TMI: Race quotas, politics led to falling UM standards, says World Bank study.... By Leslie Lau

Race quotas, politics led to falling UM standards, says World Bank study

By Leslie Lau
Executive Editor

October 17, 2011

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 17 — A World Bank publication has found that standards at Universiti Malaya have fallen and the institution has been kept at a disadvantage because of race-based admission quotas and political interference in university management.

In contrast, Singapore’s decision to prioritise research, keeping English as the medium of instruction and a merit-based admissions policy have all contributed to the success of the National University of Singapore’s success, according to “The Road to Academic Excellence,” which studies what contributes to a world-class research university.

The study also noted that Malaysian secondary school students are not well prepared for tertiary education.

It points out that the Malaysian education system promotes rote learning, conformity and uniformity rather than fresh and creative thinking.

The study is led by two scholars — Philip Altbach and Jamil Salmi — while various chapters see contributions from various academics.

Salmi, a Moroccan education economist attached to the World Bank, also notes that “disturbing political developments, from the burning of churches to the whipping of a woman for drinking beer in public,” also cast a shadow on Malaysia’s “image as an open and tolerant society.”

The comparisons between UM and NUS is contained in a chapter entitled “The National University of Singapore and the University of Malaya: Common Roots and Different Paths.”

The chapter is authored by Hena Mukherjee, a former Universiti Malaya department head with a doctorate in education from Harvard University, and Poh Kam Wong, an NUS Business School professor.

According to the study, “at an early stage, the Singapore government realised the universities’ role in sustaining economic growth.

“In contrast, after 1970, UM’s institutional goals reflected the New Economic Policy, an affirmative action plan for ethnic Malays and indigenous groups, put in place in the wake of disastrous 1969 ethnic riots that took the lives of hundreds of people on both sides of the racial divide.,” the study found.

The authors said that apart from the student quota system, the NEP translated into more scholarships to Bumiputeras, special programmes to facilitate their entry into higher education institutions, and the use of the Malay language in place of English in the entire education system by 1983.

“In UM and in government, the policy impact spiralled upward so that Bumiputera staff members, over time, secured almost all senior management, administrative, and academic positions.

“As NUS kept pace with the demands of a growing economy that sought to become competitive internationally, with English continuing as the language of instruction and research, UM began to focus inward as proficiency in English declined in favour of the national language — Bahasa Malaysia — and the New Economic Policy’s social goals took precedence.”

The study noted however that there has been widespread recognition that the implementation of affirmative action policies in Malaysia has hurt the higher education system, sapping Malaysia’s economic competitiveness and driving some (mainly Chinese and Indians) to more meritocratic countries, such as Singapore.

In the broader study, the lead authors found that research was an important element in the making of a world-class university, as well as top-grade talent.

“We’re both convinced that serious research universities are important in almost all societies,” Altbach, who is the director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, told the New York Times last week in an interview.

Said Altbach: “Independence, luck, persistence, some kind of strategic vision, adequate resources — usually, but not always, public resources — good governance structures, good leadership, the ability to attract good students and so on. But we have found that the quality of the faculty is really crucial.”

Salmi, who co-ordinates the World Bank’s activities related to higher education, told the same newspaper of their new 390-page study, which will be released later this month, that their advice is like that supposedly given for a rabbit stew recipe: “First, catch your rabbit.” Only in this case the advice would be: “First, catch your faculty.”

“The difference between a good university and great university comes down to talent.”

Steve Jobs: "You've got to find what you love"... Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

DQ Commentary:

On the day when Steve Jobs passed on (05 October 2011), I felt somewhat numb and ill at ease as to what to say, what to think... Perhaps, I am a tad too sensitive. I weep sometimes (at least, my tears have been known to flow effortlessly,) when emotional events and thoughts flood my turbulent if sensitive mind.

Then I remembered his very poignant Stanford University Commencement speech in 2005, one year after his initial diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. This speech epitomised Steve's take on life and living, and I think it represents his singular approach to this sojourn that we have on this earth. 

We all should try to leave a little dent in this world, leave a few momentary footprints in the constantly shifting sands of time, even if these are just for a while, that we mean something, some happiness, some touches to someone else. Perhaps that is all that makes a difference between us humans vs. the extinct dinosaurs and other animals before us, and even ahead of us...

I like his urging for the young to be more spontaneous, to live life to the hilt, while at the same time be a little more irreverent and even outrageous, foolish even (perhaps without being self-destructive or too much of an extreme risk taker!)... 

But we must find meaning and enjoy every moment that we have, mindful that all this 'allocated' time is never a given or a sure thing; that each of our lives is finite and most importantly, that our time has limits which are way beyond our complete understanding or our own power to influence, to change and possibly to postpone. We cannot simply put our hands out to stay our own execution, our own demise, when our time has come.

The ineluctable nature of death is that it will be upon us, like a thief in the night most times... and that we can only hope that we are ready; that we have done this and done that, and that we are at peace to meet our Maker: God, Allah, Rama or Gaia, whichever Universal Timeless Being that we believe in. 

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish! Live life!

Steve Jobs, RIP!

malaysiakini: Najib's gaping void between illusion and reality... by Terence Netto

Najib's gaping void between illusion and reality

Terence Netto
Sep 22, 2011

COMMENT It's odd - this propensity of the Najib Razak administration to shoot itself in the foot just when it is poised to play the winning cards it intimates it has long been harbouring.

In this instance, the timing of the self-inflicted wound - thedecision to charge Mohamad Sabu under the Penal Code with criminal defamation as a result of remarks the PAS No 2 made over the Bukit Kepong incident - is most inopportune.

The case comes to court just after the Attorney-General's Chambers dropped charges against a coterie of Parti Sosialis Malaysia activists who were initially indicted for offences under the hoary Emergency Ordinance and obsolete laws.

Also, the case against Sabu is being pressed when the prime minister's predecessorcautions him over the possibility of internal opposition to his liberalising laws curtailing civil liberties.

It is a measure of the silo-mentality of some Umno leaders that they are more concerned about internal reaction rather than public restlessness with a status quo that the Umno supremo is trying to change.

In other words, how Umno reactionaries feel matters more than what the public wants.

Najib's ballyhooed moves have attracted an array of ayes and nays from sceptics, with contention building over who should take the credit for the intended liberalisation, an exchange that mirrors the ongoing debate over which political forces were more responsible for gaining independence for the country in 1957.

With regard to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's caution about the likelihood of internal dissent, a Najib lieutenant has interjected to say that, perhaps, Abdullah lacked clarity about his own tilt towards liberalism, which was why, claimed Mohd Nazri Aziz, the former PM's attempt at 'perestroika' (restructuring of political discourse in Malaysia through relaxation of repressive laws) did not cut any ice with party reactionaries.

Talk about a lack of clarity about what liberalism ought to look like, what can be more addled than a decision shortly after liberalising measures were announced on prime-time television to prosecute ex-ISA detainee Mat Sabu for reason of his revisionist take on an incident that happened 61 years ago?

Form rather than substance

It has been argued in these columns that Najib knows the forms of liberalism, but not its substance, just as it has been suggested that he knows what 1Malaysia means - credit his 'We must embrace our differences' as having some worth - but does not know how to give effect to it.

The evidence of cognitive dissonance in the Najib administration is now too plentiful to deny.

From day one of his administration the PM appeared to want to smooth along nice and easy, with periodic announcements of changes to sclerotic policies and practices. But all the while his administration has been prey to jerks and twitches that throw it off-stride.

Out of this discontinuity between the reformist image he desperately wants to project and the reality that is considerably less amenable, the PM comes across as wanting the public to trust him.

Opinion surveys now tell him that the 'trust-the-PM' factor is slipping. Every new PM is given a wide berth by a watching public to strut his stuff, but once the people sense his act is tinsel, they can turn on the leader with a vengeance.

Look at predecessor Abdullah's slide from conductor of the 2004 BN landslide to casualty of the 2008 BN debacle, all within the span of a term.

The resounding lesson of that precipitous decline: Don't backslide once you have campaigned on a promise of reform.

Conjuring tricks

The problem reform-seeking Najib faces in his party and the administration is the undertow of stale thinking that hinders ameliorative policies.

In such circumstances, the task of leadership is to transform the public understanding of national issues and on the platform that affords the leader must break through the gauntlet of obstacles made up of reactionary forces, interest-group power, public passivity or cynicism, and conventional wisdom.

Najib is unable to transform his party's and his administration's assumption that democracy must be tutelary and citizens are essentially wards and not free agents.

This is the obsolete thinking he has not been able to change as the clock winds down rapidly to when he must seek his own electoral mandate.

Even if he gets it, it will be a victory without drum rolls, a majority without a meaningful mandate. That is because he has not defined clearly what he wants to do with it.

He is, in the end, more interested in form rather than substance, in management than in leadership, in tone than in content.

He is like the avuncular man who comes to do conjuring tricks at a children's party who is then startled to discover that the kids have grown up and want something more elevating.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.

fmt: Peanuts, not sweeping reforms....... by Kee Thuan Chye

Peanuts, not sweeping reforms

September 16, 2011

Let’s not be fooled, people. The changes Najib announced are merely cosmetic, and will have to be passed in Parliament first before they become effective.

COMMENT

By Kee Thuan Chye

PEANUTS. That’s what Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s so-called “sweeping reforms” are. They hardly amount to a political transformation.

While it’s cheering to note that the Internal Security Act (ISA) will be repealed – finally, after our many years of waiting – and that the Emergency proclamations are to be lifted – a decision that is decades overdue – it’s disturbing to be told that they will be replaced by two new laws aimed at preventing subversion and safeguarding public order.

And even though the detention period under these new laws may be shorter, with further extensions to be made by court order, the Home Minister is still the one to decide who gets detained for suspicion of being a terrorist.

This means, theoretically speaking, that although Najib has given the commitment that “no individual will be detained purely based on political ideology”, there is no stopping the government from branding a political opponent a suspected terrorist, whether or not he is one. Just to lock him away.

Another so-called “reform” is scrapping the requirement for publications to renew their printing licences annually.

This, also, is nothing to crow about. It still means that publications have to obtain a licence that the Home Minister may or may not grant. It still means the Home Minister has the absolute power to suspend or revoke a licence at any time. And his decision cannot be challenged in court. He does not even have to give a reason.

It also means the Home Ministry can still call up newspaper editors and cow them into submission for publishing something the ministry finds objectionable. Like what happened recently to The Star when it ran the heading ‘Ramadhan delights’ for an eating-out supplement that was not totally devoted to halal food.

The ministry can still practise the double standards it has been practising – turn a blind eye to the race-baiting and rabble-rousing of Utusan Malaysia but come down hard on the minor transgressions of other publications. So where’s the change?

If the government were truly sincere and had the political will, it should repeal the Publications and Printing Presses Act (PPPA) and no longer require publications to obtain a printing licence. That would be in keeping with the spirit of what Najib talked about instituting in Malaysia when he announced the “reforms” on Sept 15 – a “democratic system based on the universal philosophy of ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’”.

Vague reforms
None of the newly announced “reforms” fully cohere with this spirit.

On Section 27 of the Police Act, Najib said there would be a review to take into consideration the provisions under Article 10 of the Federal Constitution which guarantees Malaysians the right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of association.

But in the same breath, he said police permits would still be required for street demonstrations, subject to certain criteria.

If freedom of assembly, which should be a right of all citizens, is still curtailed in this fashion, what is that rubbish talk of Najib’s about forging a democratic system “of the people, by the people and for the people”?

He did say, however, that “permission to assemble will be given in accordance with procedures to be fixed later that will take into account international norms”. But this sounds vague. What international norms did he mean? And when is “later” going to be?

And speaking of Article 10, why doesn’t the government address the other impediments to freedom of speech, such as the Official Secrets Act (OSA), the Sedition Act, the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA), the Multimedia and Communications Act, the Public Order (Preservation) Ordinance?

No wonder Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein was smirking and applauding when Najib made his announcements. His absolute powers remain intact.

Let’s not be fooled, people. The changes Najib announced are merely cosmetic. And of course they will have to be passed in Parliament first before they become effective.

Meanwhile, Articles 149 and 150 are still there to provide Parliament with the power to pass laws that do not have to be consistent with the freedoms guaranteed in Articles 5, 9, 10 and 13, and to allow the Cabinet to declare an emergency. The Emergency proclamations may go, but Article 150 is still around. We the people are still vulnerable.

Some of us may say that we cannot expect the government to make such truly sweeping reforms in one go, and that we should be thankful for the small mercies we are now getting. Some may say this could be just the beginning, and more reforms could come.

That’s well and good. But at the same time, we should give credit where it’s due for this beginning. It’s not Najib we should thank. What we are getting is what has been due us for a long time, what any concerned government should have given us even without our having to pressure them to do so.

We should instead acknowledge that the March 8 effect lives on, and therefore the credit for these changes should go to us the rakyat for voting as we did on March 8, 2008. We voted in a stronger opposition, we denied the ruling party the two-thirds majority that it had abused to increasingly curb our democratic rights over the decades. We sent them the message that enough was enough.

These “reforms” have now come about because Barisan Nasional (BN) wants to stay in power, and it has realised that we have the power to decide whether that will happen. The “reforms” are meant to win back our votes. Ever since Najib took over as prime minister, he has been doing things merely to ensure that BN’s goal is fulfilled, not because he is altruistic or benevolent in spirit. We have seen his meanness in numerous other ways.

Watching him speak on Sept 15 when announcing these “reforms” as part of his Malaysia Day address, we could have contrasted it with his speech to 6,000 Umno members and Malay NGOs at Putra World Trade Centre (PWTC) a couple of days after the Bersih 2.0 rally, and call him “two-faced”.

Contemptuous chauvinist
At that PWTC gathering, he was far from being the prime minister who cared about reform and the good of the entire country.

He was a truculent thug who roused the crowd with the boast of Umno’s ability to round up a million members to “conquer Kuala Lumpur”. He was a contemptuous chauvinist who exhorted the Malays to unite in order to teach the Bersih 2.0 protesters a lesson and “show them whose country this is”.

No doubt, he has since realised his mistakes in his handling of the Bersih 2.0 rally and is now making amends. His ratings have dropped and he’s trying to make them go up again. Hence these “reforms”. But let’s be wary of his sincerity and be clear about his real purpose.

Let us keep sight as well of the many more ills that the government has not comprehensively addressed, such as corruption, rent-seeking, wasteful spending, Umnoputraism, our pathetic education system.

Let us demand more reforms, especially those pertaining to our institutions, such as the judiciary, the police, the Attorney-General’s Office, the Election Commission, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC).

There is still a long road ahead. Unless and until the reforms are truly sweeping and the restrictive laws abolished, we should not put our trust in Najib and BN.

Make them sweat, make them work, and don’t let them take us for granted. Never again.

Dramatist and journalist Kee Thuan Chye is the author of ‘March 8: Time for Real Change‘. He is a contributor to FMT.

Wikileaks: Najib's Islamic moderation lip service

Wikileaks: Najib's Islamic moderation lip service

Sep 3, 11 6:05pm

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Prime Minister Najib Razak, while attempting to portray Malaysia as a moderate voice in the Muslim, is doing just the opposite in his attempts to woo Malay support, according to a leaked US embassy cable.

Commenting on Najib's administration's handling of the 'Allah' and other religious issues, the embassy conveyed scepticism as to how far the PM would go to show that Malaysia was indeed tolerant of religious freedom.

“There has long been conflict between the ruling party's commitment in principle to freedom of religion and toleration of diverse views in practice,” read a US embassy cable sent to the US State Department on Jan 12 last year.

“Najib's public relations efforts to downplay differences among the races and religions and promote the concepts of toleration and moderation notwithstanding, he appears to have hardened popular views since the advent of his administration given the steps hardliners in the ruling party have forced on their fellow Umno members.”

Posted on Wikileaks last week, the cable cited the 'Allah' and Kartika issues and the cow's head incident and other issues related to the practice of religious freedom that had cast doubt on the PM's sincerity on the issue.

“Despite its extensive efforts to reassure expatriate and foreign audiences, the Malaysian government has focused only on protection of property and persons, foregoing an opportunity to make a clear statement on the maintenance of freedom of religion in the country,” it said.

According to the cable, it was believed that Najib was primarily interested in gaining the support of the Malay electorate at the expense of creating a true environment of religious freedom.

This, it said, was evident in how the government had used the judiciary to intervene on the 'Allah' issue and how it manipulated public statements including those of the Agong and the Selangor sultan, to send a message that the BN would not back down on the 'Allah' ban.

This contrasts with the PM's statements abroad, such as his lecture at Oxford in May titled 'Coalition of Moderates and Inter- Civilisational Understanding' where he sold the idea of Malaysia as a moderate nation that celebrated its diversity.

“Malaysians accept their diversity. We do not merely tolerate each other but we also embrace and celebrate,” Najib had said during his visit to the United Kingdom, at the invitation of the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies (Oxcis).

Mere 'rhetoric'

The US cable said that the PM has not shown any effort towards achieving moderation aside from “rhetoric”.

“(Najib's) failure thus far to record much in the way of tangible results, beyond more forward-looking and liberal rhetoric, leads to popular suspicion. 

“The conventional wisdom among most non-ruling coalition Chinese and Indians, for example, seems to be that the ruling party has orchestrated the 'Allah' issue so as to increase support among Malay voters by fomenting division between Muslims on one side and Christians or secularists on the other in the opposition coalition,” it said.

It added that Najib's earnest in implementing significant political reform was “debatable” and questions if it is mere “lip service” to win back conservative Malay support after serious setbacks in 2008.

It noted widespread cynicism and “distrust” amongst the non-Muslims at the PM's sincerity on religious tolerance.

“The popular view is widely and deeply held among non-Malay, non-Muslims that the government is antagonistic toward other religions and is engaged in a long-term effort to expand Islam's primacy in Malaysian society,” it said.

Religious controversy continues to blight Malaysian politics as the 13th general election looms, from the 'Christian PM conspiracy' tacked on the DAP to the recent Jais raid on a church in Damansara Utama, Selangor over alleged conversion of Muslims, that has spun off an apostasy sideshow.

Even Penang's Islamic authorities attempts at exercising tolerance recently, through their ban on loudspeakers at dawn, has become fair game for BN politicians.