WHEN THE SO-CALLED MODERATES ARE EXTREMISTS, TOO!

…HOW MOST OF THEM CAN ONLY DO THAT USING THE PLATFORM OF JUST ONE NEWSPAPER, WHICH IS CLEARLY NOT REPRESENTING THE MAJORITY IN THE COUNTRY.

By Mansor Puteh

Are they really moderates or are they just as bad as the very persons they like to condemn or criticize?

And the moderates also like to describe themselves as liberals, but they did not dare to say how liberal they can be and what being a liberal means.

In the past there was an unnecessary issue or controversy on fundamentalism, but when Mahathir said he is a fundamentalist who believes in the fundamentals of Islam, the matter died.

It seems that many Malaysians especially those who like to stick their necks out by introducing new terms into the general vocabulary of the others are still grappling on some words in English; and they are also uncertain what they meant, with them only using those few words after they had been introduced in the west by the liberals there.

So the so-called liberals in Malaysia are basically pseudo-western or pseudo-American liberals in many ways and no wonder they sound exactly like their counterparts in America and the west.  

This is where the liberals in Malaysia are fundamentally wrong; they are wont to copy and accept everything that comes from abroad without question. They only dare to question their own values and those of the majority in the country.

No wonder they only write the small columns in the one newspaper that has bothered to publish them.

Malaysians have really not gone a long way since Merdeka or Independence when we still have a small group of people in the country who are mostly educated in England or America who are trying very hard to bring whatever they had managed to get when they were there thinking that they are going to be hailed as the introducers of those ideas and values that Malaysians do not have and need to further improve their lives.

This is the logic that they have.

But the other truth is that most of them have past their prime and are in the retirement stage but they are restless and do not know what else that they can do besides writing; they can never pursue higher academic goals or to expand their mental horizons because they do not have hobbies that they can entertain and become experts in.

The only thing that they have is the talent to write and to use some basic logic to argue but not convincingly. 

What’s so moderate about them when they are also vicious in their attacks on those who they had earlier branded as extremists?

Do they have the right to brand others and not be similarly branded themselves by their nemesis?

But most of the time they have nothing better to do with the small and tight space that they have been given by only one English language newspaper that is known to be biased.

They know they cannot leave the flock to create or establish their own sect. They can only belittle the very religion that billions of the others follow.

In any case what the few of them western-educated have written does not create any stir amongst the Melayu and Muslim majority in the country who did not care with what they say.

It is just for the newspaper to use them to express the thoughts on Islam and the Muslim community in Malaysia that they are not brave enough to write on their own, being non-Muslims.

The so-called moderates are not moderates because they too are insistent that they are always right and can never be wrong; they insist on everybody to listen to them and to agree with them on whatever they say even if they try to mislead everybody by not admitting that they are not that qualified in all the things they claim to be the champion and expert of.

They are no better than those they charge for being heretic and subversives or extremists.

They claim to be moderates and also liberals, but they did not set the parameters and limits on how far they can go to push for their personal and weird agendas, which not many Malaysians adhere to as they are not sitting on a solid philosophical or even religious base, but mostly on mush.

Some of them claim to also be liberals but the way they try to prove to the others and especially their own kinds, the Muslims is to show the others are backward, especially if they are seen to be too Arabic in their ways.

At the same time they had neglected to say that they are already too westernized in many ways.

But alas, they can only do so in the country where they can also express themselves in English, which is their adopted language, but which they can never go very far to use it, especially in America or in Britain.

So who are really the moderates and who are the extremists?

The moderates are often the extremists because they always try to push their personal agendas and opinions and views on the others without regard to their own limitations in that they had become a tool of the enemies of their own people.

And most of the time they spout words that had been used by other cultural and social and religious activists elsewhere particularly in America and Europe.

They have indeed become pseudo-Americans or pseudo-Europeans.

And those whom they have charged or would like to charge for being extremists are the people who are trying very much to do away with Americanism and westernism, which their critics, the pseudo-Americans and pseudo-westerners had become.

They who like to criticize those Melayu especially for aping the Arabs, while they gleefully and wholeheartedly embrace Americanism and westernism openly and unabashedly.

They who like to pass judgment on the others are often those who are the victims of their own judgment that they did not realize.