Malaysia, Truly Hazier.

(NOTE: This is a column I wrote for Malaysiakini back in 2006. Seems that nothing has changed but a few names in the intervening 13 years. What a disgrace to all parties to this perennial scandal)

Will the haze prove as threatening to tourism in Malaysia as it surely is to the health of all those of us who live here, and to the credibility of official Malaysian and Indonesian ‘efforts’ to combat it?

The picture on the front page of a newspaper last Thursday provided a graphic response to the question, showing a tourist on the observation level of the KL tower snapping a picture of a poster portraying a clear panorama of the city while his companions at the viewing windows glumly gazing out at..nothing.

But even hazier than the air in Malaysia’s been lately is the atmosphere of mystery concerning who’s causing the problem, and how they get away with it year after year.

Tourism Malaysia director-general Mirza Mohammad Taiyab didn’t clarify matters much, saying that he hoped the haze wouldn’t get any worse, then proceeding to savage the “foreign media“ for publishing reports exaggerating the situation.

And the Mentri Besar of Selangor, Datuk Seri Khir Toyo, failed to shed further light on the subject with the blindingly obvious observation that the haze was due to open burning in Sumatra.

Everybody’s long been well aware of what causes the problem. The burning question is who? In what’s become an annual ritual of inter-Government accusations, Malaysia largely blames Indonesia for the haze, claiming that it’s the smoke from blazes set by illegal loggers and plantation owners to raze more rainforest on the much-abused islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

Indonesia in its turn regularly retorts that many of these arboreal and agricultural arsonists are actually Malaysian-owned companies operating within its territory, but fails to explain why it does little if anything to stamp-out these offenders’ incendiary activities.

And there the matter rests for yet another year, with Indonesia failing to sign the ASEAN Transboundary Haze Treaty, and Malaysia pretending it hasn’t the foggiest idea whether any of its corporate citizens are among the culprits, leaving the offenders free to brazenly light more fires, fan the flames and deliberately let them rage out of control while pretending to try and contain them, safely out of the public gaze and thus utterly unfazed.

At the height of the haze season last year, in an attempt to dispel the shroud of secrecy surrounding this issue, or at least kindle a spark of interest in it at a responsible level, I asked a top executive of a major Malaysian media group whether any of his newspapers were planning to try and get to the truth of the matter. But he replied that they didn’t have the financial or reporting resources for such a remote and complex investigative assignment, and quickly changed the subject.

In other words, as I took him to mean, however many readers of his group’s newspapers might be choking with rage at the illegal pollution of their atmosphere, not to mention wanton destruction of yet more of the natural environment, the topic of Malaysian companies’ alleged complicity in causing the haze was officially off-limits, and that he was prepared to avoid firebrand reporting in favour of helping maintain the prevailing smokescreen.

Given that where there’s smoke there’s not only ire but also fire, I guess this far-from-burning desire to uncover the true source of the haze inevitably tells its own story. So it seems reasonable to conclude that there’s more than a grain of truth in smouldering suspicions that some Malaysian companies are as guilty of environmental vandalism in Indonesia as they reportedly are in other lawless, corruption-prone and resource-rich locations in the Asia-Pacific, like Papua-New Guinea.

It shouldn’t be hard to uncover and reveal the facts of the matter. What with the efficiency of spy-in-the-sky photography these days, any organization with access to a satellite feed or world-watch website should be able to clearly pin-point the positions of haze-generating fires. And the identities of individual or corporate owners or lessees of these areas should be evident to anyone with access to statutory land-tenure records.

So I assume that the relevant Government agencies of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and any other countries affected by or interested in the haze phenomenon know perfectly well who the culprits are, and that news organizations could also be well aware if they chose to be.

I must say I’m somewhat surprised that Greenpeace and similar environmental-protection organizations haven’t been more vocal on the subject. But perhaps they have, and their statements have been largely ignored or played-down by the local news agencies and media.

Of course even if the illegal arsonists were identified, it might be tough to prove in court that they’d had deliberately set the fires in the first place, or purposely let them to spread unchecked. So it’s unlikely they could be made to cough-up fines for corruption or environmental damage, or that a class-action could be successfully brought against them by all those people like asthmatics and air travelers whose health or even lives have been endangered by their dire disregard for the consequences of their activities. But at least naming them might make for some interesting test-cases, and even shame them ever so slightly.

Meanwhile, as I write this, the haze lies over KL like a blanket of gloom, dooming us all to yet another day of praying for rain to wash some of the smoke away, or a change of wind direction to bring a breath of fresh air.

Let’s also hope the winds of change eventually blow sufficiently strongly at Government level to fire-up some genuine official efforts to snuff-out slash-and-burn logging and land-clearing for once and for all, so we can safely forget about Malaysia, Truly Hazier and get back to enjoying life in Malaysia, Truly Asia.

 

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Trump’s latest lightbulb moment.

Donald Trump has long been infamous for his flashes of idiotic inspiration, but lately they seem to be coming both thicker, in the ‘stupid’ sense of the word, and faster. Probably because he fears that his title of dimmest bulb on the global heads-of-government circuit is under threat from a fast-growing pack of populist – or, more accurately, poopulist – conservative imitators around the world.

The similarly pathologically-lying Boris Johnson of the UK, for example, is giving Trump a right run for his money in the country-running and ruining stakes, and hot on Johnson’s heels are such monstrously-mendacious and incompetent conservative up-and-comers as Australia’s Scott ‘ScoMo/ScamMo’ Morrison, the Amazon-burning Bolsonaro of Brazil, dirty Duterte of the Philippines, Madhathir of Malaysia and literally dozens of other such also-rans.

With threats like these to contend with for top ratings in the the global unreality-politics show, it’s no wonder Trump’s lately been striving more hysterically than ever to hog the international limelight.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, he tried to demonstrate that only he could predict if not control the path of a hurricane by appearing on national television with a weather map that he or some minion had crudely modified by means of a felt pen, sharpie or magic marker.

Then, even before the thunder of mixed applause and scorn for that amazing coup had died down, he up and topped it with his lightbulb revelation.

The orange facial tint that his detractors have been making so much fun of for years, he announced with a straight and indeed still decidedly orange face, was caused not by his use of tanning lamps or lotions, but by the new-fangled energy-saving lightbulb.

“The lightbulb,” he began, in a rambling if not utterly incoherent speech to an audience of Republicans in Baltimore, Maryland, “People said: what’s with the lightbulb? I said: here’s the story. And I looked at it. The bulb that we’re being forced to use! Number 1, to me, most importantly, the light’s no good. I always look orange. And so do you! The light is the worst.”

What a world-beating blend of fakery, fibbing, bluster and blabber this was, and how red- or rather orange-faced his supporters must have been at their failure to previously realise they’d changed colour!

And then, after checking each other out, as they surely must have, to see that they were after all, as pale and pasty of face as ever, to realise that their boss was utterly alone in not only his orangeness, but also in that most incontrovertible symptom of sunlamp-use, the tell-tale raccoon-like paleness around the eyes.

But, rather than becoming embarrassed, let alone incandescent with rage at Trump’s once again presuming to take them for idiots, as the rest of us do, they shamelessly sat still for this farrago of falsehood, while their leader, or rather misleader, went trumpeting on about bringing back incandescent bulbs.

“What are we doing,” he ranted. “It [the energy-saving bulb] is considered hazardous waste, but it’s many times more expensive and frankly the light is not as good. So we’re going to sell them, but we’re also going to sell incandescent bulbs. People are very happy about it. It’s amazing.”

What’s even more, in fact beyond amazing, of course, is that this amaziac not only managed to get himself elected president by a majority of electoral-college if not popular votes, but that he’s also contrived to keep disgracing both this high office and the United States of Amazerica for over three years, in the process avoiding not only richly-deserved impeachment, or incarceration for mental impairment, but both.

Whether US voters will see the light, whichever lightbulb it happens to come from, in the next presidential poll, and how long so many of the rest of us will have to put-up with Trump clones in our own countries, is anybody’s guess.

But let’s not hold our breaths waiting and wondering, lest we go red, blue, or worst of all orange in the face, not to mention suspiciously pale around the eyes, waiting for the light of a bright new day to dawn in our alleged  democracies.

Good grief.

One of my favourite Facebook friends is currently in the throes of grief as she cares for and keeps company with her dying sister. Thus not only rendering me almost too sad for them both for words, and reminding me of my wife’s similarly agonised attendance at her now late father’s bedside several years ago, but also making me glad for them that they’re able to say their goodbyes.

A gift of which time and distance regrettably deprived me on the deaths of my father, mother and several siblings. But at least, thanks to my mother, who long survived him, I’m able to treasure my father’s reported last words as typical of what I so admired in him, and the legacy with which I like to think that he, at least to some extent, left me.

Feeling cold from the restriction of circulation in his extremities caused by his extreme cardiac distress, he said, or so my mother told me, “I’d like to sleep all winter, and wake up in spring.” A statement that I’ve smiled to recall every time I’ve thought of my father since his death in 1975 at he far-from-ripe old age of 61.

And naturally, now that I’m 15 years older than he was when he died, death is very much, and increasingly, on my mind. But not morbidly so, thank goodness, or a least so I like to think.

But whether or not I’m truly resigned to my impending demise, or still, as I strongly suspect, in at least partial denial of its inevitability, I’ve at least done some anticipatory grieving over the ever-nearing loss of myself, and I hope also given some advance comfort to loved-ones I’ll leave behind me.

Not only by thinking and writing about death, as I am here and now this Thursday morning, and thereby not only further preparing myself for the experience but also producing a wealth of last words, if by no means immortal literature, as a legacy to the still-living; but also by striving to offer some sense of fellow-feeling to those who like my above-mentioned friend and her sister are facing the fact of death at this moment.

If I have anything to offer those who are grieving, most of my gratitude for this must go to the truly excellent educators I encountered in the post-graduate course in counselling that I completed some years ago at the York Street, Sydney campus of the Australian College of Applied Psychology (ACAP).

Many of the almost countless insights that these people gave me came from the unit called ‘Grief and Loss’. And one of the most crucial of these was that grief can either be good, as in healthy, emotionally cathartic, and eventually healing; or bad as in pathological or so-called ‘complicated grief’ if unduly suppressed or morbidly obsessive.

Further to this was the professionals’ dispelling of the myth that grief can ever end in what it popularly known as ‘closure’, rather than persisting permanently but also evolving through increasingly benign stages towards bitter-sweet or eventually even pleasurably fond memories.

And perhaps most helpful of all was my educator-aided realisation of the fact that in retrospect should have been obvious, but of which I’d previously been oblivious, that all apparent gains in life are accompanied by losses, and if we welcome and celebrate life’s positives so unwittingly as to fail to acknowledge or even notice these negatives, let along mourn them to at least some extent, our grief is all the greater when we encounter a loss too catastrophic too ignore.

But of even more help to me than the ‘Grief and Loss’ part of the ACAP course was the three years of training I was treated to in the late, great Karl Rogers’ ‘Rogerian’ or ‘person-centred’ and to me ultimately consoling method of counselling.

And, as I soon discovered and and since mightily struggled with, perhaps the most difficult to learn, because, paradoxically, it is actually all about unlearning.

Unlearning and abandoning one’s ‘natural’, ingrained and even perhaps instinctive behaviours such as rushing to‘rescue’ troubled people rather than helping empower them to assist and save themselves; or giving people the dubious ‘benefit’ of our allegedly ‘expert’ advice despite their being unwilling or,even more likely unable, to follow it.

But the most crucial and challenging lesson of all is to to unlearn, indeed totally spurn our almost irresistible tendency to  talk to, at or even other others, in favour of listening to them. ‘Active listening’, as this technique is termed, is not a case of the counsellor’s more or less patiently waiting to get his or her word in, as virtually all of us habitually do, but a process of intense concentration on not only listening to but truly hearing the absolute reality of what the client is pining to impart, and have both understood and accepted.

But my purpose here is not to try and teach/unteach you one of the virtually countless competing methods of counselling. Nor is it to suggest that I consider myself capable of counselling my dear friend whose sister is dying.

And in any event, even if I was so presumptuous as to consider myself capable of or in any way justified in doing so, I’d be mercifully prevented from engaging in such preposterous behaviour by the professional ethical prohibition against counselling family and friends.

But at least, thank goodness, I can put some of my learning/unlearning into practice on a person-to-person, friend-to-friend basis, and thus give her the gift of joining her in her grief rather than merely mouthing and sending her my sympathy. And also offer her the present of being truly present and genuinely listening to and really hearing her expressions of grief, rage and other emotions evoked by her sister’s plight, instead of yielding to the all-too-human temptation to say something, anything, however superficial, stupid or trite.

And I hope that by thus being there for her, though I’ve done nothing to assuage her grief, but rather to encourage her to engage with and in it, that I’ve communicated my willingness, indeed determination, to accompany her in heart, mind and spirit on every step of the long and difficult journey she has ahead of her through the valley of the shadow of death and grief before she once again finds herself back in the sunlight.

Malaysia’s tat-for-tot boycotts.

I see that the ‘new’ Malaysia’s latest epidemic of madness is a massive attempted boycott, or, if you like, buycott, of non-Malay/Muslim-made tat, presumably in retaliation for the recent outcry by non-Malay/Muslims against the proposed teaching of Khat calligraphy to every conceivable Malaysian tot.

While this latter was never an organised boykhat by or on behalf of non-Malay/Muslim Malaysians, most of Malaysia’s ethnic-Chinese minority parents of school-age children have for decades been studiously engaged in a sort of ad-hoc bodohcott of the government’s dead-headucation system by means of their own, alternative, and doubtless considerably-superior private schools.

And of course a good many non-Malay/Muslim women have for years been effectively staging an informal tit-for-tut, or, if you’re offended by the odd flash of flesh, a tart-for-tut-tut girlcott of any attempts to force them to conceal their charms so completely as their Malay/Muslim sisters prefer or are required to.

But there have also been some decidedly one-sided boycotts going on in Malaysia for decades, though no widely recognised as such, like the clearly evident boycop by the nation’s largely Malay/Muslim police against solving or even properly investigating the suspicious killings of Malaysians of mainly Indian and Chinese ‘suspects’, detainees and those deemed sufficiently politically expendable.

With victims of this boycop or refusal to resolve crimes ranging from the gruesome murder and dismemberment of the Mongolian so-called ‘model’in volved in the Scorpene submarines scandal, Altantuya Shaariibu through the defenestration of MACC witness Teoh Beng Hock to the mysterious disapperances of several non-Muslim religious pastors.

So many boycotts have been and continue to be in force in Malaysia, in fact, that, despite having lots of great friends and close relatives there, I’ve been boycotting the place for years on the grounds that it’s far too hopelessly infested with boyclods, boyclots and boyklutzes for me to be bothered going back on a visit.

My long experience of Malaysia has also greatly hardened my resolve, if indeed it needed such hardening, to continue my by now long-standing boycott of not only my native-born Christianity on the grounds that it and so many of its faithful are Christinane if not outright Christinsane, but my total, across-the board boycult of all sects, religions and other such superstitions.

Even, as some of you may have noticed, to the point of boycutting would-be Facebook friends who flaunt their piety and/or religiosity by displaying bleeding hearts and other such tell-tale symbols on their home-pages, or else preach too much in their posts about praying.

And I have to admit that I also can’t resist my urge to borecott a good many of those who, whether overtly religious or otherwise, turn chat into an exercise in terminal tedium.

In fact the more closely I examine my conscience, the more hard-core a boycotter I see myself as becoming, as the list of my boycottees has steadily expanded from that boycurse of the media, Rupert Murdoch to include Malaysia, as stated above, and now Trump and his grating version or perversion of the US, Boris Johnson and his fellow wretched wrexiteers in the UK, and every minister or member of Australia’s creepy and cringe-worthy current conservative coalition government.

In short, and in summary, I realise that I’m even more of a go-the-rat boycotter than even the the most extreme bigots and boycott-cases of Malaysia’s alleged Malay/Muslim supremacy. But of course with far more justice and justification than they have, if indeed they have any at all.

25 years of wedluck.

The standard concept of wedlock is a bit too cramped, confining or outright claustrophobic for my taste. Especially considering that it commits if not condemns the happy, sappy couple to a lifelong confinement in each others’ company, with no prospect of time off for good behaviour, until death.

I should know. I served two terms imprisoned in wedlock before I met my present and I hope final wife, and both ended not in death, but very prematurely indeed, in dearth.

A dearth on my part, mostly, of such vital virtues of a fair if not fabulous husband like patience, forbearance and above all unfailing willingness to bear the heavy husburden of keeping myself husbound to my promised intention to forsake all others.

In short, for my conspicuous and at times despicable lack of such qualities, I was husbinned by both women with whom I successively but unsuccessfully attempted wedlock, and so deservedly so that in hindsight I consider that after the second failed attempt I should have been outright husbanned for the rest of what remained of my life.

Back then, despite treasuring the son born of my first metaphorically abortive attempt at husbandhood, I felt like a total hus-been, and thus vowed to never again be so husblind as to try kidding myself that I could so husbend myself as to behave husblandly enough to hack yet another attempt at the dreaded wedlock.

And of course it was just as I’d thus given up all hope of having a marital rather than a martial relationship with a woman ever again, my wedlock deadlock was broken by a piece of amazing wedluck.

Not that I was aware when I first met my now wife in Hard Rock Cafe, KL, that she’d be my next wedding belle, or even, for that matter, bedding belle, but I sure as hell liked her just swell.

The only hitch being that she happened to be my junior by 29 years, and, as I gradually started to gather as our friendship progressed, a potential handfull from hell.

Preposterously plain-spoken, feisty to a fault, and apparently wedded to such refreshingly un-little-womanly, not to mention  unwifely attitudes as ‘what you see is what you get’, and ‘like it, lump it or get lost’.

In short, I came to realise that she was far more true to herself and far further far-out rebellious against custom and convention than I’d managed to become in more than double her span of years, and thus possibly an even worse candidate for wedlock than I’d twice proven myself to be.

For example, though her own parents were evidently most happily hitched, she perceived matrimony in as dim a light as I’d come to view it: as more like madrimony, with a tendency to soon decline into matrimoany, and eventually even further into martyrmony, for one or more likely both parties.

And also like me, she saw monogamy, with its inevitable, indeed inherent, monotony, as almost certainly destined, indeed doomed to descend from its initial high of honeymoonogamy down through the mutual dullnesses of moanogamy to the depressing depths of disenchantment, disinterest or outright disgust, or monughamy.

But after co-habiting as friends and lovers for a spell, we finally decided to legitimise ourselves as parents for our darling developing darling daughter-to-be, and take a chance not on wedlock, of course, but on what we felt was our amazing wedluck.

Naturally, in the time since she switched from waif to wife, or, if you prefer, sweetheart to spouse, the young woman I first knew has changed somewhat. For example, politically she’s switched from apathetic to apoplectic, and professionally from ad-chick to academic.

But such changes have been merely skin- rather than sin-deep, thank goodness, and thus essentially she’s still as spicy as a spouse could be, and as saucy a source as ever of entertaining trouble and strife.

The very phrase ‘trouble and strife’, coincidentally, being both cockney and Australian rhyming slang for the word ‘wife’.

A fact that finally brings me to the point of this piece, which is to say that, at least for me, her other half in this exercise in what some may perceive as weirdlock, married life has been, and shows every sign of continuing to be, as long as we both shall live, and continue to not take but give, a wonderfully happy and often wildly hilarious wedlark.

 

Shatterday alert!

Luckily for lots of you living your lives at least two hours behind Sydney time, I can warn you on this Saturday August 31 against getting out of bed. Because my usual serene Saturday routine has been so shattered that I suspect that yours might be at similar risk.

Most Saturdays I celebrate the first day of the weekend by meeting my close neighbour and good mate Michael for a gentle stroll up the street to our favourite cafe, Mrs Underwood’s, then a couple of cappuccinos and a few cigarettes while we discuss the wrongs of the world and how to put them to rights, while of course keeping our eyes peeled for any attractive women who happen to pass by.

But this morning the weekend got off to a woefully weakened start, with my having to cancel my get-together with Michael in favour of driving my wife to inspect a rental opportunity for our daughter and her boyfriend because both of them were too busy at work to make it.

And it wasn’t just a weak but also a bleak start, as on this, allegedly last day before spring is officially sprung in Sydney, it was, and as I write this still is, very wintry indeed.

Anyway, to cut a long and sorry saga short, we finished the house-inspection sooner than expected, and thus there was time to phone Michael for a late coffee-and-conversation date. But it soon became apparent that it wasn’t just me who’d got up on the wrong side of the bed and started Saturday on entirely the wrong foot, but everybody.

Our old buddy Bill, who always pauses for a word with Michael and me on his way to lose a few bucks on the horses at the local betting shop, was hobbling even more painfully than on the day a few weeks ago on which he memorably complained that his feet were both so painful that he couldn’t decide which one to limp on

Then the beggarwoman we hadn’t seen for a few weeks re-appeared, and resumed soliciting funds that she claims to need for food, but which, as I happen to be aware as I once took the trouble to follow her, actually uses to play the poker machines in the nearby pub.

And so on and on went this morning’s mournful interruptions and aggravations, the details of which I’ll mercifully spare you.

Though of course by now you’ll have guessed the dire consequences, which were that the Saturday mood was totally scattered and shattered that Michael I never got down to the serious business of deciding how to deal with Donald Trump’s latest Twitter-fits; how to fix Boris ‘Wrexit’ Johnson’s latest Brexit antics; or what, if anything, can be done to stop Australia’s contemptible conservative government from torturing asylum-seekers by confining them in prison camps, or else callously flying them back to where they fled from.

In fact we were so mind-boggled, not to mention discombobulated, to employ a wonderful word I haven’t used for a while, that we never even gave a thought to the fact that today is the Malaysia’s Merdeka Day.

Though, to judge from a great many comments that I’ve been noticing on the net, many Malaysians are in a merde mood about Merdeka, as, while they may have been free of being grated-on by Great Britain for 70 years now, they still haven’t managed to throw-off the yoke of the joke governments that have since miserably  misruled them by means of a combination of racism, religionism, corruption, jobbery and outright robbery.

So my message to anybody, Malaysian or otherwise, who happens to be reading this before arising, is to spend the rest of this

shattering Saturday safely tucked-up in bed.

Ideally in the company of a congenial person of the appropriate sex, of course, but failing that at least in textual communication, if not actual corporeal contact, with a few of your favourite Facebook friends.

And, come to think of it, you might as well follow precisely the same program tomorrow, which, coming hard on the heels of a hellish Shatterday like today, is almost certain to turn out to be one of those Shundays.

 

PH is totally phucked.

Please phorgive me the phoul language, but there’s no more appropriate way of expressing what a pharce, phiasco and outright phlop that the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government of the allegedly ‘new’ Malaysia is turning out to be.

Not that its phailure is altogether unexpected, given the phact that it’s a coalition of a number of entirely disparate parties, the most desperate of these being the monoreligioracial Bersatu headed by Malaysia’s most inphamously phoxy old phart, Tun Dr Mahathir (Mapharthir?) Mohamad.

Who, despite his party’s winning very few parliamentary seats, managed by hook or by crook or both to have himself installed as phounding PH prime minister.

This was the phirst, phundamental, and as we now see, phatal phlaw in the phoundation of a selph-styled rephormist government, given that Mapharthir was phormerly, phor an incredible 22 years, leader of the phenomenally corrupt Umno/BN regime, and misleader of Malaysia.

In fact he was virtually if far from virtuously all but a dictator, or if you prefer, doctator, who ruled the roost through a combination of phalsehood, phraud, phoney state institutions and, of course, phake news media.

So that, while he had developed a phobia phor his chosen successors as PM, especially phor thieph-in-chief Najib Razak, it seemed unlikely that he would have phorgotten or phorsaken his phoxy, poxy and generally phucked-up old habits.

And, as some of us grimly phoretold, he hadn’t, and still shows no sign of doing so. The first major symptom of his lack of intention to rephorm being his phailure to prevent fellow rephugees from Umno/BN from leap-phrogging over to PH and and thus polluting it with their very presences, let alone their nepharious practices.

Next PH phuck-up was its rephusal to ratiphy the the United Nation’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms – oops, Phorms – of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

On the grounds, presumably, that racial discrimination and indeed outright supremacy had always been, and was intended to phorever be, the the very phoundation of Mahathir/Mapharthir’s divide-and-conquer-style political phinagling.

Just as pherocious anti-Semitism has always been his sole contribution to global phinancial and Middle-Eastern political debates.

And since the ICERD phiasco, things have only gone phurther and phaster down-hill, with just a phew of the phoremost examples of PH’s  phatal decline being the proposed introduction of khat caligraphy into school curricula; the phailure, in phact outright rephusal or “tak nak” to extradite religious trouble-maker Zakir Nak to India where he’s wanted on terrorism charges; and most lately the toleration if not support and encouragment for the calling of a fatwah/phatwah against Sisters in Islam.

Widely and justly admired for their advocacy of Islamic pheminism and other such phreedoms from mental, physical and political

represssion, the Sisters clearly represent phar too serious a threat to the current version, or more accurately perversion of PH and its purportedly high principles.

Unsurprisngly, in view of this pharrago of phiascos, pharces and phoul-ups, more and more phormerly optimistic phans of PH are saying phooey and ptui to PH, with the potentially tragic result for themselves and their nation that the next phederal election could well result in the return to power of the phorever and even more totally phoul pack of Umno/BN phuckers.