Bring on the general ejection - Dean Johns

After decades of robbing Malaysians of everything from their rightful share of the nation’s riches to their democratic rights and civil liberties, the kleptocrats and kleptocronies of the BN regime are hell-bent on stealing yet another five years in office.

But they know they haven’t a prayer of achieving this without playing as dirty as ever; hence their hate campaign against the organisers and supporters of Bersih for demanding a clean and fair electoral system.

Most Malaysians are so sick of BN and cynical about its propaganda, however, that the old dirty tricks are no longer working. In fact they’re positively counter-productive, and have been back-firing against the government to a deliciously destructive degree.

So that the claim by former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad that the Bersih 3.0 rally was a covert attempt to overthrow the government was greeted not, as intended, as a wise observation by a senior statesman, but as a ridiculous Mahathir-style fabrication.

A fabrication nevertheless enthusiastically adopted and echoed by current Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and three former police chiefs, one of whom went further to implicate communists in the plot.

Then the government made a further laughing stock of itself by appointing the red-suspecting former inspector-general of police Hanif Omar, as head of an ‘independent’ inquiry into the rally.

Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein also attracted his share of public scorn with his claim that “some parties” wanted injuries and deaths to occur at the rally, and deputy IGP Khalid Abu Bakar further stated that he had seen video evidence of the fact that there were “elements who wanted to cause deaths”.

Meanwhile, in case all these outlandish claims of coups and killings hadn’t sufficiently diverted Malaysians’ attention from Bersih’s call for clean and fair elections, Election Commission (EC) deputy chief Wan Ahmad Wan Omar stated that the EC would no longer deal with Bersih, as its co-chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan is a “destroyer of democracy”.

Also joining in an evidently concerted attempt to smear and harass Ambiga were a group of “petty traders” who rallied outside Pertama Complex and later at her house to cook burgers, while all the usual suspects including Perkasa and so-called ‘NGOs’ variously burned her in effigy and demanded that her citizenship be revoked.

And not to be out-done in the regime’s attempts to further disgrace itself and alienate the populace, the National Fatwa Council threw its support behind BN in condemning the Bersih 3.0 rally as haram.

Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak himself, in concert with his craven ‘mainstream media’, has been waging a campaign of all his usual lies and disinformation, as if in a desperate attempt to demonstrate his regime’s utter lack of credibility.

Any remaining shred of clout that the regime’s media still enjoy with most Malaysians was lost through such post-Bersih 3.0 atrocities as Astro’s censoring of BBC and Al Jazeera reports on the rallies, and the criminal defamation of Australian Senator Nick Xenopophon by the New Straits Times and Utusan Malaysia.

Farrago of fantasy
In addition, Najib’s speech to the faithful to mark the 66th anniversary of Umno was ludicrously false and fatuous even by his long-established low standards.

Addressing a rally of bused-in supporters at the National Stadium in Bukit Jalil, he proposed what he called “seven principles” whose patent falsehood only served to demonstrate that he wouldn’t recognise a principle if it bit him.

Right from principle number one, that “Umno keeps its promises”, his speech was a farrago of fantasy that might well have encouraged hard-core supporters to stick with the sleazy status quo, but surely only further alienated Malaysians craving clean and fair elections and government.

And Najib’s more recent speech in London to launch his latest propaganda ploy, an organisation called Friends of Barisan Nasional UK (FBNUK) , was so full of lies and spin as to be a sure-fire vote-loser back home.

The purpose of the FBNUK, he told a select group of BN officials, regime cronies and obscure UK political hacks, is “to actively promote closer ties with the United Kingdom and disseminate reliable, timely and accurate information to the Malaysian diaspora there”.

He then went on to claim that his government had “unveiled the most significant package of reforms since its independence,” including repeal of outdated security laws, implementation of new measures to enhance media freedoms and a range of important steps to clean up elections.

This was an outrageous performance by the man whose every ‘reform’ has been so fraudulent that press freedom in his country languishes at 144th in the world, and who just days ago rejected the rakyat’s call for clean and fair elections as an attempt to overthrow his rotten regime whose rule he has vowed to defend even with “broken bodies” or “lost lives”.

But who needs to overthrow Najib’s government when he and his cronies, with their outrageous lies, spins and injustices - not to mention unabated corruption and other species of criminality - are working so hard to undermine it?

Everybody in Malaysia, the UK and elsewhere is perfectly aware that Najib himself remains suspected of involvement in the corrupt submarine purchase currently under investigation in France.

And specifically in the UK, it’s common knowledge that the BN regime is guilty of selling the BBC fake documentaries and censoring its news reports.

In any case, attempts to proselytise expatriate Malaysians in the UK or anywhere else seems such a futile and self-defeating exercise in light of BN’s refusal to permit them to vote in their home elections that FBNUK might in practice prove more like FUKBN.

Meanwhile, back in Malaysia, a group claiming to be members of the Malay Armed Forces Veterans Association had gathered outside Ambiga's home to stage what they called “butt exercises” in protest against her being “an enemy of the nation who has smeared the country’s name”.

But BUTTBN, like FUKBN, is just another instance of the fact that everything BN says or does these days is yet another incentive for Malaysians to throw these bums out of office.

Or, in other words, to be sure and make the next general election, be it clean and fair or as dirty as the regime can make it, BN’s long-deserved general ejection.