COMMENT | PAS and not spooking non-Muslims

“Under conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think.”

- Hannah Arendt

COMMENT | The key to all of this, the real danger to the non-Muslim polity, is the “tip” Kepong MP Lim Lip Eng gave to PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang for the Islamist party to win over non-Muslims.

Lim said: “First of all, Hadi and PAS should agree with the view that Malaysia is a secular country that has Islam as the official religion, as recommended and acknowledged by three former prime ministers - Tunku Abdul Rahman, Abdul Razak Hussein, and Hussein Onn.”

Notice how that list of names did not include Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. The current prime minister has rejected the idea that Malaysia is a secular state and non-Malays support his regime, so why make PAS accept the view that Malaysia is a secular state?

Indeed PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man’s adroit response - "Malaysia is not a secular country. If it was, why should DAP include ‘to fight for a secular country’ in its own manifesto?” - really goes to hypocrisy and mendacity of using the concept of secularism as propaganda for the base but abandoning it when coming to power.

You can say a lot about Hadi and lord knows, I have said most of it in many articles over the years. What you cannot accuse him of is...