On March 31 a five-year-old boy wandered out of his parents’ sight during a shopping trip to a mall in Kuala Lumpur. The story immediately made its way into the mainstream media, which began publicizing the parents’ desperate plea to anyone to return their missing child. Most had little hope of finding the boy, at least not alive.
One has to look to Dr Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, for a slap to the Americans once in a while. Many have dismissed him as suffering from “former president syndrome”: ex-rulers indulge in rhetoric and tell others what they themselves should do were they still in power. But in the case of Mahathir, one thing many of his enemies and friends agree on is that the man has a lot of stamina for putting up a good fight.
"Academic-turned-militant", "bomb expert", "terrorist", "Bali-bomb brain": these are just some of the abusive remarks that the media in Indonesia and Malaysia have borrowed from western news agencies to libel Dr Azahari Husin, who died on November 9 after what the Indonesian police claim was a shoot-out.
After months of Bangkok accusing its southern Muslim population of being terrorists, a series of violent attacks rocked the southern Muslim-majority provinces near the Thai-Malaysian border...
Although Anwar Ibrahim’s ‘conviction’ on corruption charges was a foregone conclusion, the April 14 verdict still sent shock waves through Malaysia. The sentence - six years in jail - was even heavier than expected, and Judge Augustine Paul’s decision to have the prison term begin from the day of the conviction...
One of Malaysia’s prominent alims (Islamic scholars), Datuk Ishak Baharom, is to lose his job as the State Mufti of Selangor - Malaysia’s richest state - effective from October 31, 1997.
When one loses the arguments, he becomes incoherent. He talks about things which are out of this world or age, and of things which had no relevance or connections to the arguments in hand. This seems to be the case with some of our leaders stuck in an Islamic time capsule.
The Malaysian government agreed to allow the Israeli cricket team play in an international cricket tournament in Kuala Lumpur which is participated by 22 countries. A notable exception is Pakistan which has one of the world’s best cricket teams. Pakistan is boycotting the tournament on the ground of Israeli participation.
Addressing Hollywood film industrialists in Beverly Hills on January 14, Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad invited the American entertainment industry to invest in his latest brainchild, the Multimedia Super-Corridor (MSC).
In what is a major blow to the Malaysian government’s democratic pretentions, the country’s High Court declared on June 19 that Malaysia’s controversial Bakun Hydro Electric Dam project invalid.
It is true that Malaysia enjoyed a certain reputation among Muslims of the world as a ‘good’ Muslim country. It is not that they were impressed by the rapid development but by the fact they still could hear the azan over the TV, well kept mosques all over the capital and also Malaysian leaders still swearing their loyalty to Islam.
