KUALA LUMPUR, June 5 – Lim Kit Siang said today it is “preposterous” of Utusan Malaysia to blame Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim and the DAP for the ulama group’s losses in the PAS party elections.
The DAP parliamentary leader said the Umno newspaper’s claims are imaginative that it does not deserve any “rebuttal except a contemptuous dismissal”, adding it was worse than the “DAP-Christian Malaysia” story last month.
“The saving grace is that Utusan’s editors and their real masters are preaching to a diminishing audience (swiftly taking Umno down the slippery slope to bankruptcy, both political and financial with plummeting circulation ) – which probably explains their screaming desperation by the day,” he said in a statement today.
Columnist Awang Selamat, a pseudonym for its editors, wrote in Utusan’s weekend edition today that both PKR and DAP have been working this past year to influence the PAS party polls where incumbent deputy president Nasharudin Mat Isa lost to popular grassroots leader Mohamed Sabu.
“The most satisfied and happy is Anwar and DAP strongman Lim Kit Siang. They can both smile widely in their sleep as their strategy has become a reality,” Awang Selamat wrote in Mingguan Malaysia, the Umno newspaper’s weekend edition today.
Lim pointed out Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak spent RM70 million in public funds to enlist public affairs strategist APCO expertise to promote 1 Malaysia but it had been “sabotaged everyday by Umno and Barisan Nasional component parties with the Utusan’s ‘garbage of all garbage’ today the latest example”.
“It is the Pakatan Rakyat comprising DAP, PKR and PAS which symbolises the real 1 Malaysia — uniting Malaysians regardless of race, religion, geography or socio-economic status — while Barisan Nasional led by Umno hegemon and the impotent and irrelevant 12 other BN component parties which represent a discredited, divided and dispirited nation-building concept!
“Otherwise, how could DAP be accused by BN component parties like MCA and Gerakan of having sold out the Malaysian Chinese, Indians and non-Muslims to PAS while Umno through Utusan is accusing PAS of being stooge and puppet of DAP?” said Lim.
He added that PR parties are equal partners unlike BN which only has one master.
“Each of the three PR parties — DAP, PKR and PAS — have been developing in the past two years to be better prepared for the greatest political challenge awaiting all Malaysians: the 13th general elections,” he said.
Utusan had been at the forefront of a campaign this past week to support the ulamas or scholars group in the PAS elections but newly elected deputy president Mohamed Sabu led a group of professionals to sweep the party top posts and nearly half of the central working committee. It had also supported unity moves between Umno and PAS, which the Islamist party has again firmly rejected this year.
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