Hypocrites helping themselves

By Dean Johns

Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak has reportedly claimed on Twitter that the report of his wife’s now notorious fashion-shopping spree in Sydney earlier this year ‘was a wildly exaggerated story deliberately fabricated to affect people’s perception of their leaders’.

No surprise at the falsehood of this statement. As the whole world knows very well by now, the only way to stop 1Malaysia’s great misleader from lying would be to confiscate his iPhone and sew his lips together.

But as accustomed as I’ve become to his taste and talent for fraud and deception, I still find myself gob-smacked at times by Najib’s massive capacity for hypocrisy.

This is the man, after all, who in league with his Umno/BN colleagues and mainstream media cronies has participated in and presided over the deliberate fabrication of virtually countless stories designed to affect public perception of leading opponents of his regime.

The first and most obvious target of Umno/BN smears, slurs and slanders that springs to mind is, of course, Anwar Ibrahim, who Najib and his gang have fitted up with a whole range of original creations.

Like the second sodomy charge that Anwar recently finally shrugged off after a two-year travesty of a trial only to find himself facing it again with the granting of the prosecution’s appeal.

Then there was the sex DVD fabricated by the so-called ‘Datuk T’ trio, one of whom was a former Umno menteri besar who was notoriously relieved of his post.

And all the while there has been that other wildly exaggerated and deliberately fabricated story about Anwar’s unhealthy friendship with Jews or the possibly ‘sinister’ implications of his recognition of Israel’s right to defend its borders.

Seizing on a perfectly reasonable statement by Anwar in an interview that Israel has the right to defend its security, Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin fabricated the story that he “does not rule out the possibility” that this was an attempt “to invite the Jewish state and the United States to interfere in Malaysian politics”.       

Never mind glaring hypocrisies like the rabidly anti-semitic former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s secret payment of US$1.2 million to corrupt Jewish lobbyist Jack Abramoff for a secret meeting with President George W Bush, and the Umno/BN regime’s hiring of a notorious Israeli-owned PR consultancy, Apco Worldwide, to brighten-up Najib’s international image.

Displays of hypocrisy

And equally hypocritical, given the suspicious wealth but apparent untouchability of a great many offspring of Umno/BN politicians and cronies, have been attacks on Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng, by means of a deliberately fabricated stories about his children.

First and ugliest of these was the utterly false allegation that Lim’s adolescent son had sexually molested a female schoolmate, and that his father had paid RM200,000 to get the boy enrolled in an alternative school.

And more recently there was that gratuitous, inappropriate and clearly deliberately fabricated public statement by Defence Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi that Lim’s daughter had been “much improved” by her experience of national service.

In the light of such regime-inspired outrages, objecting to a true or at least substantially verified story about Rosmah Mansor’s frock-shopping exploits is hypocritical in the extreme.

But not so extreme, perhaps, as the displays of hypocrisy sparked by the ongoing National Feedlot Corporation scandal. The moment the news broke of alleged hanky-panky in the granting and disbursement of a RM250-million loan to the husband and children of Umno Wanita chief and Women, Family and Community Development Minister, Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, she launched a scathing attack on Anwar’s wife Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail.

This proved a bad mistake, as it only served to highlight the stark contrast between Shahrizat’s career as a member and beneficiary of the criminally corrupt Umno/BN regime with Wan Azizah’s spotless reputation.      

Then, in an act of quite astonishing hypocrisy, former minister Rafidah Aziz, known as the “AP Queen” for her former allegedly corrupt largesse in handing-out motor-vehicle approval permits, called on Shahrizat to step down from her official posts.          

But Shahrizat has defied Rafidah’s call, commenting that she “did not want to be rude to her seniors”, and adding that she is answerable only to God, and has been to Mecca three times in the past two-and-a-half months to “ask for guidance from Allah”.

Of course such sickening sanctimony and hypocrisy is by no means exclusive to Shahrizat and her colleagues in the Umno/BN regime.

That hypocrisy knows no bounds or boundaries was graphically illustrated in today’s Sydney Morning Herald by a photograph of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad piously praying at a ceremony marking the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, while his army continues to slaughter citizens protesting against his murderous rule.

This may well be the kind of nightmare scenario with which Najib was threatening Malaysians when, behind his hypocritical pose as a ‘moderate’, he rallied the rabble at the 2010 Umno general assembly with the cry that “even if our bodies are crushed and our lives lost, brothers and sisters, whatever happens, we must defend Purajaya”.      

But meanwhile, as long as he still has a fighting chance of rigging the next general election in favour of his regime, he’s still relying on his trade-mark mantra “you help me, I help you”.

Despite the fact that, as we students of Umno/BN’s 54-year hypocracy all know only too well, what he actually means is “you help me, so I and my fellow fraudsters in Umno/BN can go right on helping ourselves to whatever we can get our grubby hands on”.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia’, ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’, ‘Missing Malaysia’ and ‘1Malaysia.con’.