silly season of 2006

after giving you an article by my friend, martin jalleh, here is one by dr francis loh, who is, also, like martin, a penangite catholic (like me). i had met dr francis loh a few times but only know him casually on a ‘recognise face so smile at each other’ basis only. another penangite catholic, who is very prolific at writing like martin and dr francis loh, is anil netto who is in aliran and he also writes for asia times. i know anil well too but not as well as martin. see, we have 3 good writers here who are catholics and from penang (btw, susan loone is one of us too!). whoever said the church is silent (or passive) on political matters eh.

ok now on to dr francis loh’s article. like martin, he wrote on what happened during the past year. you can read his article at beritamalaysia or at aliran itself. i am not going to reproduce it here since it is lengthy but i do want to highlight a part about the ‘sms incident‘ – stupid action of the mufti of perak in near causing a riot in an ipoh church. (he was the culprit who caused it, not the poor lady from kedah).

The latest silly incident is how 300 Muslims reportedly demonstrated in front of a Catholic church in Silibin, Ipoh on 5 September. Why? Apparently because they had received an SMS which (mis)informed them that Muslim converts were going to be baptised that Sunday morning. As it turned out, it was 98 Catholic youths who were going to receive their First Holy Communion that morning.

Forget the fact, as the Catholic bishop has clarified, that converts to Christianity need to undergo year-long courses and that such conversion celebrations would only occur during a special Easter Vigil occasion. You would not expect Muslims to realise these details. Forget also the fact that, by demonstrating, these Muslims would disrupt Sunday church services and prevent people from going to church. Indeed, forget that they would never tolerate people of other faiths demonstrating in front of their mosque and disrupting their Friday prayers.

But, what is the matter with these 300 people who could have been so easily misled by an SMS? Don’t they think about the contents of messages that they receive? Do they not think through what they read or see or hear? Don’t they think before they act? Isn’t this simply old ethnic and patronage politics of the worst kind wherein we blindly follow such rumour-mongering about how we are being threatened by another ethnic group? We thank God that most Malaysians have not descended to such low depths.

here are my previous posts touching on the sms incident.
the leaders of the mob should apologise

kamanan dekat gereja diancam

we will respond with prayers>/a>

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note: still can’t get connected at home. that’s why you see i do mostly CnP posts (or grumblings!)! 🙂