PETALING JAYA: Leaders of the G25 group of eminent Malays have urged the people to be calm and stop racially manipulating issues. G25 founding member Tan Sri Mohd Sheriff Mohd Kassim (pic) said NGOs had a responsibility to ensure national issues be explained in a proper manner. “Don’t sensationalise every issue. Some issues happened because of circumstances in the country. “For example, unemployment or falling commodity prices, that has nothing to do with race and it’s beyond the control of the government. “But people manipulate that into a racial issue. That is unfair and not right. We have to look at things in a proper manner. Don’t look at every issue through racial lenses, ” he told The

Soon after Pakatan Harapan (PH) won the 14th general election, I wrote that the three issues that will continue to plague Malaysia will be religion, race and the economy. The video images of Dr Zakir Naik standing tall on the back on a Land Rover, escorted by police outriders entering the Sultan Muhammad IV Stadium in Kota Baru on Aug 10 must have created fear in the PH leadership and the concerned public. Such grand welcoming ceremonies are normally accorded to our Yang di-Pertuan Agong and sultans when they inspect a parade. Naik has hijacked Malaysia using Islamic fundamentalism to control the minds of the majority of the populace. Naik has now placed himself in a commanding position to i

KUCHING: Malaysia lacks public intellectuals despite the large number of higher institutions of learning that have sprung up across the country in recent years, an academic told an annual conference on the promotion of the English language. Sharifah Munirah Alatas of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia attributed this to a lackadaisical attitude among local academics who treat their work as just another salary-earning job. “Many lecturers in the universities are comfortable in their teaching and research worlds. They do what they have to do to get paid their monthly salaries,” she said in her presentation at the conference convened by the Malaysian English Language Teaching Association, a groupin

On Aug 4, I was on a Malindo Air flight from Kota Kinabalu to Kuala Lumpur to attend a meeting. Reading the flight magazine, I could feel my heartbeat speeding up and my stress level rising at the headline “Malaysia Independence Day Parade, Aug 31, 2019”. The accompanying description read: “Also known as Hari Merdeka Parade, the main parade is held at Merdeka Square in commemoration of being the original site of the first Independence Day parade.” Hello! Original site of the Malaysia independence parade? What are you talking about? First of all, Malaysia was formed on Sept 16, 1963, and Sabah and Sarawak had their own Padang Merdeka for the Malaysia declaration ceremony. The next page got mo

A MAJOR topic at the inaugural Malaysian Economic Symposium held on July 26 at the Parliament Complex was government-linked companies (GLCs). The big issues about GLCs are not only their large presence in the economy but also their governance. As mentioned in the symposium, which was jointly organised by the Office of the Speaker of the Dewan Rakyat, the Backbenchers Council and the Parliamentary Caucus on Reform and Governance to get a deeper understanding of the challenges facing the economy, there are so many GLCs that nobody knows what the total number is. The other concern is their lack of transparency and accountability. About 15 years ago, the then prime minister launched the GLC Tran