THE CICAK.com

NewsWatch: Race has nothing to do with it? Dear Rehman Rashid, you don’t speak for me

theCICAK NewsWatch is a fortnightly critique of news articles and opinion-editorials published in local newspapers. NewsWatch writers will highlight “holes” and flaws in articles, in hopes to promote fairness, objectivity and transparency in Malaysian news media.

If there is a news article that you think deserves our attention, please send it to write4thecicak@gmail.com. Be sure to include “NewsWatch” in your subject line. theCICAK team is looking for both good and badly written articles.

By TIMOTHY TEOH

The New Straits Times reminded me recently on why it is best used for fish wrapping.

While the National Union of Journalists Malaysia recommends that bloggers be recognized as alternative media disseminating information, while the latest concern in Malaysian cyberspace is press freedom in our country being rated lower than Cambodia, Philippines and East Timor, and while Barisan Nasional and Parti Keadilan Rakyat both analyze the Ijok outcome, NST instead decides to run a commentary by Rehman Rashid.

Many of you may remember him as the writer of “A Malaysian Journey,” a local classic first published more than a decade ago.

Or as the NST columnist who shot to notoriety when he said, “Everyone has an opinion and a rectum, and not that many seem capable of telling one from the other.” Read it on Susan Loone’s site.

Rehman then later responded to harsh criticism saying he couldn’t help that his English was good and that those who accused him of being hoity toity were at fault.

Do you feel riled up? Wait, he’s done it again. This time with an article titled, “The Great Unspoken National Contract.”

This is the sub headline for his article:
“So is it true that the Chinese electorate in the past two by-elections showed they were unhappy with the government? Well, take a number and get in line.”

He claims that race has “nothing to do with it.”

Rehman goes on to tell us that, “if it is true that the Chinese remain upset with, for instance, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein’s infamous keris-waving at the last UMNO general assembly, surely it cannot be for anything worse than a breach of protocol. It was an act perceived as not so much belligerent or threatening as ill-mannered.”

Ill-mannered! Right. Thanks for telling me what I think about it. Next time Hishammuddin brandishes a keris and tells us not to question bumiputra rights, we should all just be shaking our heads saying, “Tsk, tsk, so impolite.”

After all, there’s nothing racial about it, right?

To Rehman, everyone is only on a quest to cari makan.

He says, “Most of us would be happy enough with survival, the basic criteria of which seem to be getting what we want and keeping what we have. The hard-headed pragmatism that has seen us through 50 years of theoretically impossible nationhood has matured (albeit in the sense of cheese, a form of decomposition) into a thick mucilage of cynicism and apathy.”

He ends his article by telling us that our fight against racial and ethnic discrimination is futile, and that we’re only perpetuating the issue:

“It works, more or less. A government is returned, salient messages nailed to its shirt-tails. Things get done, somehow, someday. Everyone has their say, somehow, some way. Food is found, the world turns round, and everyone lives to fight another day.”

“It’s what you call the Malaysian Way,” Rehman says.

It’s one thing to have “journalists” who write fawning opinion-editorials for the government. At least you know what they stand for.

But this is just plain sad. The phrase “apathetic journalist” is an oxymoron.

A commentary like this, however, wouldn’t be out of place on some online blog. But publishing it in a daily newspaper is just needless self-indulgence for a staff writer who should retire.

–
TIMOTHY TEOH is a contributing writer for theCICAK.

A fervent freethinker, Tim believes that “sensitive” issues are the very ones we need to think out. He is a soon-to-be IT graduate of MMU and hails from Penang. Visit his site.