A most bizarre ‘All Lives Matter’ editorial appeared yesterday in the New Straits Times implying that we must be on the side of the “genocidal” Myanmar regime if we advocate for Malaysia to close our borders.
The NST warned, “If we turn xenophobic against the Rohingya, what’s the difference between us and the ethnic cleansers of Myanmar?”
According to Malaysia’s oldest English-language daily, ‘race’ is merely a man-made idea. “What is real though is the human race that traces its origin to a common primordial pair. We are all related.”
“Like race, ethnicity is a mere social construct”, said NST.
“The Rohingya, the African-Americans, the Caucasians, the Malays, the Indians, the Chinese, and men and women of every other name we have taken to calling, are related. If we remember this, we will stop hating each other,” the NST editorial continued.
“It doesn’t matter what label we give ourselves or others apply on us. Remember, it is a human construct. There is no ethnic label [given by the Creator] where we came from nor [in the Hereafter] where we will go to,” concluded the NST.
Very bizarrely, the NST is adopting the DAP mantra which insists we are all only one human race.
Venturing further as if their newsroom had been hijacked by DAP’s Anak Bangsa Malaysia cult, the NST went as far as to suggest that if we’re unable to transcend our ethnic boxes, then there must be a “taint” or “ugly spot” in our heart which is nothing more than “hate-fuelled” xenophobia!
BELOW: “Kita semua manusia. Ada yang datang awal, ada yang datang lewat.”
Weaponizing the Rohingya against Malay claim of indigeneity
Because the Rohingya are Muslim, their shared faith is Malaysia’s Achilles heel (imperative to help Muslim brethren) when pro-refugee keyboard warriors try to persuade our immigration authorities to open the floodgates.
It’s true that Malays always show solidarity with the oppressed ummah abroad — the Palestinians, the Bosnians, the Chechens. However Palestinians, Bosnians and Chechens do not desire to become citizens of Malaysia. Meanwhile no country in the world is now offering citizenship to the unwanted Rohingya.
Bangladesh is at the end of its tether. Their police complained that crime “skyrocketed” in Cox’s Bazar within a year of the arrival of the 2017 Rohingya wave. So did the trafficking of amphetamine with Rohingya becoming drug mules smuggling the meth across the border from Rakhine, Myanmar.
Apart from the drug trade, Rohingya have been involved in serious crimes such as armed robbery, kidnapping, rape and murder. Rohingya have also been killed in shootouts with Bangladeshi police.
Malaysians have succeeded in flattening the curve of the coronavirus and we’ve moreover proceeded to the recovery MCO phase. Yet there are those like the NST editorial board who demand that we must welcome boatloads of Rohingya coming from Cox’s Bazar — a maximum risk Covid-19 red zone.
An influx of Rohingya boat people may well spark new covid clusters in our country, putting paid to the months of sacrifice we’ve made observing all the strict social distancing protocols.
BELOW: Dear Marina, shouldn’t we think first about protecting our frontliners from the coronavirus rampant in our immigration depots?
Protecting illegal immigrants is sub rosa agenda that also serves to ‘flatten’ Malaysia’s traditional distinction between the natives described in Article 153 of our federal constitution and those races (Chinese, Indian) not mentioned in our constitution.
While Malaysians of Chinese and Indian descent are not ourselves immigrants, our forefathers were. In the past, it was a simplistic truism that Tanah Melayu, i.e. the peninsula comprised three main races: Malays are the bumiputera whereas Chinese and Indians are keturunan pendatang (descended from immigrants) and thus not indigenous to this land.
There is however a strong push to coerce our authorities to now absorb all comers who enter our country illegally.
The Malay public has been browbeaten and bullied to become inured to the flagrantly false allegation implicit in the hashtag #MigranJugaManusia. No Malaysians are of the belief that migrants are subhuman, and therefore this insidious ‘Migrants Are Human Too’ hashtag is simply a form of over-the-top hysteria.
BELOW: Michelle Liu accuses Malaysians of likening Rohingya to dogs, in the same vein as Nazis likening Jews to vermin and the Hutu tribe likening the Tutsi tribe to cockroaches during the Rwanda genocide
Conflating ‘Migran Juga Manusia’ with ‘Kita semua pendatang’
If the virtue signalers (such as yesterday’s NST editorial writer) were to have their way, we will be speedily deplatformed and canceled if we don’t agree to embrace a deluge of refugees and illegal immigrants.
As it is, we’re already called “ugly Malaysians” and labeled as unkind and inhumane for supporting our government’s decision to turn away the Rohingya human trafficking boats.
There is however another even more insidious hashtag # Kita Semua Pendatang.
Not only is it the Chinese and Indians in this country who are descendants of pendatang, Malaysia has in recent years become a salad bowl where many other immigrants belonging to various ethnicities – Rohingya, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Yemeni, Somali, Aghani, Syrian, etc. – have settled in the peninsular west coast.
Reflect on how aggressively they are drumming into everybody’s head the guilt-trip mantra ‘Migrants are human too’. This is in tandem with the ’Kita semua pendatang’ brainwashing.
Repeat ‘Migran juga manusia’ and ’Kita semua pendatang’ coupled together (like the ‘Coffee & Creamer’ couplet) a thousand times and some gullible Malaysians may be swayed.
They will have succeeded in their ‘Kita SEMUA Pendatang’ indoctrination when enough Malays have internalized the false belief that Malaysia is an immigrant country.
No, we’re not an ethno nation state like big bad Myanmar (they admonish us) but we’re a country build on immigration and built by immigrants, they drum into us again and again at gunpoint.
If everybody is a pendatang, then who is pribumi? What happens to the Malay “special position” birthright?
ABOVE: Lawyer activist Goh Cia Yee tweeted the #MigranJugaManusia hashtag together with his statement “My ancestors were migrants too” in support of throwing our doors wide open to Rohingya
Malays will be made to bend the knee
In late April, Cia Yee advocated ‘Rohingya refugees should be allowed to reside in Malaysia’ and his urging was headlined in the Malaysian media. Not coincidentally, Cia Yee is a member of an outfit called Liberasi where his comrade is the very same Michelle Liu quoted above who had alleged “there are Malaysians who actually believe Rohingyas are like dogs”.
’Kita semua pendatang’ is being shoved down our throats in one gulp together with ‘Migran juga manusia’.
As it is, Malays are already told, “You are pendatang too, just like the rest of us”.
At this point in time, most Malays don’t take kindly to the assertion that they’re immigrants from Indonesia. But there is no guarantee that Malays will not cave to pressure in future.
In the near future, minority non Malays might just be able to pull off making the Malay majority bend the knee, similar to how Black Lives Matter succeeded in shaming a segment of guilt-stricken whites to kneel and bow to the George Floyd fetish.
Gullible Malays who can be shamed into believing that they are inhumane, xenophobic and racist will eventually acquiesce that they are pendatang too. And this is how the Article 153 protection for natives of the land can be subverted … subtly through public shaming.
Jus soli versus jus sanguinis
Jus soli citizenship is based on place of birth. Rohingya who are born in Rakhine state should rightly be citizens of Myanmar. Nonetheless, Burma’s 1982 citizenship law contains a proviso which effectively rendered the Rohingya a ‘stateless’ group.
Jus sanguinis citizenship is the ‘right of blood’ where one’s nationality is acquired through his parents’ ethnicity.
Blood is indeed thicker than water. Akin to Bangladesh taking in the Rohingya, Germany too took in more than 12 million ethnic Germans who were expelled from eastern European countries at the end of WWII, including those (whose ancestors lived) centuries in Sudetenland who were stripped of their Czechoslovak citizenship in 1945.
For the record, Burma is hostile to all foreigners — there have been anti-Chinese riots in Yangon as well as waves of expulsion of its Indian community. A few other ethnicities (Chinese, Indian, Nepali, Pashtun) are similarly penalized by the Burmese citizenship law just like the Rohingya.
The pivotal clause that excludes Rohingya from full citizenship is Burma’s requirement that a Burmese person must belong to an ethnic that has lived in the country since before 1823. (Note: Malaysia also has a citizenship base year; ours is pegged at 1957.)
1823 was the year Burma was defeated by Britain in the First Anglo-Burmese War. Framers of their citizenship law evidently saw the Rohingya as foreign labour imported into the country by the British colonial overlords against the wishes of Burmese natives. It is reasonable to deduce that the law’s 1823 cutoff year had the Rohingya particularly in mind to be excluded.
The Burmese almost unanimously view Rohingya as “intruders” or “interlopers”. In Malaysia, the amir of Isma Abdullah Zaik Abd Rahman viewed ‘Kedatangan pendatang Cina bersama penjajah British satu bentuk pencerobohan’.
Another parallel comparison might go along the argumentative lines as follows:
Burmese say: “You are immigrant. You’re Bengali from Bengal.”
Rohingya reply: No, we are indigenous. We’re Rohingya, not Bengali.
The Rohingya speak the Bengali language but still claim they’re not Bengali. It’s exactly like Lim Guan Eng stridently claiming he is “not Chinese” — which he once controversially did on 12 May 2018.
At the same time, these Rohingya are willing to pass themselves off as Bengali when they use forged Bangladeshi passports in order to enter Saudi Arabia for work.
Burmese say: “You’re not Rohingya. You were recorded in the British population censuses of Burma as ‘Chittagonian’.” (Note: Chittagong is a division in today’s Bangladesh.)
Rohingya reply: We’ve been in Arakan more than 800 years.
Yet the first instinct of these Rohingya is to balik Chittagong when they fled in Aug-Sept 2017 to escape the Myanmar army’s “clearing operations”. (Note: Cox’s Bazar is a district of Chittagong.)
The Rohingya claim to have been in Arakan more than 800 years is about as convincing as if Malaysian Chinese were to claim to have lived here more than 500 years dating back to the Malacca sultanate. While it’s true that the Baba and Nyonya of Malacca can trace their ancestry to many centuries ago in Malaya, how many Chinese are Baba-Nyonya?
Burmese say: “You’re not native. You’re trying to steal the identity of a very, very small group of old Muslims.”
Rohingya reply: We are R-O-H-I-N-G-Y-A, a word nobody seems able to pronounce.
Do you say Rohin-gah or Rohin-yah or Rohing-nga or Rohing-nyah or Rohin-gia or Rohin-ngia or Rohin-jah?
Recycling of this ‘Rohingya’ self-referential group identity came about only in the 1950s stemming from the community’s political mobilization. This is similar to Cina DAP in the 2010s trying to force our National Registration Department (JPN) to accept their newborn as keturunan “Anak Malaysia” in the birth certificates.
Hannah Yeoh and the then DAP Komtar Adun Ng Wei Aik in 2011 refusing to register their babies as either ‘Indian’ or ‘Chinese’ is like the self-declared Rohingya who repudiate their Bengali ethnic origins. In Myanmar, they claim it is racist to be called ‘Bengali’, which to them is somehow a derogatory word.
We know the motives of the Rohingya in their tussle with the Burmese authorities on their fraudulent keturunan. Is it that difficult to guess at the motives of the Cina DAP in their bangsa ‘Anak Malaysia’ tussle with our registration authorities?
BELOW: Birth cert application forms for Hannah and Wei Aik’s newborns
Helen Ang 
pribumi born out of rock?
Born of Blut und Eisen (Blood & Soil). Otto von Bismarck’s 1871 speech on the idea behind a modern and united German nation.
heil hitler? this i can agree.
Why should we not be responsible to Myanmar problem. We are not a rich nation to support influx of refugees.Send them back or to other rich nations. 200k is enough
We have a constitution.. And it is well defined.
Only the monkeys in the jungle are the true natives of Malaysia.
Melayu, unless they consider themselves as monkeys, are in actual fact, pendatangs.
You are either monkeys or pendatangs. Bumiputra is a voodoo political term created by the monkeys who deny being pendatangs so that they can oppression the other pendatangs.
On day we are going to break that knee on our necks.
Not that suprising that we have banana chinese or banana indian (being banana just to be on par with the whites while dismissing origins) because ‘monkeys’ need banana.
I can understand your sentiments, Helen. I can now understand why you’re such a huge fan of Trump. LOL.
Deep down we all want to protect our borders so that we don’t share what we don’t already have enough of. I realise taking in the boat people once may lead to more boat people arriving. But turning them away is cruel. It’s almost certain death awaits them. We should take those coming in on boats on humanitarian grounds. At the same time, we must work with the government of Myanmar and tell them to put a stop to this.
I am no fan of Trump. I think he’s evil. I’m no fan of DAP either. It’s funny how you see DAP more aligned to the Democrat left though. I see them more aligned to the far-right with the evangelical tie-ups.
Here’s what I think about DAP’s bashing of our government’s decision on the Rohingya issue. Firstly, they just like to create issues. In the past, it was about some nuclear fallout. This time, it’s about Rohingyas. It’s their MO. Secondly, you do know how these evangelical groups work don’t you? They show immense kindness and they then manipulate you into embracing their religion. Since they can’t convert Malay Muslims, my guess is they are hoping they might convert Rohingya Muslims.
Quote re: “At the same time, we must work with the government of Myanmar and tell them to put a stop to this.Unquote
The boats are ferrying Rohingya from Cox’s Bazar, not Rakhine state.
At Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, their lives are not in danger from the Burmese military.
Also Cox’s Bazar is the refugee camp where their application to third countries for asylum is being processed by the international organizations. So there is where the Rohingya should rightly remain.
Their sea journey coming to Langkawi does not make them refugees. They’re illegally coming here as economic migrants after paying the human traffickers.
Our M’sian coastguard is absolutely correct to turn away the Rohingya boats from our borders.
We should put them on an island all 200k Like B?.desh is doing.
One downunder nation is doing.
It seems odd that there is little negativity surrounding Down Under’s use of an island to incarcerate refugees for years.
But it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for our government to embark on.
” ‘race’ is merely a man-made idea ”
Nonsense!
It’s woman-made.