rights. Freedom is illusory. We are born into circumstances which in themselves are restrictive, some more than others. Dignity is not a thing handed-down whether by a government or by a school yard bully (think Helen Ang) or by a neighbouring thug (Apanama). It is taught and has to be cultivated which for many is unaccomplished even in death. There are no saints to which god’s image is imprinted, but only humans with all their attendant goodness and flaws. Humans can be good without especially God; he might even better God’s image if he had half the chance the bible says he doesn’t have. Hell is other people (Sartre) only because they, Malay-Muslims (Jailani Harun) and Christians (Andrew Khoo), believe there is no other pathway to heaven other than their gods.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 09:47:30 +0000
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