No offence meant?

The Star finally realised they had offended certain quarters (read: Muslim readers) with P. Gunasegaram's commentary piece “Persuasion, not compulsion” on the recent caning of three women for syariah offences.

Read their half-quarter (read: half-hearted) apology here.

And Dato' Rocky Bru says no need to file a police report..!

For context read my posting Kenapa Kita Patut Buat Laporan Polis.

By the way Dato', somebody already did. Read Mazidul's posting here: Persatuan Pengguna Islam Malaysia, PPIM telah membuat laporan polis di Ibu Pejabat Polis Daerah Sentul, Kuala Lumpur pada jam 2.20 petang tadi (23.02.10).

And another thing - don't bother searching for the stated piece “Persuasion, not compulsion” by P. Gunasegaram's on The Star's website 'cos they already removed it (read: Story file not found).

Zaini Hassan labelling the Kelantanese 'parochial'

Zaini Hassan does it again!

And this time with his shallow sociological analysis and generalized classification/description of the Kelantanese.

To me labelling the Kelantanese 'parochial' in every way is judgmental and unbecoming of a writer.

Do you know what the Kamus Dwibahasa DBP defines/translates parochial as?: pg 888 - parochial: ks tidak luas; picik; sempit (pandangan, fikiran dll): a parochial outlook - pandangan yang sempit.

click on pic to see a larger view

Pade-pade la tu Abe Zaini, nak puji-puji bodek termasuk melabel oghe Kelate denge mace-mace terma ye demo sendiri dok pahe! Dalam pada tu mu dok bodek-kipas oghe kelate tu, mu sempat pulok kutok-keji - ngato oghe Kelate 'parokial', yo ko oghe Kelate parokial - buke hak mu nak menilai! Mu dok payah suroh oghe kelate ikut apa hok mu ndak atau sokong sapa-sapa, oghe kelate buleh buat/pileh sendiri. Kalu ada oghe ye 'parokial' disini ialah mu denge juak-juak mu. Tiap-tiap hari guna surak kabor untuk kempeng benda ye samo jo! Tulih la idea baru agar oghe melayu buleh maju ke depe!

Come As You Are Video by Nirvana - MySpace Video

Come As You Are Video by Nirvana - MySpace Video

Kenapa Kita Patut Buat Laporan Polis

Saya keliru dengan kenyataan Dato' Ahiruddin Atan @ Rocky's Bru yang membawa tajuk "Kenapa mereka tidak patut buat laporan polis terhadap The Star" dalam entrinya hari ini:

"Why they should not lodge the police report against The Star"

"I hear that some folks want to make a Police Report over a Press article about this caning of the three women. I will not say which newspaper and who the people are. But my advise is don't take ownership of anything that is confusing and will only cause more confusion. Just leave it to the ‘confusionists'." - Syed Akbar Ali's The Case of Caning Women, 21 Feb 2010.

A police report is expected to be lodged against The Star and its managing editor P. Gunasegaran in Kuala Lumpur this morning (Monday 22 Feb 2010) re the article Persuasion, not compulsion which is seen as insulting the way of Islam [read What are you talking, Guna?].

Tulisan P. Gunasegaram, Persuasion, not compulsion dimuatkan dalam akhbar The Star hari ini.

Saya tidak faham apakah asas amaran si Rocky ini terhadap kita umat Islam agar bersabar atau apakah ini tempelan sarcastic beliau.

Bagaimanapun, kita patut terima nasihat beliau bahawa kita jangan terburu-buru dengan perkara yang hanya akan mencelarukan kita, umat Islam seluruhnya. Pada pendapat saya kalau ada pakar undang2 yang berpendapat kita patut bawa isu ini ke pengadilan, maka laporan polis sepatutnya dibuat.

Ini adalah kes penghinaan terhadap hukum syariah dan tidak sepatutnya kita umat Islam berdiam diri dalam soal ini. Bagaimanapun, sebagai rakyat yang patuh kepada lunas undang-undang negara kita tidak sepatutnya mengikut nafsu amarah dengan mengambil tindakan terburu-buru seperti menunjuk perasaan di jalanraya.

Biarkan saja mereka yang arif dalam hal ini untuk ambil tindakan. Dalam pada itu, mereka yang bijak dalam ilmu pemujukan (persuasive) harus main peranan untuk menerangkan kepada yang bukan Islam dan yang kurang arif dalam hal ini agar mereka lebih faham.

Mazidul Akmal Sidek nampaknya tersangat marah dalam hal ini. Entri beliau bertajuk P. Gunasegaram: Shut Up menceritakan betapa sensitifnya beliau dalam isu ini.

Of Denial and Blurred Vision

The topics below has been discussed ad nauseam. But I would like to revisit them.

Nonetheless, some people still couldn't get their blurred vision adjusted no matter how hard others want to help readjust it for them. I think they should try get expert advice on how to heal or regenerate their worn out brain cells, if all else fail.

They couldn't even tell between a form of judicial punishment (as in hukuman ta'zir) and a form of corporal punishment.

Read Ragunath Kesavan's letter to the editor (NST) here for context.

What if you tell them that there are sick people out there who even like to be caned as a form of sexual release, not deviation - BDSM, bondage, bare hand spanking, caning on the buttocks you name it! (I'm not good at these terminologies as I am no fan).

Okay, I am getting a bit strayed.

My question is, why are these people always ready to climb the bandwagon to go on their hunting ego trip, having a field day making issues out of these caning cases?

Making matters worse they would go to harass a Muslim woman who was about to receive her punishment a few months back. No! Tak payah sebut nama, they know who they are!

Yes, I'm referring to part-time model Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno who has yet to receive her punishment, albeit telling the world she would very much like to be caned.

My advice to them : Kalau depa dah kata, "Pukol lah tang mana suka!" hang pa dok sibuk nak larang dia buat apa?

BUKAN PUNGKOK HANGPA YANG NAK KENA SEBAT!

Two days ago it was reported that three Muslim women were caned at the Kajang Prison on Feb 9 for the Syariah offence of having extramarital sex. They had been found guilty under Section 23 (2) of Federal Territory Syariah Criminal Offences Act 1997 (Sexual intercourse out of wedlock) by the Federal Territory Syariah High Court in Kuala Lumpur between December 2009 and January 2010.

After the punishments were meted out, these women went on national TV to tell the world that they had accepted the punishment with an open heart, and had realised and repented for their offences.

They admitted that the caning did not result in any wound on their bodies, however, they admitted it left a deep impact on their conscience. They hope other women would refrain themselves from doing things which are against Islam.

Well, on another other side of the dichotomy, some smart-ass liberalist (as they call themselves) would go on another set of argument. That all these would not have happened if the authorities were not given the powers to enforce their moral policing and invade on others' privacy bla..bla..bla..!

For these arguments, I would like to put my brakes a bit. As to how much powers the relevant authorities should be given to go on their moral policing quest, I wouldn't know.

But some powers are due, granted that we are a nation guided with laws and morals, without which, we are not what we are right now.

Maybe this article can help enlighten us.

And on the question of invading others' privacy, of course there should be a limit to it. But, the public should also be enlightened as to what constitute invasion of privacy and what does not?

Would you say by telling of a young couple who is flaunting their PDAs (public display of affections, not your faithful PDA phones) you are considered invading their privacy?

And what about the clothes (or lack thereof) the young girls usually wear in public? Would it be invading the girls privacy if someone who feels disgusted about it tells her to go wear something decent?

Is the person who tells the girl off not subjected to his/her own privacy being invaded when he/she feels abhorred that the younger generation had disgraced themselves by not clothing themselves according to the accepted moral code.

Then they (the liberalist) would go on a hunting trip to refute (including labelling people who detest them a conservative whatnot) telling us or even worse asking us back what is the accepted moral code of conduct? who gives us the authority to set a moral code of conduct bla..bla..bla...!

I've had enough of these arguments!

You want to set your own accepted code of moral conduct you go ahead find another country! But while you are living in this country there a laws and sets of moral guidance you have to live by, whether you like it or not!

I rest my case.

Can you fathom this 'buggery' statement?

The above pic was taken from one Wan Imran Wan Chik's Facebook wall (without permission). I will however ask his permission though, whether or not the pics (above and below) belong to him.

What fascinates me is not who or which party were responsible for those words on the banner, but what actually are the meaning for the words.

Right now I am still pondering, trying to comprehend what the original writer meant with the statement: "It's Australian practise to interfere with Australian court?

Is that a statement by the Australians or a question that needs to be answered by Australians?

Never mind the second sentence (in red), it's much more complicated for most of us to understand.

The second pic (below) is quite comprehensible although devoid of proper spelling usage. But this is considered acceptable when you want to make these kind of statements for the world to see what is happening in Bolehland.

Why Orwell Endures

Essay
Why Orwell Endures

By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
Published: February 12, 2010

In Sutton Courtenay churchyard about 10 miles south of Oxford, near the imposing tomb of H. H. Asquith, the prime minister 100 years ago, a much simpler gravestone reads “Eric Arthur Blair.” It was to that grave a friend and I recently made a pilgrimage for a sad anniversary. Blair died of tuberculosis on Jan. 21, 1950, at the age of 46, just when he had found fame and fortune under the name by which the world knows him, George Orwell.

An early death was a kind of secular martyrdom for this latter-day St. George of England, and the heroic aura hasn’t faded. Sixty years on, Orwell towers above not only the apologists for tyranny whom he loathed but also other anti­totalitarian writers. Recent biographies of Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone haven’t done much to enhance the reputation of either man. Both believed that, as Silone said, “the last battle” would be between Communists and former Communists, like themselves, and such men too often evinced in their anti-Bolshevik guise the dogmatism or even fanaticism that had made them Bolsheviks in the first place. That kind of zealotry was alien to Orwell.

He has worn well for other reasons, of course. His deathbed fortune came with “1984,” which has been plausibly described by Robert Harris (another notable political novelist) as the most influential novel ever written. No other can have so enriched the language. Try a Web search for countless contemporary uses of Newspeak, the thought police or doublethink — the expressions, that is: a glance at the political pages or op-ed columns provides plenty of examples of what those brilliant coinings describe.

And yet for all his fame and stature, Orwell remains elusive. For one thing, he is impossible to categorize. He was a great something — but a great what? Scarcely a great novelist: the prewar novels are good but not very good, and even “Animal Farm” and “1984” aren’t great in the sense of “Madame Bovary.” To call him a great journalist, as many have done, means overlooking plenty of mundane (and inaccurate) political commentary. It’s when he turns to such unlikely matters as boys’ comics and vulgar postcards, as well as to his central subject of politics and language, that he enters the realm of deathless literature.

His politics were likewise sui generis. Although he called himself a democratic socialist, and served with a revolutionary-Marxist militia in Spain, he was in many ways an emotional and cultural conservative. The least doctrinaire of political writers, he had the gift of being able to transmute the Tory virtues of skepticism and pragmatism into a distinctive kind of radicalism.

Even his personality is elusive. It’s most striking that although he worked for BBC Radio and lived in the heyday of newsreels, we don’t have a single recording of his voice or moving image of him, or indeed any photograph at all of Orwell smiling. That too somehow seems appropriate. There were dark sides to his personality, and it’s not hard to understand what his friend Malcolm Muggeridge meant when he said that Orwell was an easier man to love than to like.

Sad as Orwell’s death was, one can’t escape a sense that in some way it was providential. Koestler and Silone were sullied by the bruising battles of the cold war, while Orwell’s early death, as Harris says, bestowed an “aura of unassailable posthumous integrity” on his life and work. That explains why so many years later he has survived his notorious fate, appropriated by a militant right he abhorred, yet vilified by much of the left to which he felt he belonged.

Only a few years ago, his enemies on the left found a new stick to beat him with, the list of fellow-travelers and crypto-Communists he compiled in 1949 and showed to a friend in the foreign office. Apart from the fact that, to anyone who knows anything about literary and political London then, the list is shrewd, fair-minded and often amusing, look back a few years. In 1941-42, Orwell was sardonically taken by the way so many French intellectuals had transferred their loyalty to the Third Reich. “If the Germans got to England, similar things would happen, and I think I could make out at least a preliminary list of the people who would go over.” Was that equally reprehensible?

Besides, there is the sheer originality of what Orwell says, which is why whenever you dig into him you will hit a nugget of golden wisdom. “India is potentially a nation, as Europe, with its smaller population and great racial homogeneity, is not,” he wrote, thereby obviating acres of print since, about whether there will ever be a United States of Europe.

And when friends of Israel wonder sorrowfully these days why international opinion has turned against that country, I think of Orwell writing in 1945 for an American (and largely Jewish) audience in the famous leftist magazine Partisan Review. As he observed, liberal-left sentiment was then “strongly committed to support the Jews against the Arabs” in what was still British Palestine. And yet, he went on, “the Palestine issue is partly a color issue,” in which “an Indian nationalist, for example, would probably side with the Arabs.” There in a lightning flash you have it: “an Indian nationalist” — Nehru and many another — did support the Palestinian Arabs, followed over the years by the whole of Asia and Africa.

Or again, whenever perplexed Americans fret over Osama bin Laden or suicide killings, and delude themselves that material progress will cure these ills, I think of what Orwell wrote in 1940 about another charismatic monster. “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice. . . . However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”

And then, when the Berlin Wall fell at last and Big Brother was dethroned in Eastern Europe, I wondered how many people recalled another insight by this famous scourge of Communism. Hannah Arendt insisted that Soviet dictatorship could only grow ever more horribly repressive, a view “1984” might seem to endorse. But it was also possible that the grip might one day be relaxed, Orwell said with great prescience, and that even a slight relaxation would ultimately doom the regime, which would collapse from the inside.

In the end, when trying to pin down Orwell’s mysterious grandeur, I think of two phrases. One was by Evelyn Waugh, with whom Orwell shared an unlikely mutual admiration, and who saw just what mattered: Orwell’s “unusually high moral sense and respect for justice and truth.” And there is Orwell himself, who once wrote of Anatole France that he was not a socialist but a radical, as could be seen quite simply in “his passion for liberty and intellectual honesty.” Could there be a better epitaph for the man who said that?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include “The Controversy of Zion” and “Yo, Blair!” He is writing a study of Winston Churchill’s reputation and influence.