I thank all for their views as to what I should do after my retirement from frontline DAP leadership, including the PAS President, Hadi Awang.
I may be anti-Hadi unless he changes his ways but to call me anti-Islam and promoting Islamophobia is like calling Saudi Arabia anti-Islam and promoting Islamophobia for banning Hadi and describing him as akin to a terrorist.
I still remember Hadi slamming Saudi Arabia five years ago as among the Gulf states like Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain, for believing more in Zionists than in Allah and Islam when the quartet of Gulf States added the IUMS, the International Islamic Council, to its terror list.
I do not regard as Hadi as a terrorist but he seems to suffer from intellectual inadequacies if he regarded my suggestion that PAS should join the Anwar Unity Government as not a personal one, but an official invitation from the DAP or Anwar Unity Government.
His silence to the three proposals I put to him shows that he is not prepared to be a responsible, honest and respected Islamic leader, the conditions I had laid down for PAS to join the Anwar unity government.
I note Hadi’s attack yesterday accusing the DAP as a purveyor of secularism through the “Malaysian Malaysia” concept, but I merely want to point out that the first and the third Prime Ministers of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Hussein Onn, had stressed that Malaysia should not be turned into an Islamic State.
I do not want to be a person who make wild and preposterous allegations, and when challenged was unable to present an iota of evidence to substantiate the allegations, or self-invite to join a government.
In a Facebook post yesterday, Hadi said that non-Muslims’ wellbeing will be threatened if they “cross the line” in their behaviour towards Muslims in Malaysia.
He said that DAP has been nothing but a nuisance to a country ever since the party was founded and has “gone too far”.
I believe that no race or religion is under threat, not Islam or any other of the great religions of the world which have found a home in Malaysia.
But there are extremists who want the people to believe that a race or a religion is under threat by other races and religions, and this is why they are opposed to the objective to make Malaysia a role model to the world of inter-ethnic, inter-religious, inter-cultural and inter-civilisation dialogue, understanding, tolerance or harmony.
For Malaysia to be a role model for the world of inter-ethnic, inter-religious, inter-cultural and inter-civilisation dialogue, understanding, tolerance and harmony, there must unity and moderation among Malaysians, regardless of race, religion or region.
This is why it is important for a survival, justice and prosperity of the nation that there should be a reset and a return to the original nation-building principles of a plural Malaysia which the nation’s founding fathers have written into the Constitution and Rukun Negara – constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, separation of powers, rule of law, Islam as the official religion and freedom of religion for all faiths, good governance, public integrity, meritocracy, respect for human rights and national unity from our multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-religious and multi-cultural diversity.
In the campaign for a reset and return to the original nation-building principles for a plural Malaysia (included in the ranks were the first three Prime Ministers of Malaysia who were UMNO Presidents) we must not allow words to lose all meaning, where extremism is regarded as “moderate”, and being “moderate” becomes “extremism”.
Malaysia is now faced with a choice of destiny – whether Malaysians regardless of race, religion or region unite as Malaysians while retaining their separate ethnic and religious identities to become a first-rate world-class nation, or we continue with our national decline to end up as a divided, failed, rogue and kleptocratic state in the next few decades.
This is why Malaysia needs Anwar Ibrahim as the 10th Prime Minister, not only for the next five years but for the next 10 years.