Anwar: Ex-judge’s ‘racist’ warning to Chinese would make Hitler proud

BY CLARA CHOOI
ASSISTANT NEW EDITOR

KUALA LUMPUR, May 13 — Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim has slammed former Court of Appeal judge Datuk Mohd Noor Abdullah for warning the Chinese of a Malay backlash, saying the latter’s “racist” remarks would make German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler proud.
The Pakatan Rakyat (PR) de facto leader wrote in a brief blog posting last night that unlike Umno, leaders in his pact would not spread such racial discord but propagate peace and mutual respect among the country’s many races.
“How long more are we to tolerate such hate mongering and race baiting from the illegitimate Najib government?” Anwar (picture) asked.
“Former appeal court judge Datuk Mohd Noor Abdullah’s racist speech puts the Ku Klux Klan to shame and makes Hitler proud,” he said, referring to Germany’s World War II leader Adolf Hitler whose Nazi party perpetrated the Holocaust, the genocide of an estimated six million European Jews.
The Ku Klux Klan or KKK is a secret society organised in the United States after the Civil War to reassert white supremacy, white nationalism and anti-immigration, expressed through terrorism.
“Let’s all stand shoulder to shoulder and remain united. To Malaysians — thank you for coming out tonight in Ipoh and showing these zealots what being Anak Malaysia means,” Anwar added.
He was responding to remarks made by Mohd Noor at a forum yesterday where the latter warned the Chinese community to prepare for a backlash from the Malays for their alleged “betrayal” against the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) in Election 2013.
The former high-ranking judge reportedly accused the Chinese of plotting to “seize political power” from the Malays, despite already having benefited economically from the “Malay’s hand of friendship”.
“For the Malays, the pantang larang (taboo) is to be betrayed, because when they are betrayed, they will react and when they react, their dendam kesumat tidak tersudah-sudah (wrath will be endless).
“When Malays are betrayed, there is a backlash and the Chinese must bear the consequences of a Malay backlash,” he was quoted as saying on independent news portal Malaysiakini at the forum titled “GE13 post-mortem: Muslim leadership and survival” organised by the UiTM Malaysia Alumni Association and Gabungan Melayu Semenanjung.
To stress his position, Mohd Noor, who currently sits on the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) complaints committee, also said the Malays have always been on the defensive but if the community were to move to the offensive, they should demand for the creation of more Malay rights, including larger reserve land and a higher Bumiputera equity target.
“The nice term would be called ‘re-organising society’ but the crude term would be for Malays to emigrate into the cities so that we will own the houses together with others and not only be able to just look at them.”
“Arrange it in such a way that from today on every business would have a 67 per cent share ready for Malays to be taken up at any time,” he was quoted as saying.
Post-Election 2013 has seen scores of BN and BN-friendly leaders take potshots at the Chinese community for their clear backing of federal opposition PR during the tumultuous polls last week.
But while they argue that it had been a “Chinese tsunami” that had cost BN to bleed seats, analysts and PR leaders have denied this, pointing to the 51 per cent in popular vote that the opposition had won against BN’s 48 per cent.
Instead, they have argued that the vote trend did not reflect a Chinese-vs-Malay contest but rather an urban-vs-rural divide that has resulted in the emergence of two Malaysias.
Umno-owned daily Utusan Malaysia has been pushing the view that the election results had been because the Chinese had voted against BN, publishing daily news and editorials to expound this point, which has been backed by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.