patah balek

Wikileaks 2

2010-12-13T20:56:00.002+08:00

Gara-gara pendedahan kabel diplomatik dan risikan oleh Wikileaks, hari ini negara menjadi kecoh besar apabila pemimpin-pemimpin politik kita dan media berlumba-lumba mengulasnya.

Anwar Ibrahim, tuan punya badan, menyalahkan polis Cawangan Khas dan menegaskan kabel diplomatik tersebut tidak mempunyai apa-apa bukti.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad pula percaya Anwar tidak mungkin dijerat untuk melakukannya tetapi percaya Lee Kwan Yew memang mengetahui kegiatan Anwar!

Ibrahim Ali, yang ingin membuktikan beliau telah benar-benar sihat dan segar, tidak hairan dengan pendedahan Wikileaks. Ia bukan lagi satu rahsia, katanya.

Peguam Anwar, Sankara Nair, pula ingin merujuk perkara ini -- khususnya media seperti Utusan Malaysia dan New Straits Times -- kepada mahkamah atas alasan sub judice.

Menariknya, peguam ini memetik wawancara Malaysiakini dengan Anwar pada Julai 2008 yang melaporkan Anwar pernah berkata beliau memang sudah mendapat maklumat bahawa (bekas) ketua polis negara Musa Hassan sedang merancang sesuatu.

Bayangkan, ini satu pendedahan kabel oleh Wikileaks....

Wikileaks

2010-12-12T20:56:00.002+08:00

Pengasas laman Wikileaks, yang kini memuncak popularnya, Julian Assange pernah singgah di Malaysia tahun lalu untuk mengunjungi Anwar Ibrahim. Waktu itu, katanya, Anwar sedang berkempen di sebuah pilihan raya kecil.

Tidak lama selepas pertemuannya dengan pemimpin PKR itu, Assange ditahan oleh pasukan polis Cawangan Khas (SB), katanya lagi.

Assange dikenali umum kerana dua perkara: Pertama, mendedahkan maklumat sulit negara-negara besar dan kini, kedua, kerana dituduh mengadakan hubungan seks tanpa kondom!

Lihat video di sini dan salinan ucapannya di Oslo Freedom Forum pada April lalu.

Pendemokrasian

2009-12-18T12:40:00.003+08:00

Ilan Peleg menulis sebuah buku khas bagi membincangkan kemungkinan jalan-jalan mengubah, ke arah demokrasi, sebuah negara yang pelbagai kaum tetapi dikuasai secara ketat oleh satu kaum sahaja.

Dengan kata lain, negara seperti Malaysia.

Pengarang Democratizing the Hegemonic State: Political Transformation in the Age of Identity mengkategorikan negara seumpama ini sebagai "exclusivist regime".

Boleh baca ringkasan ideanya di laman web penerbitnya Cambridge University Press.

Berdasarkan penilaian bab-bab awalnya, buku profesor sains politik ini boleh dijadikan rujukan untuk memahami gelagat negara seperti Malaysia, sekurang-kurangnya membandingkan dengan beberapa lagi negara seumpamanya.

[ii]

Selain mempromosikannya di kalangan rakan-rakan sepejabat, saya mencadangkan buku ini dijadukan rujukan kedua atau ketiga selepas membaca dan membahaskan buku Joseph R Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State.

Buku nipis ini asalnya makalah yang disusun daripada syarahannya; jadi ia hanya memuatkan beberapa lakaran idea tentang evolusi pembentukan negara - khususnya dalam pengalaman Eropah - sehingga entiti yang kita panggil "negara bangsa" (warisan abad ke-19)

Buku harus jadi bacaan wajib kepada aktivis politik dan NGO, kepada semua penganut liberal yang mencurigai negara dan menganggapnya "necessary evil". Bacaan wajib dalam erti kata mengenali sejarah pembentukan institusinya, alasan ia diwujudkan, lingkungan ia muncul dan gelagatnya berkembang untuk melayang jenis-jenis elit tertentu.

Sekumpulan teman-teman telah mengupas buku ini (terbitan Princeton University Press) tetapi belum memadai kerana tiada ulasan meluas untuk perkongsian dengan khalayak lebih besar.

[iii]

Buku Murray J Edelman, The Politics of Misinformation, barangkali teks yang paling sulit difahami walaupun konsep-konsepnya ringkas dan padat. Teorinya tentang politik dan negara diadunkan dengan analisis kajian budaya.

Ia melihat komunikasi politik sebagai "concentrations of social and economic power result in public languages of politics that are necessarily image-based, vague, and misleading in their denial of undemocratic tendencies.

"As a result, public discourses of democracy tend to be populistic, emotional, and likely to emphasize images of progress rather than structural inequalities in their formulations of public problems.

"In short, neither typical problem definitions nor solutions invite critical popular understanding or involvement in democratic politics."

Dengan kata lain, buku Edelman cuba membangkitkan persoalan tentang "the symbolic nature of politics, and specifically the role played by non-rational beliefs (those that lack real-world grounding) in the shaping of political preferences."

Menurutnya, "beneath an apparently functional and accountable democratic state lies a symbolic system that renders an ignorant public quiescent. The state, the media, civil society, interpersonal relations, even popular art are part of a mass spectacle kept afloat by empty symbolic beliefs."

Walaupun kita boleh tidak bersetuju dengan analisisnya, bagi saya, ia tetap menarik kerana cuba menyuluh beberapa persoalan ketatanegaraan secara ringkas serta padat, dan pada waktu yang sama cuba menyelak penyelewengan-penyelewengan terseumbunyi.

Kolum

2009-12-14T23:58:00.003+08:00

Tidak pasti, sama ada janji saya ini dapat ditunaikan atau tidak. Harap-harap dapat ditunaikan! Atau, sewajibnya ditunaikan. Janji, apakah boleh dimungkiri?

Saya berjanji kepada diri sendiri, dan beberapa rakan di pejabat, untuk menghidupkan semula kolum Tiada Noktah di Malaysiakini -- kolum yang terabai sebaik sahaja yang selesai tinjauan di Jakarta dan menyertai sebuah akhbar web.

Setelah hampir dua tahun di akhbar web lama saya ini (sejak Februari 2008), saya berangan-angan semula (ulang: semula) untuk meneruskan kolum Tiada Noktah.

Mungkin, seawal-awalnya bulan Januari 2009

[ii]

Saya ada beberapa topik yang ingin diulas, antaranya kontroversi dan reaksi susulan kenyataan Nga Kor Ming tentang peruntukan masjid. Bagaimana kenyataan seumpama ini mudah dimanipulasi sehingga kita mendengar lebih banyak "nasihat ala leteran" daripada membahaskan sama ada wajar atau tidak peruntukan tidak sampai 2 peratus untuk rumah ibadat bukan Islam!

Ia mengingatkan saya kewajaran PAS dan beberapa NGO Melayu kanan menganjurkan demonstrasi membantah forum tahun lalu yang dianjurkan oleh Majlis Peguam.

Saya sering terganggu dengan reaksi-reaksi negatif, liar, emosi dan tidak masuk akal kumpulan Melayu kanan dan Islam kanan ini. Saya bukanlah orang kiri. Tetapi aliran kanan melampau ala negara ini sebetulnya bukanlah kanan dalam erti kata "right" dalam pengkategorian politik di dunia Barat.

"Kanan" di negara kita lebih mudah dikaitkan dengan orang yang tidak berfikir, tebal emosi, suka menekan orang lain (setidak-tidaknya suka membebel macam mak-mak kita!) dan suka menutup wacana -- lebih baik orang tidak menyuarakan sesuatu keraguan dan permasalahan dan biarkan sahaja isu ini semua terpendam daripada cuba mengucapkannya.

"Kanan" ini, dengan erti kata lain, bukan "kanan" cerdik tetapi kanan bebal, kanan bahlol, dan kanan sengal. Pendek kata, kanan kental, kanan sembab!

Sekira-kiranya kalau kita melayan kanan seumpama ini kita turut menjadi bebal dan sembab seperti mereka. Atau, kalau mengabaikan kanan seperti ini, kita juga bebal dan sembah seumpama mereka!

[iii]

Barangkali, dengan penuh emosinya, kita pula boleh labelkan kanan ini kanan talibanisme -- jika kita tidak mahu sebut kanan fasisme!

(c) Hak cipta imej Web Designer Wall.com (dengan sedikit tapisan!)

Beyond breaking news

2009-11-29T12:50:00.003+08:00

In the minds of most journalists, the work we do is indispensable, and has always been indispensable, to the successful operation of a democratic society.

A democracy requires an informed public, which journalism generates, and because we monitor the performance of government, we ensure that it honestly and capably serves the people. Journalism schools often have rhetoric to that effect emblazoned on their walls—certainly ours does. We're here to train the future bearers of our democratic function and to do what we can to nudge the current bearers to do a better job.

At this moment, given the precarious financial state of the news media, our core conviction about the role of our profession feels a bit shaky—more on that in a moment. But schools and departments of journalism are generally thriving. The contradiction is especially noticeable because the education sector is just about the only part of journalism whose business model is still in excellent health. How can we be so evidently countercyclical? And what can we do to help change the situation for news organizations, so that journalism schools and the profession might thrive together?

In hindsight, it seems clear that just about all living journalists grew up taking the solidity of the social and economic arrangements underlying our work too much for granted. Yes, until 10 or 15 years ago, it seemed as if practically everybody was in the ambit of the mainstream media, but that didn't mean there was a loyal mass audience for news about public affairs. Newspapers were vast bundles of information—sports scores, classified ads, movie schedules, comic strips, supermarket discount coupons—no one part of which had to stand on its own economically. Television and radio news were the sole sources for a summary of the great events of the day, on the day they occurred.

But today the Internet, by doing a wonderful thing—making every component part of the news separately and instantly available to anyone with a broadband connection—has relentlessly picked apart the economic logic of news organizations. It turns out that original reporting on public affairs, unbundled from other information and untethered from high-priced retail advertising, has trouble paying for itself. So, by inexorable economic logic, fewer people are being paid to do it.

Yes, the nation's founders wrote the First Amendment, and the citizens of the early republic passed it. But with respect to the press, that represented an extension of the guarantee of free speech to printed matter, not the creation of a sanctioned professional category. Information-seeking reporters took decades to arrive on the American scene. First there had to be cities, and fast, powerful printing presses, and ways of making enough money in the newspaper business to pay for newsrooms. The big-city newsrooms of the late 20th century were a workable support system for the social function of reportorial journalism, but even then it was anomalous for such an important democratic task to be entrusted almost entirely to private businesses. Anyway, the point soon became moot because the economics of the arrangement stopped working.

Why haven't journalism schools suffered the same fate as newspapers? In general, universities—which, like newspapers, only more so, are great bundles of unrelated activities having to do with the production and dissemination of knowledge—have thus far been immune to the process of disaggregation that has devastated news organizations. The idea that belonging to the middle class absolutely requires first getting a bachelor's degree from a residential college, a concept that would have been considered crazy a century ago, is now deeply ingrained in American culture.

Journalism programs in universities mainly serve undergraduates, so the programs live under the protective umbrella of that assumption. Graduate journalism programs mainly attract people who have fallen in love with the profession, so those programs are protected from strict cost-benefit calculations. Many young people seem to be excited by the turmoil in journalism and see it as an opportunity to get in on something new, rather than as a threat. And journalism schools have a powerful argument for themselves today because they can teach the skills that the profession demands—in working in digital media, and in reporting on complicated subjects—far better than newsrooms can.

A generation ago, the essential skill for journalists, writing a breaking news story, was fairly intuitive, and many graduates of journalism schools could expect careers that entailed long, slow rises through large news organizations, with training embedded in every step. Today many of our new graduates find themselves working at understaffed Web sites—either freestanding operations or parts of traditional news organizations—where they have to be comfortable with Web publishing from Day 1 and have to handle quite advanced and specialized editorial content, without much advice from anybody. Education is important in this environment because the workplace isn't set up to provide it.

Because of their location in universities, journalism schools have access to large populations of young people, and many are making efforts to teach "news literacy" courses to nonjournalism students. Such courses aim to educate civilians about how journalism works, but also, and more important, to instill the habit of reading the news every day. The idea is that a daily report from a reputable news organization is to citizenship what the proper diet is to health: a long-term, life-enriching practice for individuals, and, in the aggregate, an important element of a better-functioning society.

Those courses are a good thing. But journalism programs in universities can work toward the ideal of an informed, engaged citizenry in other, even more urgently important ways.

The main problem in journalism today lies on the supply side, not the demand side. It is true that the unfettered, ungoverned Internet can offer up all sorts of misinformation to readers. But it is also true that, unlike traditional news media, the Internet provides a means for instant correction and counterargument. (Our leading font of durable journalistic misinformation is talk radio and television, not the Internet.) Online encyclopedias, auctioneers, and retailers have found pretty good ways of establishing trust across large communities of strangers; that is within journalism's reach, too. The Internet almost certainly has expanded the audience for genuine news more than it has expanded the audience for misleading news. The world's top news organizations have attracted enormous global readerships, far beyond what they have ever had before, and millions of secondary sites, from aggregators to one-person blogs, are heavy direct and indirect users of material produced by those organizations.

Because the barrier to entry is so low, the Internet is also a great medium for journalistic experimentation; we don't have to wait around for big, tradition-bound organizations to innovate. The real difficulty is that the Internet doesn't support the kind of journalism that covers production costs, because almost all Internet journalism is free to readers and bargain-priced, compared with print, for advertisers. Opinion journalism, of the kind invented by pamphleteers in the 1700s, thrives on the Internet. Original reporting does not. So even if every single person under 30 woke up every morning with a gnawing hunger for news, it's not at all clear that the hunger could be satisfied, especially if it's a hunger for local news.

Therefore journalism schools ought to explore, and are already exploring, the possibility of becoming significant producers of original news reporting to make up for the loss of the reporting that economically devastated news organizations can no longer afford. Journalism schools and departments are practical-minded, often to a fault; they are oriented toward sending their students out to report under faculty members' direction. The advent of the Web has made publication and distribution of the fruits of students' reporting easy and inexpensive. Anyone in the world who has a good Internet connection can log on to the Columbia School of Journalism's Web site and find at least two dozen journalistic sites operated by our students and faculty members. The efforts include local-news sites about Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and upper Manhattan; subject-matter sites on charter schools, religion, and the economic crisis; and media-related sites for magazine, radio, broadcast, and digital journalism.

What journalism and the public most need right now is serious, continuing coverage of matters of public importance: city halls, school systems, statehouses. Journalism schools are not fully equipped to provide that now, but the logistical and financial difficulty of equipping them to do so would be far less than the difficulty of creating and sustaining new news organizations built from scratch. Like teaching hospitals, journalism schools can provide essential services to their communities while they are educating their students.

Journalism schools not only can replace the original reporting capability that news organizations have lost, but also can raise the level of sophistication in the practice of journalism. Why? Because so many of them are located in research universities that are our society's leading collections of top-level expertise across all realms of knowledge. Journalism schools should be deeply involved with the other parts of their universities, not just in order to spread the word about journalism, but also to learn, and then to teach, about the substance of the issues that their students report on.

Journalism is more interdisciplinary than most other fields of study in the university, and more oriented toward producing published work aimed at nonexperts. But it should—and, at this point, probably must—have a greater ambition than simply reporting facts without analysis or context. News organizations are finding that "breaking news" has become a commodity without much economic value. Journalism schools, because they are in universities, are an ideal place for journalism to find its way toward producing work that truly explains societies to their citizens.

Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Sumber: Journalism Schools Can Push Coverage Beyond Breaking News Oleh Nicholas Lemann (The Chronicle Review, 15 Nov 2009)

Non sense!

2009-10-12T14:41:00.003+08:00

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously.

Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science.

“We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find.

When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

Sumber: How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect oleh Benedict Carey (New York Times, October 5, 2009)

Absurd

2009-09-23T22:45:00.004+08:00

The befuddled tramps in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot are a poetic personification of paralysis. But new research suggests the act of watching them actually does get us somewhere.

Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains.

That's the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What's more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.

In the first of two experiments, 40 participants (all Canadian college undergraduates) read one of two versions of a Franz Kafka story, The Country Doctor. In the first version, which was only slightly modified from the original, "the narrative gradually breaks down and ends abruptly after a series of non sequiturs," the researchers write. "We also included a series of bizarre illustrations that were unrelated to the story."

The second version contained extensive revisions to the original. The non sequiturs were removed, and a "conventional narrative" was added, along with relevant illustrations.

All participants were then shown a series of 45 strings of letters, which they were instructed to copy. They were informed that the strings, which consisted of six to nine letters, contained a strict but not easily decipherable pattern.

They were then introduced to a new set of letter strings, some of which followed the pattern and some of which did not. They were asked to mark which strings followed the pattern.

Those who had read the absurd story selected a higher number of strings as being consistent with the pattern. More importantly, they "demonstrated greater accuracy in identifying the genuinely pattern-congruent letter strings," the researchers report.

This suggests "the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities" are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.

Sumber: This Is Your Brain on Kafka Oleh Tom Jacobs (Miller-McCune.com, September 16, 2009). Hak cipta foto (c) A life I'm doomed to lead (April 9, 2009)

Harapan

2009-09-10T23:39:00.004+08:00

Aku tidak faham kenapa foto yang seringkas ini diberikan tajuk "Mata Harapan". Sesekali ia bertukar sisi menjadi seperti cermin - mata dalam foto yang menggambarkan harapan atau mata yang memandang menaruh harapan? Mata jurugambar? Atau kedua-dua kemungkinan?

Atau, dalam seni, berilah apa-apa tajuk. Asalkan ada tajuk, setidak-tidaknya berjudul "tanpa tajuk"!

Sumber: Photographer of the week oleh Randy Brogen [Boston Globe, 8 Sept 2009]

Lembu

2009-09-08T20:12:00.004+08:00

Pepatah Melayu: Lembu punya susu, sapi dapat nama ...

The Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) today continued its investigations on Malaysiakini by holding a marathon questioning session involving the online daily's 12 staff members.

The eight-hour session began at 10.30am at Malaysiakini's office in Bangsar Utama, Kuala Lumpur, and ended at about 6.30pm.

Among those questioned were Malaysiakini chief executive officer Premesh Chandran, editors, journalists, video team members and one technical staff.

About eight MCMC officers were involved in the questioning process, who split into three teams to record statements from Malaysiakini staff simultaneously.

Except for Chandran and the technical staff, all the others were involved in the process of news gathering, editing and publishing two stories and videos related to the cow-head protest in Shah Alam on Aug 28 and a press conference by Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein on Sept 2.

They were journalists Rahmah Ghazali, Jimadie Shah Othman, Andrew Ong, cameraperson Amir Abdullah, editors K Kabilan, Nasharuddin Rahman, Fathi Aris Omar, video editors Shufiyan Shukur, Ng Kok Foong and Lydia Azizan.

The investigation by MCMC centres on two video clips published by Malaysiakini - one on the protest and the other on Hishammuddin's press conference - which were deemed offensive.

The videos cited were the 'Temple demo: Residents march with cow's head' and 'Hisham: Don't blame cow-head protesters'.

Sumber asal: Malaysiakini videos: 12 questioned by MCMC (Malaysiakini, 8 Sept 2009)

Kaya

2009-09-07T23:57:00.002+08:00

After analyzing data on the self-reported levels of sexual activity and happiness of 16,000 people, Dartmouth College economist David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England report that sex "enters so strongly (and) positively in happiness equations" that they estimate increasing intercourse from once a month to once a week is equivalent to the amount of happiness generated by getting an additional $50,000 in income for the average American.

"The evidence we see is that money brings some amounts of happiness, but not as much as what economists might have thought," says Blanchflower. "We had to look to psychologists and realize that other things really matter."

Their paper, "Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study," recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, essentially puts an estimated dollar amount on the happiness level resulting from sex and its trappings.

Despite popular opinion, they find that having more money doesn't mean you get more sex; there's no difference between the frequency of sex and income level. But they do find sex seems to have a greater effect on happiness levels in highly educated -- and presumingly wealthier -- people than on those with lower educational status.

Overall, the happiest folks are those getting the most sex -- married people, who report 30% more between-the-sheets action than single folks. In fact, the economists calculate that a lasting marriage equates to happiness generated by getting an extra $100,000 each year. Divorce, meanwhile, translates to a happiness depletion of $66,000 annually.

Whether that hefty happiness income boost is the result of marital bliss or more sex is up for debate. But their "econometric" calculations confirm what psychologists have long known: People who consider themselves happy are usually richer in sexual activity.

"Many studies confirm that people who are depressed have less sex," says psychologist and sex therapist Robert Hatfield, PhD, of the University of Cincinnati and a spokesman for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. "Conversely, if you're not depressed -- 'happy,' as some might say -- you're more likely to have more frequent sex."

Does sex lead to happiness, or are happy people just more likely to lead each other to the bedroom? That's still under investigation, but there is evidence that psyche and sex feed off each other.

Take that study in the May 2001 issue of the Journal of Sex Research, in which Georgia State University researchers found that people who are involuntarily celibate are frequently afflicted with nonhappy feelings -- anger, frustration, self-doubt, and even depression. They conclude it's the result of "missed opportunities" of living without sex.

But according to another researcher, it may not be the sex per se, but lack of semen exposure.

"Semen appears to act as an antidepressant in women," psychologist Gordon Gallup, PhD, tells WebMD.

"In our studies, women who have unprotected sex have lower levels of depression, as measured on the gold standard evaluation tool, than those who have the same amount of sex with a condom.

"In fact, we found no difference in depression scores between women having heterosexual sex with condoms, lesbian sex, or not having sex at all," adds Gallup, of the State University of New York in Albany.

And in a follow-up study to that finding, reported two years ago in Archives of Sexual Behavior, women having sex without condoms were more likely to display depressive signs once they stopped having sex than those on a sexual hiatus whose previous partners used condoms.

"Women [who have sex] without condoms are also more likely to fall victim to the rebound effect following the breakup of their relationship," he tells WebMD. "This suggests that there is a withdrawal effect that influences depressiveness when semen exposure stops."

Sumber: Sex Better Than Money for Happiness, Oleh Sid Kirchheimer [WebMD Health News, July 16, 2004]. Foto (c) Lizards and Turtles

Nota: Asalnya mahu masukkan foto Ludivine Sagnier dari filem Water Drops on Burning Rocks atau La Petite Lili, tetapi bimbang mama dia tengok dengan abang & Nia, akhirnya tukar pix kura-kura berenang di luar perahu.

Tagihan

2009-09-03T23:37:00.006+08:00

Selepas menulis coretan peribadi tentang Nathania (yang baru kembali senyum dan berlari, malam ini, selepas demam), ungkapan ini terasa "semacam relevan":

People often compare having a new baby to the early days of a love affair, which is true as far as it goes, but one’s physical fixation on, and craving for, a newborn is much stronger and more intense that that. How often in a love affair can you literally find yourself in tears because you were away from a man for three hours?

I imagine a better metaphor would be addiction. There is an opium-den quality to maternity leave. The high of a love that obliterates everything. A need so consuming that it is threatening to everything you are and care about. Where did your day go? Did you stare blankly at the baby for hours? And was that staring blankly more fiercely pleasurable, more compelling than nearly anything you have ever done?**

Tetapi aku bukan ibu dan tidak pernah menikmati erti cuti bersalin!

** sumber: My Newborn Is Like a Narcotic oleh Katie Roiphe [Double X, 25 Ogos 2009]

Cryptomnesia

2009-09-01T19:00:00.004+08:00

According to Richard L. Marsh, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Georgia and a leading cryptomnesia researcher, Schneider is on the right track. "When people engage in creative activity, they are so involved in generating or coming up with something new or novel that they fail to protect against what they previously experienced," said Marsh. Over the last 20 years, Marsh has designed numerous models for studying cryptomnesia in the lab. An early study involved asking subjects to work with an unseen "partner" (actually a computer) to find unique words in a square array of letters, similar to the game Boggle. A short while after completing this task, the researchers asked each participant to recall the words they had personally found, and to generate new words neither the participant nor the participant's partner had previously been able to find.

The subjects plagiarized their partners roughly 32 percent of the time when trying to recall their own words, and up to 28 percent of the time when attempting to find previously unidentified words in the puzzle. Not only was plagiarism rampant, many subjects who plagiarized also checked a box indicating they were "positive" their answers had not previously been given by their partners.

Henry Roediger, a memory expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said that cryptomnesia is partially caused by the lopsidedness of our memories: it's easier to remember information than it is to remember its source. Under the right conditions, this quirk can even evoke false memories. In one study, the more times Roediger instructed participants to imagine performing a basic action (like, "sharpen the pencil") the more likely the participants were to recall—incorrectly—having actually performed the action when asked about it later.

But misattributing memories from one source to another, whether from imagination to reality or from a friend to oneself, is only one of the psychological quirks behind unconscious plagiarism. Another is implicit memory, which Dan Schacter, a psychologist at Harvard, called, "the fact that we can sometimes remember information without knowing that we're remembering it."

The classic demonstration of implicit memory involves a psychological technique known as priming. When a person is exposed to a list of words (or "primed") in one setting, than later asked to come up with words from a specific category, say "types of fruit," in another setting, the person is more likely to name fruit that had appeared during the priming session than fruit that hadn't.

This result may not seem all that exciting, except that it also occurs with amnesiacs, who are unable to form conscious memories of the actual priming session. At the most basic level, says Schacter, this suggests that implicit memories are formed in different regions or systems of the brain than conscious memories. This disconnect, coupled with errors in remembering the source of ideas, words, or even whole phrases, may be responsible for cryptomnesia. "Unconscious plagiarism makes it sound like a pretty exceptional and unusual circumstance," said Roediger. "But I really think that at a very simple level, these things are happening all the time. You know, your friend uses some expression and you pick it up and use it too."

While unconscious plagiarism is embarrassing in cases where original creative output is expected, in most aspects of daily life it ranges from useful to indispensible. What is called cryptomnesia in one context is known as social learning theory in another. For example, children learn how to behave by unconsciously copying others, and friends strengthen their relationships when they assimilate each other's phrases, behaviors, and opinions.

But before we give high-profile cryptomnesiacs a free pass, as if they were suffering from an intractable psychological disorder, there's a bit more to know. Cryptomnesia happens more frequently between those who trust one another, such as people in romantic relationships or close friendships, but less frequently between strangers—particularly when the one whose ideas or words might be plagiarized is present. And due to our innate skepticism, unconsciously copying a person one doesn't know, or a source one doesn't yet trust, is uncommon.

[Sumber: You Didn’t Plagiarize, Your Unconscious Did, Oleh Russ Juskalian (Newsweek Jul 7, 2009)]

Kartun

2009-08-28T01:04:00.008+08:00

Di mana hebatnya Gedung Kartun? Hishamuddin Rais, melalui blognya Tukar Tiub, menyifatkan satira politik dwibulanan ini "majalah kultus", sementara Malaysiakini.com dalam satu laporannya menyebutnya "majalah terulung dalam kelasnya sendiri."

Sebagai seorang ahli karikatur dengan sejarah perkartunan lebih 20 tahun, ketua pengarang majalah ini Zunar memang dikenali tajam, subversif dan pedas hentamannya terhadap pemimpin politik, khususnya kerajaan.

Semua orang mengenali Zunar melalui karyanya di penerbitan-penerbitan politik seperti Detik, Harakah dan juga Malaysiakini.com - sebelum ini bersama majalah klasik dunia humor negara Gila-Gila dan akhbar Berita Harian.

Ledakan peristiwa Reformasi 1998 menonjolkan lagi "kepembangkangan" karikatur Zunar walaupun karya dalam Gila-Gila dan siri kartun "Papa" (bermaksud miskin teramat sangat) di akhbar harian itu sudah menonjolkan sifat kritisnya terhadap persoalan semasa - khususnya lukisannya yang sangat ekonomis.

Tetapi kepembangkangan Zunar ini bukanlah punca kehebatan Gedung Kartun. Majalah edisi sulung ini (atau edisi tunggal?) ada karisma dan auranya yang lain, yang jarang disedari dan diperhatikan oleh peminat karikatur, bahan humor atau penyokong parti politik.

Kalau begitu, ada apa dengan Gedung Kartun?

[ii]

Sebagai sebuah majalah yang mengharapkan belas ehsan permit penerbitan Kementerian Dalam Negeri (KDN), Gedung Kartun sebetulnya telah mencetuskan "revolusi besar" dalam dunia penerbitan negara ini - suatu gejala yang sama sekali radikal, luar jangka, luar kotak analisis dan dengungan kejutan yang membengitkan telinga.

Sama ada sidang pengarangnya, penerbitnya atau Zunar sendiri menyedarinya atau tidak, saya tidaklah pasti. Mungkin tidak menyedari sepenuhnya perkara tersebut.

Atau, bagi diri Zunar, ia berlalu secara sangat alami (di Indonesia, kata ini ibarat natural atau semula jadi dalam bahasa kita) sehingga beliau sendiri tidak merancangnya. Tidak merancang di sini mungkin membawa maksud beliau seorang yang naif. Tidaklah begitu maksud saya. Tetapi kurang lebih, begitulah maksud saya.

[iii]

Gedung Kartun, bagi saya, mencetuskan "revolusi penerbitan" dengan paparan radikalnya itu kerana ia satu-satunya penerbitan - tidak ada majalah atau akhbar yang memerlukan permit penerbitan (PP) tahunan - mengambil langkah "paling gila" sedemikian.

Gedung Kartun, di tangan Zunar, satu-satunya penerbitan berkala dalam sejarah persuratkhabaran Malaysia yang mengemis simpati KDN tetapi berani, bersedia dan nekad sekali "melanggarnya" (baca: fikir ala pemimpin Umno dan pegawai KDN)!

Dalam sejarah 52 tahun kemerdekaan negara, majalah inilah satu-satunya penerbitan yang berani meludah muka PP secara berdepan-depan, dengan angkuh mendabik dada.

Ulang: Satu-satunya penerbitan di negara ini!

Jika penulis politik Ahmad Lutfi Othman, kini ketua pengarang kumpulan Harakah yang baru sahaja dikenakan hukuman gantung PP, melihat gaya persembahan Gedung Kartun vis a vis PP, pastilah beliau akan menggeleng-gelengkan kepala.

Bukan beberapa kali, tetapi pastilah berpuluh-puluh kali!

Sebagai pengusaha media alternatif, Ahmad Lutfi - dan sesiapa sahaja yang tergila-gilakan PP seperti akhbar Karangkraf yang menerbitkan Watan (diharam), Eksklusif (diharamkan) dan Sinar Harian (belum diharamkan tetapi dikekang) - tentunya takjub besar melihat bagaimana Gedung Kartun telah "mensia-siakan" peluang mendapat lesen itu dengan mengeji, memperli dan mengganyang perdana menteri sedemikian rupa.

Tiada belas ehsan langsung pada edisi sulungnya!

Dan ... sewaktu PP itu hanya diperolehi secara lisan, belum secara rasmi menerima surat bahagian kawalan penerbitan KDN.

Isu yang dibangkitkan pula bukan sebarang isu tetapi isu yang pernah menyeret Raja Petra Kamaruddin ke mahkamah (atau ke kem Kamunting?) - Altantuya Shaariibuu - dan isu isterinya Rosmah Mansor yang dituduh "dalang" pemerintahan perdana menteri.

Karikatur Najib, Altantuya dan Mongolia itu bukan disorok-sorokkan di halaman terpencil di dalam majalah sehingga tidak disedari pembaca (seperti semua penerbit yang ketagih PP) tetapi di muka depan!

Subjek perlinya pula bukan calang-calang tetapi sambutan hari kemerdekaan negara!

Entahlah, sememangnya Gedung Kartun benar-benar ingin mencetuskan sejarah revolusi ini atau semata-mata naif dalam dunia penerbitan, terserahlah pada penilaian masing-masing.

Tetapi ia telah memulakannya dan ia telah terpahat dalam sejarah negara... siapa yang ingin memecah rekod Zunar haruslah "lebih gila" daripada Gedung Kartun!!!

Nikmat

2009-08-24T00:25:00.000+08:00

There were several regions of activation, but the most striking result, Janniko R Georgiadis says, was how certain regions in the front of the brain shut down during orgasm, especially one just behind the left eyeball.

Researchers have long noticed that damage to this area -- the lateral orbitofrontal cortex -- can leave people with wildly antisocial and impulsive tendencies, including hypersexuality.

Shutdowns in the brain's prefrontal cortex appears crucial, Georgiadis adds. "It's the seat of reason and behavioral control. But when you have an orgasm, you lose control."

Regions called the temporal lobes also showed damped activity. In fact, the less activity these regions showed, the more sexually aroused the women felt.

These deactivations might explain the appeal of autoerotic asphyxiation, the researchers say.

Depriving a brain of blood during sex not only provides a dangerous thrill but also shuts down key brain regions, leading to addictive orgasmic euphorias.

Sumber: "Science of the orgasm" by Regina Nuzzo [The LA Times February 11, 2008]

Bersatulah Rendra!

2009-08-07T19:07:00.004+08:00

Bersatulah Pelacur-pelacur Kota Jakarta

Pelacur-pelacur Kota Jakarta
Dari kelas tinggi dan kelas rendah
Telah diganyang
Telah haru-biru
Mereka kecut
Keder
Terhina dan tersipu-sipu

Sesalkan mana yang mesti kausesalkan
Tapi jangan kau lewat putus asa
Dan kaurelakan dirimu dibikin korban

Wahai pelacur-pelacur kota Jakarta
Sekarang bangkitlah
Sanggul kembali rambutmu
Karena setelah menyesal
Datanglah kini giliranmu
Bukan untuk membela diri melulu
Tapi untuk lancarkan serangan
Karena
Sesalkan mana yang mesti kau sesalkan
Tapi jangan kaurela dibikin korban

Sarinah
Katakan kepada mereka
Bagaimana kau dipanggil ke kantor menteri
Bagaimana ia bicara panjang lebar kepadamu
Tentang perjuangan nusa bangsa
Dan tiba-tiba tanpa ujung pangkal
Ia sebut kau inspirasi revolusi
Sambil ia buka kutangmu

Dan kau Dasima
Khabarkan pada rakyat
Bagaimana para pemimpin revolusi
Secara bergiliran memelukmu
Bicara tentang kemakmuran rakyat dan api revolusi
Sambil celananya basah
Dan tubuhnya lemas
Terkapai disampingmu
Ototnya keburu tak berdaya

Politisi dan pegawai tinggi
Adalah caluk yang rapi
Kongres-kongres dan konferensi
Tak pernah berjalan tanpa kalian
Kalian tak pernah bisa bilang 'tidak'
Lantaran kelaparan yang menakutkan
Kemiskinan yang mengekang
Dan telah lama sia-sia cari kerja
Ijazah sekolah tanpa guna
Para kepala jawatan
Akan membuka kesempatan
Kalau kau membuka kesempatan
Kalau kau membuka paha
Sedang diluar pemerintahan
Perusahaan-perusahaan macet
Lapangan kerja tak ada
Revolusi para pemimpin
Adalah revolusi dewa-dewa
Mereka berjuang untuk syurga
Dan tidak untuk bumi
Revolusi dewa-dewa
Tak pernah menghasilkan
Lebih banyak lapangan kerja
Bagi rakyatnya
Kalian adalah sebahagian kaum penganggur yang mereka ciptakan

Namun
Sesalkan mana yang kau kausesalkan
Tapi jangan kau lewat putus asa
Dan kau rela dibikin korban
Pelacur-pelacur kota Jakarta
Berhentilah tersipu-sipu
Ketika kubaca di koran
Bagaimana badut-badut mengganyang kalian
Menuduh kalian sumber bencana negara
Aku jadi murka
Kalian adalah temanku
Ini tak bisa dibiarkan
Astaga
Mulut-mulut badut
Mulut-mulut yang latah bahkan seks mereka politikkan

Saudari-saudariku
Membubarkan kalian
Tidak semudah membubarkan partai politik
Mereka harus beri kalian kerja
Mereka harus pulihkan darjat kalian
Mereka harus ikut memikul kesalahan

Saudari-saudariku. Bersatulah
Ambillah galah
Kibarkan kutang-kutangmu di hujungnya
Araklah keliling kota
Sebagai panji yang telah mereka nodai
Kinilah giliranmu menuntut
Katakanlah kepada mereka
Menganjurkan mengganyang pelacuran
Tanpa menganjurkan
Mengahwini para bekas pelacur
Adalah omong kosong

Pelacur-pelacur kota Jakarta
Saudari-saudariku
Jangan melulur keder pada lelaki
Dengan mudah
Kalian bisa telanjangi kaum palsu
Naikkan tarifmu dua kali
Dan mereka akan klabakan
Mogoklah satu bulan
Dan mereka akan puyeng
Lalu mereka akan berzina
Dengan isteri saudaranya.

Imaginasi

2009-07-27T13:04:00.003+08:00

What's Romantic About Science?
When science became a source of sublime terror.

By Adam Kirsch
(Slate.com, July 20, 2009)

The last time a scientific breakthrough made the front page, it was because science threatened to kill us all. The launch of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland last September was greeted with headlines like Time's "Collider Triggers End-of-the-World Fears" as journalists tried to calculate the odds that the world's largest particle accelerator would accidentally tear apart the space-time continuum and annihilate the Earth. And it is not just such doomsday scenarios that make us suspicious of technological progress: On a philosophical level, too, scientific advances can look like human retreats. A century and a half after Darwin, there are millions of Christians who see evolution as an intolerable blow to human dignity, just as there are millions of environmentalists who see Western science as a scourge of the planet.

These 21st-century conundrums have been with us for a long time. In The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes explores an early-19th-century period of terrific—and often terrified—excitement about science, of marvelous discoveries that raised humble experimenters to the rank of national heroes. Holmes' subjects—including astronomer William Herschel, chemist Humphry Davy, and explorer Mungo Park—were household names in England, but their discoveries were by no means always welcome ones. Herschel's observation of the stars, for instance, showed that the Milky Way was just one of a vast number of galaxies that were constantly being born, aging, and dying. The Milky Way, Herschel warned, "cannot last forever." It followed, as Holmes writes, that "our solar system, our planet, and hence our whole civilization would have an ultimate and unavoidable end." For the first time, the apocalypse was not a matter of religious faith but of demonstrated scientific fact.

Herschel's discoveries represent one face of what Holmes calls, loosely but suggestively, Romantic science. The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, as Holmes acknowledges: "Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so."

Contemplating the immensity and strangeness of the universe could produce the same feeling of sublime terror that Coleridge strove for in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or that Wordsworth evokes in parts of his autobiographical epic "The Prelude." In Keats' sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," the poet compares his feeling of literary discovery with that of "some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken"; as Holmes explains, this was an allusion to Herschel's discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781, one of the stories told at length in The Age of Wonder.

At the same time, the growing fame of individual scientists made them seem larger-than-life, almost superhuman, like the Romantic persona cultivated by Lord Byron. The glamour of exploration was unmistakable: Joseph Banks, who returned from Tahiti with tales of erotic adventure, and Mungo Park, who spent two years charting the course of the Niger River, were objects of fascination on their return to England. (Banks stayed home and spent a long career as president of the Royal Society; Park returned to Africa and disappeared.) Humphry Davy's glamour was of a different kind. Alone in his laboratory, he penetrated the deepest secrets of nature, isolating the elements of sodium, iodine, and chlorine for the first time. His discoveries, his useful inventions (including a safety lamp for coal miners), and his brilliant popular lectures made him a celebrity and a social lion—he won a knighthood and a rich wife, although, as Holmes shows, neither made him happy.

Davy was also an accomplished poet who insisted on the close relationship between scientific and artistic ways of seeing. "The perception of truth is almost always as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty," he wrote, "and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind." It is the kind of observation one might expect from the polymath Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Davy's close friend. In a letter to Davy in 1800, Coleridge speculated on the affinity between science and poetry: "[B]eing necessarily performed with the passion of Hope," the poet believed, science "was poetical."

The phrase appeals strongly to Holmes, and he expands on it: "Science, like poetry, was not merely 'progressive.' It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier world." "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, and the revolution in science was just as heady.

Yet the Romantic poets also made the case against science in powerful terms that still influence our mistrust of science and technology. Science alienates us from nature and ourselves, Wordsworth wrote in "The Tables Turned": "Sweet is the lore which Nature brings/ Our meddling intellect/ Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:/ We murder to dissect." One of the best-known anecdotes about Keats, which Holmes duly recounts, has him complaining at a dinner party that Newton "destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism" and drinking a toast for "confusion to Mathematics." And none other than Coleridge said that "the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton"—a view that, Holmes writes, "has a peculiar power to outrage men of science, even modern ones."

But the most potent Romantic warning against the peril of science was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to which Holmes devotes a chapter. Holmes shows that Shelley was alluding to Davy when she wrote, in Frankenstein, of how modern scientists "have acquired new and almost unlimited Powers: they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadow." But the lesson of her book is that these powers are too great for human wisdom—that once they are unleashed, they may return to destroy their masters as Dr. Victor Frankenstein's monster turns on him. Shelley's creation clearly touched a nerve in English society: "[I]t was made famous, if not notorious, in the 1820s by no less than five adaptations for the stage," Holmes writes.

Frankenstein was a parable for an age when every scientific advance seemed to mark a threat. Sometimes the threats were quite literal. No sooner had Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier made the first manned balloon flight in Paris in November 1783, than Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador to France, was imagining the possibilities of balloon warfare: "Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each" could carry a French army across the Channel to England, where "ten thousand Men descending from the Clouds might in many places do an infinite deal of mischief."

Even laughing gas, discovered by Davy in 1799, was unsettling in the very intensity of the pleasure it brought. "The pleasurable sensation was at first local, and perceived in the lips and the cheeks," Davy recorded. "It gradually, however, diffused itself over the whole body, and in the middle of the experiment was for a moment so intense and pure as to absorb existence. At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness." Was nitrous oxide, the world wondered, a boon to mankind, even a possible surgical anesthetic, or an excuse for moral decay and sexual license? It was rumored that Davy's laboratory witnessed uncanny scenes, as when a "young woman was overcome by hysterical excitement, ran out of the laboratory, and rushed screaming down the street …where she was somewhat bizarrely reported to have 'jumped over a large dog' before she could be restrained and brought back." It sounds like something Mary Shelley might have dreamed.

Finally, The Age of Wonder places more faith in science's "beauty" than in its "terror." "We need," Holmes writes in a heartfelt epilogue, "the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe." Yet it is only because of science and technology, of course, that the future of the globe is in question. Without nuclear weapons and global warming, not to mention the Large Hadron Collider, we wouldn't need to reinforce our "hope" and "belief" in the survival of the species, which, until the 20th century, was taken for granted. There is a reason that Herschel and Davy, heroes in their own time, have been overshadowed by the eminent contemporary whose name everyone still knows, Frankenstein.

Hemingway

2009-07-21T00:48:00.003+08:00

Don’t Touch ‘A Moveable Feast’
By A. E. HOTCHNER (New York Times, July 19, 2009)

BOOKSTORES are getting shipments of a significantly changed edition of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, “A Moveable Feast,” first published posthumously by Scribner in 1964. This new edition, also published by Scribner, has been extensively reworked by a grandson who doesn’t like what the original said about his grandmother, Hemingway’s second wife.

The grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

It is his claim that Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s fourth wife, cobbled the manuscript together from shards of an unfinished work and that she created the final chapter, “There Is Never Any End to Paris.”

Scribner’s involvement with this bowdlerized version should be examined as it relates to the book’s actual genesis, and to the ethics of publishing.

In 1956, Ernest and I were having lunch at the Ritz in Paris with Charles Ritz, the hotel’s chairman, when Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s Louis Vuitton had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it.

Charley had the trunk brought up to his office, and after lunch Ernest opened it. It was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: “The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!”

There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a café crème. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life.

When Ernest returned to Cuba in 1957, he had Nita, his sometime secretary, type the stories on double-spaced pages to make them easy to edit. When I visited the Hemingways in Ketchum, Idaho, in the fall of 1958, Ernest was at work on what he called “my Paris book.” He gave me several chapters to read. In 1959, when we were in Spain following the great matadors Antonio Ordóñez and Dominguín, Ernest often worked on the Paris manuscript on the days when there wasn’t a bullfight.

Back in Cuba, he suspended work on it to write “The Dangerous Summer,” about those bullfights, for Life magazine. But instead of the contracted 40,000 words, he wrote 108,746 and asked me to go to Cuba to help him pare down his manuscript.

When I was leaving for New York to give the manuscript to the editor of Life, Ernest also gave me the completed manuscript of the Paris book to give to Scribner’s president, Charles Scribner Jr.

I recount this history of “A Moveable Feast” to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it, and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication. Ernest died before the publication of the book could go forward. When I visited him in the Mayo Clinic a few months before his dementia led to his suicide, he was very concerned about his Paris book, and worried that it needed a final sentence, which it did not.

After his death, Mary, as executor, decided that Scribner should proceed with the publication. Harry Brague was the editor. I met with him several times while the book was in galleys.

Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book. However, she did call me about its title. Scribner was going to call it “Paris Sketches,” but Mary hoped I could come up with something more compelling. I ran through a few possibilities, but none resonated until I recalled that Ernest had once referred to Paris as a moveable feast. Mary and Scribner were delighted with that, but they wanted attribution. I wrote down what Ernest had said to the best of my recollection, and this appears on the title page attributed to a “friend,” which is the way I wanted it.

These details are evidence that the book was a serious work that Ernest finished with his usual intensity, and that he certainly intended it for publication. What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.
As an author, I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this “restored edition.” With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in “A Moveable Feast” about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor.

All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work. There is always the possibility that the inheritor could write his own book offering his own corrections.

Ernest was very protective of the words he wrote, words that gave the literary world a new style of writing. Surely he has the right to have these words protected against frivolous incursion, like this reworked volume that should be called “A Moveable Book.” I hope the Authors Guild is paying attention.

A. E. Hotchner is the author of the memoirs “Papa Hemingway” and “King of the Hill.”

Negatif

2009-07-13T23:53:00.005+08:00

Entah mengapa, dan kita perlu cari sebabnya, berita negatif tentang Rosmah Mansor cepat mendapat perhatian ramai - setidak-tidaknya beginilah ukuran enjin pengesan beberapa berita ngetop (istilah orang Indonesia) di Malaysiakini.

Terbaru berita tentang beliau bertajuk Lagi gema gugurkan Rosmah di Unisel. Ia dimuatkan petang Jumaat lalu (hari yang paling kurang pembaca, khususnya di sebelah petang) dan tiba-tiba melompat ke tangga keempat berita paling popular sebulan ini.

Ia melaporkan satu desakan popular - dan kelihatannya spontan, tanpa perancangan - untuk menyingkirkan isteri perdana menteri sebagai canselor universiti tersebut.

Dua berita teratas kategori paling popular bulanan juga mengenai Rosmah - Kempen video burukkan isteri PM (25 Jun) dan 'Rosmah-Najib kahwin di rumah saya' (26 Jun).

Berada di tangga kelapan sejak beberapa minggu lalu JKKK kecewa video cemar Rosmah (26 Jun).

Malaysiakini pernah memuatkan beberapa bahan berita tentang (atau berkaitan) Rosmah dalam tempoh dua minggu lalu tetapi tidak tersenarai dalam kategori paling popular peringkat bulanan.

Bagaimanapun bahan-bahan berita ini pernah popular peringkat mingguan - tetapi tidak cukup kuat untuk mendaki tangga bulanan: Video burukkan Rosmah makin hilang sambutan (9 Julai), Siswa anti-Rosmah belum serah diri (2 Julai), Video Rosmah: Polis siasat Badrul (30 Jun) dan 'Bini puaka' seret 2 siswa ke mahkamah (30 Jun).

Kita harus bertanya: kenapa berita-berita tertentu tentang Rosmah meraih populariti mendadak dan bertahan lama dalam carta berita popular; sementara berita-berita lain tentang personaliti yang sama boleh naik mendadak tetapi tidak kekal dalam carta popular?

[ii]

Jika kita tinjau lagi carta berita-berita ngetop bulanan di Malaysiakini, kita akan dapati berita banglo mewah Dr Khir Toyo berada di tangga ketiga - kenaikan perlahan-lahan sejak ia menjadi isu besar media awal minggu lalu (6 Julai).

Berita Nik Aziz Nik Mat menghentam Nasharuddin Mat Isa (kata orang, nama barunya "broker") masih bertahan di tangga kelima walaupun isunya sudah lama berlalu (17 Jun).

Berita yang naik mendadak tetapi masih di tangga bawah carta paling popular peringkat bulanan termasuklah ulasan Dr Mahathir Mohamad tentang 100 hari pertama "yang lebih banyak negatif daripada positif" pentadbiran Najib Razak, suami Rosmah.

Ia berada di tangga kesembilan, atas berita tentang Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan jawab bos lamanya Anwar Ibrahim - sudah lama, mula menurun dan mungkin akan terkeluar carta tidak lama lagi jika ada berita-berita yang lebih hangat.

Senarai berita dan perkembangan sekitar politik Perak dan wiranya yang paling tersohor Mohamad Nizar Jamaluddin - yang pernah menguasai carta bulanan sejak beberapa bulan dulu - kini berada di tangga ketujuh.

Kemungkinan tokoh ini akan terus merosot jika tiada lagi insiden seperti rampasan kuasa di Perak, kekecohan di DUN Perak, kes mahkamahnya yang luar biasa dan laungan "hidup rakyat" di Dewan Rakyat.

[iii]

Saya rasa mudah untuk menjawab kenapa tokoh-tokoh politik ini mendapat perhatian meluas. Antaranya, kerana isu itu bersifat nasional, dilaporkan meluas di media dan tokoh politik yang sudah bertapak kukuh.

Persoalan saya kenapa berita tentang Rosmah yang hanya dilaporkan di Malaysiakini boleh mencipta minat mendalam pembaca? Apakah hebatnya Rosmah ini?

Saya sokong ISA ...

2009-07-07T23:40:00.008+08:00

(Khusus kepada pembaca Majalah I, Julai 2009)

Artikel saya yang asalnya bertujuan main-main akhirnya menjerat diri sendiri.

Malu ada, lucu pun ada - begitulah yang saya rasa sewaktu menyedari memang benar kata orang "pengarang telah mati" dan teks akhirnya bercakap bagi pihak dirinya sendiri - tiada lagi campur tangan pengarang!

Untuk bacaan lanjut teori ini, baca The Death of the Author (oleh Roland Barthes) dan ringkasan ideanya.

Kelmarin saya terperasan sebuah majalah Islam menerbitkan kembali artikel saya tentang "ISA, juga ada manfaatnya" yang diedarkan di Internet sejak April 2001 termasuk di Tranungkite.net.

Majalah bulanan terbitan Karangkraf itu dalam edisi Julai (terbaru) memuatkan isu kebebasan bersuara dengan memaparkan tokoh anti-ISA, Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh dan terselit juga satu halaman artikel saya tersebut.

Ya, walaupun saya berterima kasih atas kesudian pengarang dan penerbit memuatkan artikel tersebut demi melanjutkan perbahasan tentang pro dan kontra akta kontroversi tersebut tetapi tulisan saya itu tidak kena-mengena dengan sikap saya yang anti-ISA.

Tajuknya memang berbunyi positif tetapi kandungannya sarat dengan sindiran sinis yang halus, main-main dan benci kalau ... (ulang: kalau) pembaca memahami latar peristiwa politik yang mendorong saya menulis sebegitu rupa.

Yakni, penangkapan 10 aktivis Gerakan Reformasi dan pemimpin PKR (dulu PKN) menjelang dan selepas 14 April 2001 dan kenyataan ketua polis negara waktu itu yang bohong, palsu, mengada-ngada dan jahat.

[ii]

Bagaimanapun Majalah I bukanlah pihak pertama yang terkeliru dengan artikel saya yang mengelirukan itu.

Sahabat saya Astora Jabat juga pernah membangkitkan artikel tersebut dalam satu kolumnya di Utusan Malaysia (16 Feb 2003) yang memuji-muji saya sebagai seorang (daripada tiga) penulis Melayu kritikal "yang rasional". Saya telah jelaskan di sini "Belum mati" (16 Dis 2005).

Saya memohon maaf atas sifat main-main dan sinis lembut dalam artikel saya tentang ISA walaupun saya fikir saya tidak pernah bersalah apa-apa. Cuma, jika ada tanggapan umum bahawa saya pernah menyokong ISA, saya mohon maaf!

Kebetulan artikel ini tidak datang sendirian. Ada satu catatan pendek yang dikirim sehari atau dua sebelum saya menulis artikel ini.

Artikel itu bertajuk 'Cara nak buat Grenade Launcher, Molotov Koktel dan Bom' (lihat sikap saya yang anti-ISA dalam senarai artikel saya antara 2000 dan 2001 di laman web edisi lama Tranungkite.net).

Malah Astora bukan pihak yang pertama terkeliru.

Sewaktu artikel tentang ISA tersebut diedarkan dalam ruang diskusi senarai e-mel (mailing list) dan laman-laman web tersebut, ia telah menimbulkan kontroversi dan mengelirukan beberapa pembaca, termasuk teman-teman dekat saya sendiri.

Beberapa pembaca Malaysiakini, malah, menulis dan merungut waktu itu kepada ketua editor kami, Steven Gan. Saya telah jelaskan kepada Steven, rakan-rakan dan pembaca tetapi ... rupa-rupanya "pengarang telah mati" dan hantu karyanya terus berkeliaran mengejar mangsanya sendiri.

[iii]

Kepada rakan-rakan yang mengenali saya dan kepada pembaca setia yang mengikuti dengan dekat coretan-coretan saya, tentulah mereka tidak percaya saya mempunyai pendirian sedemikian dan tentulah mereka fikir saya bermain-main atau hanya melepaskan geram.

Saya boleh tunjukkan beberapa tempat yang menunjukkan artikel itu bukanlah mewakili pendirian saya.

(a) Sesuatu undang-undang diluluskan di Dewan Rakyat digubal untuk manfaat orang ramai dan negara, bukan semata-mata untuk menjaga Perdana Menteri atau Umno seperti didakwa oleh pembangkang.

Penjelasan: Saya sedar beberapa (kalau tidak banyak) akta digubal demi kepentingan perdana menteri dan kerajaan Umno semata-mata. Misalnya akta yang sering menjadi kecaman saya dalam konteks kempen kebebasan media, Akta Penerbitan dan Mesin Cetak (PPPA) dan Akta Rahsia Rasmi (OSA).

(b) Pembangkang memang akan memburuk-burukkan ISA kerana aktivis dan pengikut mereka yang sering menganjurkan keganasan, termasuk ketika berceramah, akan berasa terhalang dengan wujudnya akta ini.

Penjelasan: Saya tidak pernah percaya pembangkang menganjurkan keganasan sewaktu mereka berceramah yang saya ikuti sejak di bangku sekolah lagi. Saya ikuti dengan dekat kegiatan pembangkang - ceramah, seminar, forum, mesyuarat dan demonstrasi.

Hujah (b) saya ulang sebagai menyindir pemimpin politik BN, pegawai polis dan media arus perdana yang suka memburuk-burukkan pembangkang secara bombastik!

(c) Bukankah mereka juga berhak hidup dengan aman damai, sekurang-kurangnya dapat kais pagi makan pagi untuk menyara anak-anak ke sekolah.

Penjelasan: Ungkapan "berhak hidup dengan aman damai, sekurang-kurangnya dapat kais pagi makan pagi" juga bermaksud menyindir atau main-main.

(d) Dengan itu akan terselamatlah negara ini daripada gejala puak-puak pelampau ini, misalnya penyokong reformasi.

Penjelasan: Saya meletakkan diri saya sebagai penulis yang sebelah kakinya dalam Gerakan Reformasi (waktu itu) dan sebelah lagi dalam dunia kewartawanan, kepenulisan dan penerbitan alternatif. Semua "orang reformasi", aktivis NGO dan malah polis Cawangan Khas (SB) menyedari perkara ini.

(e) Setiap kali mereka mengadakan tunjuk perasaan besar-besaran di Kuala Lumpur, mereka mengganggu lalu lintas dan penjaja-penjaja di tepi jalan. Tidakkah kegiatan ini berbahaya kepada keselamatan nyawa pengguna jalan raya dan gedung perusahaan penjaja-penjaja ini?

Penjelasan: Lihat frasa ini "berbahaya kepada keselamatan nyawa pengguna jalan raya dan gedung perusahaan penjaja-penjaja ini." Cuba lihat perkataan "gedung perusahaan penjaja-penjaja", biar betul!

(f) Perenggan tersebut haruslah dibaca dengan perenggan selepasnya: Tentunya! Oleh itu langkah kerajaan untuk menggunakan ISA ke atas puak reformasi masih mempunyai kesan yang positif ke arah mengurangkan kemalangan di ibukota, misalnya akibat perlumbaan haram, dan meningkatkan taraf penjaja-penjaja Bumiputera di ibukota – yang semakin dihimpit ekonomi kaum asing.

Penjelasan: Saya ulang sejumlah perkataan tersebut dengan memberikan fokus kepada frasa yang digariskan seperti berikut: ... langkah kerajaan untuk menggunakan ISA ke atas puak reformasi masih mempunyai kesan yang positif ke arah mengurangkan kemalangan di ibukota, misalnya akibat perlumbaan haram.

Apakah begini sikap saya dan cara saya berfikir?

(g) Minggu lalu polis telah mendedahkan satu pakatan sulit puak reformasi untuk menggunakan pelancar bom, bahan letupan, bom petrol dan bebola penggalas bagi menyerang anggota-anggota polis.

Penjelasan: Saya tahu kenyataan ketua polis negara ini bohon semata-mata kerana saban malam saya bersama penggerak-penggerak demonstrasi ini dan pembohongan ini jelas sekali kerana kertas pertuduhan (sebenarnya alasan semata-mata) ke atas mereka sebelum diseret ke kem Kamunting di Taiping tiada kaitan langsung dengan kenyataan ketua polis ini!

(h) Walaupun polis tidak mengadakan sebarang sekatan jalan raya atau memeriksa kenderaan di tempat-tempat strategik di ibu kota, tetapi oleh kerana mereka sedar bahawa ISA sedang menunggu mereka, maka semua senjata berbahaya itu ditinggalkan sahaja di rumah-rumah mereka.

Penjelasan: Cuba lihat frasa "semua senjata berbahaya itu ditinggalkan sahaja di rumah-rumah mereka". Senjata berbahaya yang saya maksudkan ini (seperti perenggan-perenggan sebelumnya: pelancar bom, bahan letupan, bom petrol dan bebola penggalas) kerana nama-nama ini saya muntahkan kembali daripada kenyataan Tan Sri Norian Mai!

[iv]

Dengan sikap saya yang terpaksa menjelaskan kembali artikel yang lebih lapan tahun usianya itu, saya hari ini terpaksa mengangkat panji-panji baru "pengarang belum (ulang: belum) mati."

Pengarang yang belum mati akan terus mengejar, mencekik sehingga menggelupur dan menghanyutkan hantu artikelnya sendiri. Semoga tiada lagi mereka yang disampuk atau dirasuk oleh "ISA, juga ada manfaatnya".

(Meniru gaya Hishamuddin Rais di blognya Tukar Tiub) Kah, kah, kah, kah, kah, kah!

Video

2009-06-30T23:58:00.002+08:00

Maksud saya, tiga klip video mengulas tentang "kejahatan" Rosmah Mansor, isteri perdana menteri.

Kata orang, dalam perang, kita harus mengambil sikap dan memihak. Tetapi mungkin keberpihakan mematikan kebenaran atau menghidupkannya?

Saya makin tertarik dengan nasib politik Rosmah - sejauh mana kontroversi yang dimuatkan dalam klip video boleh merosakkan imejnya lagi atau menolong menonjolkan kewibawaannya di mata umum.

Tertarik setelah Rosmah tiba-tiba menjadi media darling dan seterusnya meletakkan imejnya di setiap benak orang - sekali gus mengundang reaksi-reaksi pro dan kontra terhadapnya.

Maksud saya, bagaimana tiga klip video tersebut telah melahirkan bahan-bahan berita berikut: 'Bini puaka' seret 2 siswa ke mahkamah, Video Rosmah: Polis siasat Badrul dan Mahfuz: BN kini ertinya 'bini Najib' (Malaysiakini, semuanya terbit 30 Jun).

Saya tertanya-tanya apakah akan jadi pada klip video ini, nasib Rosmah dan mereka yang ditemubual dalam klip tersebut sejak ia pertama kali diterbitkan 9 Jun lalu. Baca berita Kempen video burukkan isteri PM (25 Jun).

Pendedahan klip itu mengundang reaksi balas yang mempertahankan Rosmah. Lihat Apa Ada Dengan Video fitnah Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor (Mykmu, 11 Jun) yang meminjam percubaan When news reporting gets sensational (Malaysia Instinct, 10 Jun).

Apakah kedua-dua laman web pro-Umno ini percaya dengan membela Rosmah, imej wanita ini akan dapat dibersihkan dan semakin baik?

Atau, pembelaan mereka ini boleh bertukar pisau yang menikam dari belakang - mendedahkan lagi pekung Rosmah dan mempromosi "kejahatan" yang didakwa di klip video tersebut?

[ii]

Saya fikir usaha mereka akan membawa backlash. Bukan bermakna mempertahankan sesuatu yang benar dan fakta itu akan membawa kesan buruk kepada Rosmah.

Tetapi, sebaliknya, menegakkan benang basah boleh menikam diri sendiri dan menelanjangkan lagi keburukan Rosmah, kecacatan sikap laman-laman web tersebut dan mengajak orang bercakap lagi dan bercakap lagi, termasuk yang bukan-bukan dan palsu-palsu.

Kata orang Melayu, bangkai gajah Rosmah (jika ada, jika benar seperti didakwa di klip video) tidak boleh ditutup dengan daun-daun lalang blog pro-Umno. Malah apabila bangkai itu mereput, proses penguraiannya memamah daun-daun lalang menjadi sebatian yang menusuk hidung pula!

[iii]

Saya tidak berminat menuduh atau membela Rosmah. Saya tidak berminat mengecam atau menasihati blog-blog pro-Umno itu.

Saya hanya tertarik pada klip video ini, nasib Rosmah, mereka yang ditemubual dalam klip tersebut dan kita semua mulai hari ini seperti mana kita berdepan dengan khabar angin yang kemudiannya didapati menyimpan sekelumit kebenaran.

Apakah reaksi kita waktu itu, ketika kebenaran menganga di depan muka kita ...?

Rosmah

2009-06-25T23:56:00.005+08:00

Maklumat ini belum diberitakan - sebahagiannya sudah pernah disebut dalam laporan Harakahdaily.net, sementara sebahagian yang lain pernah menjadi buah mulut segelintir wartawan media arus perdana dan peminat dunia hiburan.

Tetapi, umumnya, sehingga kini tiada berita atau pengesahan rasmi.

Berita ini ada kaitan dengan Rosmah Mansor, isteri perdana menteri kita sekarang, sewaktu beliau belum lagi bergelar "wanita pertama" negara ini.

Beberapa klip video yang dimuatkan di Youtube sejak dua minggu lalu membangkitkan semula memori saya sewaktu bertugas dengan mStar Online, edisi dalam talian akhbar berbahasa Melayu yang diusahakan oleh Star Publications Bhd.

Malaysiakini siang tadi melaporkan sedikit tentang kewujudan tiga klip video ini. Kami mengambil keputusan untuk tidak menerbit-ulang dakwaan-dakwaan yang dimuatkan dalam video-video tersebut. Biar pembaca mengkaji dan membuat kesimpulan sendiri.

Malaysiakini hari ini hanya menganalisis, kurang lebih, kedudukan tiga klip tersebut dan bagaimana ia tersebar - dimanfaatkan oleh golongan yang anti-Rosmah, anti-PM atau anti-Umno atau ketiga-tiganya sekali gus.

Dan bagaimanapun reaksi mereka yang pro-Rosmah, pro-PM atau pro-Umno atau ketiga-tiganya sekali gus.

Dalam satu daripada tiga klip tersebut, seorang lelaki yang mendakwa adik Rosmah menceritakan kemarahan "wanita pertama" apabila dia menolong menguruskan perkahwinan anak perempuan Rosmah dengan seorang selebriti yang bergelar doktor, anak seorang Datuk yang berkait erat dengan Umno.

Dalam klip video itu juga ditunjukkan (baca: mendakwa) seorang lelaki yang mendakwa Rosmah menghalang tetamu utama (yang telah diundang) ke majlis perkahwinan tersebut dihalang oleh "orang-orang Rosmah."

Saya tidak dapat mengesahkan kedua-dua dakwaan ini. Sama ada benar atau palsu, terpulang pada penyelidikan masing-masing pembaca.

Namun maklumat yang saya mahu kongsikan di sini berkaitan (sangat-sangat berkaitan) majlis perkahwinan anak gadis Rosmah (bukan anak dengan Najib) seperti dua lelaki itu dakwa dalam klip video "Rosmah perempuan puaka."

Saya tidak tahu bagaimana editor atau wartawan hiburan di akhbar-akhbar harian dan majalah-majalah hiburan yang lain. Tetapi saya ingin kongsikan satu maklumat tentang perkahwinan tersebut seperti yang saya pernah alami (lihat dengan mata) di mStar Online.

[ii]

Pada malam itu saya kebetulan pulang lewat dari pejabat. Seorang teman wartawan, wanita dan masih muda, ditugaskan untuk menghadiri dan membuat liputan tentang perkahwinan tersebut.
Beliau bahagian hiburan, sementara saya bahagian berita.

Sebagai seorang yang dedikasi, selepas majlis tersebut, beliau terus kembali ke pejabat dan menfailkan story tentang majlis tersebut - maklumlah anak isteri timbalan perdana menteri dengan selebriti yang meningkat naik waktu itu. Tentu nilai beritanya tinggi dan mStar Online ingin segera melaporkan peristiwa bersejarah dan meriah itu.

Kalau tidak salah ingatan saya, waktu itu sudah jam 10 malam. Saya menyemak sepintas lalu dan merancang untuk pulang.

Kira-kira sejam selepas ia dimuatnaik, tiba-tiba editor kami (lebih tepat acting editor, kerana mStar Online belum ada editor rasmi, waktu itu) bergegas datang dari rumahnya di Ampang.

Beliau sudah pulang lebih awal, petang hari itu atau beberapa jam sebelum muncul kembali di depan saya - di tingkat 7 bangunan The Star. Tiba-tiba diarah datang ke pejabat. Tidak hairan beliau nampak sedikit tidak senang dan merungut-rungut.

Rupa-rupanya "boss" (bukan sahaja big boss di The Star, tetapi yang lebih atas dan di luar The Star) mengarahkan agar story wartawan wanita tadi dibuang sama sekali daripada mStar Online!

Editor kami membaca story tersebut, dan sambil merungut-rungut sebentar, terpaksa membuangnya. Barulah saya tahu bahawa ada seseorang yang tidak senang dengan berita anak perempuan Rosmah diterbitkan di media.

Saya menunggu dan menunggu - esok, lusa, seminggu dan dua minggu. Media-media lain juga tidak melaporkan tentang berita perkahwinan tersebut. Saya hairan, kami bertanya-tanya.

Dan kemudian tersebarlah khabar bahawa Rosmah sendiri tidak mahu berita perkahwinan itu diterbitkan!

Dan saya pun belajar satu hukum untuk berjaya sebagai pekerja media di akhbar arus perdana bahawa ikutlah arahan orang politik kalau mahu terus kekal di situ walaupun arahannya tidak masuk akal, melampaui batas atau high-handed.

Nota: Sehingga kini saya tidak pasti siapa yang memberi arahan tersebut, sama ada pegawai-pegawai Najib, pegawai-pegawai Rosmah atau siapa. Saya sendiri tidak dapat mengesahkan sama ada khabar "Rosmah sendiri tidak mahu berita perkahwinan itu diterbitkan" itu benar atau palsu. Sehingga kini saya tidak pasti, saya tidak sahkan sendiri dan tiada maklumat sahih.

Yang saya dapat sahkan daripada peristiwa ini adalah - khabar angin bertukar menjadi berita yang sahih dan kuat sewaktu berita sebenar tidak lagi dapat disampaikan!

[iii]

Apabila isu perkahwinan anak gadis Rosmah muncul, semula, dalam klip video tersebut, maka maxim yang saya pakai saat ini ringkas sahaja: khabar angin bertukar menjadi berita yang sahih dan kuat sewaktu berita sebenar tidak lagi dapat disampaikan!

Gambar-gambar perkahwinan mereka (acara bersanding) boleh dilihat di Agendadaily.com.

Hak cipta foto atas (c) Pretty Peektures, foto bawah (c) Agenda Daily - anak Rosmah menangis

Lucah

2009-06-16T20:23:00.004+08:00

Perdana menteri hari ini menjawab pertanyaan ahli parlimen Seputeh, Teresa Kok, berhubung 39 laman web dan blog yang dilarang diakses oleh kakitangan awam di pejabat-pejabat kerajaan.

Sama ada sedar atau tidak, laman web The Star hari ini menerbitkan semua senarai laman web dan blog tersebut.

Semakan mendapati beberapa blog tersebut masih boleh diakses dan memuatkan bahan-bahan lucah!

Apakah senarai ini sejenis promosi PM untuk menggalakkan penyebaran bahan pornografi?

Sedih

2009-06-11T19:01:00.003+08:00

Memihak
Senin, 08 Juni 2009/Catatan Pinggir/Tempo

Politik adalah sebuah tugas sedih: usaha menegakkan keadilan di dunia yang berdosa. Reinhold Niebuhr, theolog itu, mengatakan demikian untuk siapa saja. Tapi saya kira ini terutama berlaku bagi tiap intelektual publik – artinya seseorang yang dengan tulisan dan ucapannya berbicara ke orang ramai, mengetengahkan apa yang sebaiknya dan yang tak sebaiknya terjadi bagi kehidupan bersama.

Niehbuhr (dan saya mengikutinya) memakai kata “tugas”. Kata yang aneh, memang. Sebab tugas itu bukan karena komando sebuah partai atau kekuasaan apapun. Tugas itu muncul, di dalam diri kita, karena ada sebuah luka. Kita merasa harus melakukan sesuatu karena itu. Luka itu terjadi ketika pada suatu hari, dalam kehidupan sosial kita, ada liyan yang dianiaya, ada sesama yang berbeda dan sebab itu hendak dibinasakan. Luka itu ketidak-adilan.

Saya menyebutnya “luka” karena persoalan ketidak-adilan bukanlah sesuatu yang abstrak, tapi konkrit, menyangkut tubuh, melibatkan perasaan, membangkitkan trenyuh dan juga amarah: Munir yang dibunuh tapi kasusnya tak terungkap tuntas, ribuan orang yang dilenyapkan di masa “Orde Baru” dan tak pernah diusut, Prita Mulyasari, si ibu, yang dimasukkan sel oleh jaksa secara seenaknya, atau Prabangsa, wartawan Radar Bali, yang dibunuh dengan brutal karena ia mengritik orang yang berkuasa.

Ada luka, dan aku ada: pada momen itu aku tahu apa yang terasa tak adil. Meskipun aku belum bisa merumuskan seluruhnya apa yang adil, aku terpanggil.

Di situlah seorang intelektual publik berbeda dengan seorang clerc dalam pengertian Julien Benda. Dalam versi Inggris, kata clerc disebut sebagai “intelektuil,” tapi itu adalah padanan yang tak tepat. Benda menggunakan kata itu untuk mengacu ke zaman lama Eropa, ke kalangan rohaniawan yang semata-mata mengutamakan nilai-nilai universal, hidup jauh dari pertikaian politik. Mereka tak memihak; mereka jaga kemurnian akal budi. Dalam La Trahison des Clercs Benda mengecam para intelektual yang turun ke keramaian pasar, memihak kepada satu kelompok dan mengobar-ngobarkan “nafsu politik”.

Harus dicatat: Benda seorang rasionalis sejati. Ia menganggap “nilai-nilai universal” itu sudah terpateri selesai di dalam diri. Ia tak mengakui bahwa yang “universal” datang dari pengalaman manusia sebagai mahkluk-di-bumi, yang berkekurangan, terbatas, hidup dengan liyan, fana. Benda memisahkan rasionalitas dari dunia, sebagaimana ia menghendaki siapapun yang setara dengan clerc tak memasuki arena pergulatan politik di mana nilai-nilai universal konon ditampik.

Memang harus diakui, di masa Benda, sebagaimana di masa kini, ada perjuangan politik yang hanya memenangkan cita-cita yang tertutup: kaum Nazi hanya hendak membuat dunia baru bagi “ras Arya”, kaum “Islamis” hanya untuk menegakkan supremasi umat sendiri.

Tapi kita ingat Nelson Mandela. Ia berjuang sebagai pemimpin kaum kulit hitam, tapi akhirnya ia tak berbuat hanya untuk kebaikan kaumnya. Ia menang untuk meruntuhkan kekuasaan apartheid yang memperlakukan orang secara menghina berdasarkan warna kulit. Maka kemenangan Mandela baru berarti kemenangan bila ia mengalahkan apartheid juga dalam bentuk baru. Demikianlah Mandela tak mendiskriminasikan orang kulit putih di bawah pemerintahannya. Di dalam cerita Afrika Selatan, luka ketidak-adilan itu memanggil keadilan dalam arti yang sebenarnya: keadilan hanya “adil” bila keadaan itu berlaku bagi siapa saja.

Itulah sifat universal yang berbeda dengan universalitas seorang rasionalis. Universalitas seperti dalam politik Mandela tumbuh dari trauma. Tapi tak hanya itu. Kepedihan itu diakui sebagai sebuah mala yang tak dapat dibiarkan bercokol di sebuah masyarakat jika masyarakat itu ingin hidup. Dengan kata lain, politik, sebagaimana dijalankan Mandela, adalah perjuangan ke sesuatu yang universal, dari sebuah situasi yang partikular.

Di situlah seorang intelektual publik seharusnya terpanggil untuk memihak. Dengan itu ia memandang politik sebagai sebuah tugas, bukan untuk sebuah ambisi. Ia tak duduk di tepi ongkang-ongkang, merasa harus bermartabat di mahligai. Ia tak berbeda dengan seorang tetangga yang ikut memadamkan api bila rumah di sudut sana terbakar, bukan hanya untuk menyelamatkan kampung seluruhnya (dan tentu saja rumahnya sendiri), tapi juga karena ia terpanggil untuk tak menyebabkan orang lain menderita.

Tapi, seperti disebut di atas, dunia memang berdosa. Penderitaan dan kekejian tak pernah hilang dari dalamnya. Maka perjuangan, atau pergulatan politik, akan selalu dibayangi cacat. Kita tak bisa menerima “politik sebagai panglima” bila di sana tak ada kebebasan lagi untuk mengakui cacat itu, bila pertimbangan kalah dan menang menelan secara total seluruh sudut hidup kita, selama-lamanya. Sebab tiap perjuangan politik akan terbentur pada keterbatasannya sendiri.

Maka bila aku memilih A hari ini, aku memilihnya dengan bersiap untuk kecewa. Aku juga memilihnya bukan untuk selama-lamanya. Aku hanya memilihnya sebagai sarana yang saat ini kurang cacat di antara yang amat cacat – sarana sementara untuk mencegah luka lagi, meskipun pencegahan itu tak pernah pasti.

Saya katakan tadi: kita bersiap kecewa. Tapi kita tak menyerah. Sebab kita tak akan bisa lupa Munir: kita tak akan menghalalkan ketak-adilan sebagai kewajaran hidup. Pengalaman sejarah menunjukkan, di tengah ketidak-adilan yang akut, yang kita derita, manusia selalu menghendaki keadilan -- yang entah di mana, yang entah kapan datang.

Dari perspektif ini, Ratu Adil bukanlah takhayul. Ia sebuah ideal yang tak hadir. Politik adalah tugas merambah jalan di belukar membuka celah agar keadilan itu datang. Terkadang tangan jadi kotor, hati jadi keras – dan itu menyebabkan rasa sedih tersendiri.

Di depan belukar itu, kita berjudi dengan masa depan. Siapa yang menuntut kepastian penuh dari sejarah akan mendustai diri sendiri. Selalu ada saat untuk bertindak dan memihak – juga ketika kita menolak untuk bertindak dan memihak.

Tapi pada saat yang sama juga ada saat untuk berdiri agak menjauh. Terkadang dengan ironi, terkadang dengan penyesalan, tapi selamanya dengan kesetiaan: di dunia yang berdosa, pilihan kita bisa salah, tapi tugas tak henti-hentinya memanggil dan politik selamanya meminta. Kita mungkin gagal. Meski demikian, tetap ada yang berharga yang kita perkelahikan.

Goenawan Mohamad

Musuh

2009-06-07T23:32:00.004+08:00

Hairan, dunia ini bermula dengan kata-kata - demikian menurut Bible, "pada mulanya, kata".

Mulianya manusia juga kerana kata-kata, "dan diajarkan kepada Adam akan nama-nama", demikian pula al-Quran merakamkan permulaan bahasa (dan kata-kata) yang memuliakan Adam dan anak cucunya.

Tetapi kata-kata penuh pembohongan, lebih bohong daripada seks. Kata "cinta" tidak setulus senggama. Dengan kata lain, seks itu jauh lebih benar, tulen dan tegas daripada kata-kata!

Namun, Dr Haron Din yang dimuliakan itu bermain-main dengan kata-katanya [klik imej di kanan untuk baca lebih jelas]. Tiada "musuh dalam selimut" pada halaman-halaman kertas kerjanya. Hanya media yang mengulas atau menambah-nambah - jelasnya ketika menjawab Husam Musa.

Sama ada tokoh ulama ini buta seni berbahasa atau bermain dengan kata-kata.

Dr Haron tentu tahu apa erti kata-katanya di muktamar hari ini - mana yang lebih benar, kuat dan "mengganggu jiwa" berbanding cinta (semula, sekali lagi) yang pernah melanda.

Dr Haron tidak sebut "musuh dalam selimut", Dr Haron hanya sebut "musuh dalam", "musuh Islam yang berada di dalam" dan "individu-individu tajaan mereka [yakni: Umno atau musuh luar negara] bagi mendapatkan kemenangan dalam pertandingan parti."

Dr Haron tahu kata-kata politiknya lebih lemah, longgar dan leweh berbanding tulisan di kertas kerjanya.

[ii]

Tidak hanya orang politik yang suka bermain kata-kata, dan tidak hanya orang politik yang suka menyalahkan media apabila kata-katanya dikutip dan mengandungi kebenaran.

Kebenaran memang pahit, ustaz. Buat apa kita mengelak kebenaran dan melarikan kontroversi? Berani sebut, berani tanggung. Lebih baik kita mengaku sahaja daripada melemparkan tuduhan kepada media.

Tiananmen

2009-05-28T00:53:00.004+08:00

Membaca peristiwa ini, dari perspektif belakang sejarah selama 20 tahun, boleh membuka satu daripada beberapa jalan kemungkinan apa yang bakal terjadi kepada kita di Malaysia. Sejarah perjuangan yang penuh nostalgia, kawalan dan "projek pelupaan" (negara dan diri sendiri) boleh mengingatkan kita apakah yang bakal terjadi 20 tahun lagi.

The Great Forgetting: 20 Years After Tiananmen Square
By MARA HVISTENDAHL
The Chronicle Review, Volume 55, Issue 38 (terbit 29 Mei 2009)

Kang Zhengguo remembers where he was when his hopes were crushed. It was 6 a.m. on June 4, 1989. He had just awakened and turned on his shortwave radio, hoping for good news. Two weeks earlier, Deng Xiaoping had imposed martial law in an attempt to contain the protests that had gripped China since April, but the students had refused to relinquish Tiananmen Square.

Kang, a bookish literature professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University in the central city of Xi'an, had been jailed for his ideas during the Cultural Revolution. He had reason to be wary of a student movement. Still, like intellectuals across China, he supported the demonstrations, hoping, even as the People's Liberation Army advanced on downtown Beijing on June 3, that they might bring needed political reforms.

"We had an illusion," he recalls. "We thought if the students were really strong, the soldiers would turn around and support them." Now, tuning in to Voice of America, he heard that the opposite had happened. The army had opened fire.

Hundreds died, many of them bystanders and workers who stood in the path to Tiananmen Square. Within hours, Xi'an Jiaotong students were blasting news of the slaughter over the university PA system and gathering on athletics fields to march downtown. Kang scrawled AIM YOUR GUNS HERE on a piece of paper and pinned it on his chest. Then he joined the crowd — altering, with that modest act of protest, the course of his career.

For many Westerners, the enduring image of China's 1989 protests was of a nameless man staring down a tank, an unforgettable scene that spoke to the power of individual resistance. But the protests were not so much a Chinese 1960s as they were a quiet nationwide uprising, a simmering defiance that spanned class, education level, and geography.

In the month and a half before the army opened fire, students at universities around China took to the streets. Workers went on strike. Old people distributed food and water. Even thieves, participants recall with nostalgia, called a moratorium on stealing.

Intellectuals across the country showed particular enthusiasm. At Xi'an Jiaotong, Kang says, "70 percent of the faculty supported the students." Another 20 percent were too scared to voice an opinion. Only administrators who had an interest in maintaining order publicly opposed the protests.

But the military crackdown in the early hours of June 4 decisively squelched any hope of openness and reform. For the hundreds of thousands of people who took part in protests across China that year, the assault indelibly affected their lives, forcing some into exile, others to prison, and dooming many more to stagnant careers. More subtly, the slaughter at Tiananmen shaped intellectual currents for decades to come.

Now, on the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, participants say Chinese academic and intellectual life is profoundly different.

Before the crackdown, Kang had been on track for a full professorship. But because of his involvement in the student protests, his prospects for advancement at Xi'an Jiaotong evaporated. He applied to other universities, only to be told that his academic and political record was a problem. That was, in a way, the lesser insult. By 1994, when he left Xi'an to take a position at Yale — an opportunity that came, by a stroke of luck, after a professor in the Chinese department picked up a book of literary criticism Kang had written years before — his colleagues had begun to question the wisdom of democratic reform. In 1996, China was gripped by a book called China Can Say No, which urged readers to turn inward and reject the "Western" construct of democratic reform. Two of its authors claimed to have protested at Tiananmen Square.

Kang, now 64 and settled with his family in New Haven, has continued to assail his government for the deaths in 1989, describing his memories in his recent book Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China (W.W. Norton, 2007). But when he returns to China now, he is a maverick. "My relatives and my friends criticize me" for bringing up politics, he says. "They say, 'China is much better now than before. Our daily lives are much better than they once were.'" Even other professors, he says, have moved on. "They talk about buying a house, buying a car, going abroad on vacation, putting their kids in this or that school. No one discusses politics." He pauses, searching for an explanation. "It's not that they're afraid. It's that they're not interested."

On May 4, 1919, thousands of students from 13 Beijing universities gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest their government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, which included terms that many felt were unfair to China. The movement soon spread to Shanghai and from students to workers, paving the way for the formation of the Communist Party. Party leaders viewed the May Fourth movement as so critical to the Communist revolution that in 1958, when they unveiled the Monument to the People's Heroes in the center of Tiananmen Square, the faces of the 1919 protestors were carved into one side.

In 1989, when students once again converged on the square, they chose the monument as their base. "May Fourth was very important to Chinese history," says Wang Chaohua, a student organizer who appeared on the government list of 21 most-wanted leaders after the Tiananmen crackdown. "Like the students of May Fourth, we wanted to propose something new." In both 1919 and 1989, says Wang, who recently completed a doctorate in Asian languages and literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, "political authorities did not command the public imagination. The vacuum was filled by intellectual energy."

Students first gathered in the square on April 15, 1989, to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist who had been purged from Communist leadership two years earlier. Most of the students had been born on the eve of the Cultural Revolution and grown up in a time of pervasive political theater; they saw demonstrations as an effective means of influencing policy. But other factors contributed to unrest — among professors as well as students. Nascent economic reforms had yielded insufficient results for the educated class. Instead, intellectuals had watched as party leaders used their power to ensure the success of their own children.

"One of the fires that lit [scholars] was that they had been treated so poorly," says Perry Link, a historian at the University of California at Riverside. "They had tiny salaries and couldn't travel very much, so they had a lot of personal complaints. That fueled their thought about what went wrong with China in a concrete sense." One slogan shouted in the square was "Raise the pay of intellectuals!"

Students also wanted more freedom in their personal lives. Before 1989 universities tightly controlled students' private activities, imposing curfews and restrictions on dating. In the square, students danced and listened to the music of the pop star Hou Dejian. In the excitement of the protests, one student leader, Li Lu, informed a crowd that he was still a virgin. He and his girlfriend staged a wedding on the Monument to the People's Heroes, as other protesters toasted the couple with salt water from their hunger strike. "What do we want?" Wu'er Kaixi, another of the movement's leaders, asked of his generation in the 1995 documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace. "Nike shoes. Lots of free time to take our girlfriends to a bar. The freedom to discuss an issue with someone."

In the wake of June Fourth, as the massacre is known in China, that freedom came. Deng intensified market reforms, embarking on a 1992 tour of southern China, the country's cradle of manufacturing, that ushered in rapid economic growth. As China prospered, government money flowed into academe. In the late 1990s, China launched Project 211 and Project 985, which funneled billions of yuan into dozens of universities. The Ministry of Education expanded opportunities for scholars to go abroad and announced new research funds for those who stayed home. At the same time, ministry and university party cadres loosened controls over students' personal lives.

Since 1989, "they've been trying to remove some of the sources of frustration that drove intellectuals into the streets," says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of Chinese protest at the University of California at Irvine. "There's much less micromanagement of daily life on campuses. There's less control over academic trips. There's a wider array of books you can buy in bookstores. Students can now be part of global youth culture."

At Xi'an Jiaotong University, Kang recalls, the months following June Fourth were grim. Sirens wailed, and offenders were seized in the street. The fall semester of 1989 started with a witch hunt, with professors and students brought in for questioning. Then, in a grim Orwellian twist, came the parties. Nearly every weekend that winter, Kang says, his students invited him to a dance. "After June Fourth, boys and girls could go here and there together," he recalls. "Administrators wanted students to date. They wanted them to turn decadent."

"The kids who followed us were able to own pairs of Nike shoes," says Wu'er, reflecting on his earlier explanation for the protests. "It's a deal the Chinese Communist Party made with the people: We're going to let you get rich, but you have to surrender your political freedom."
Not everyone profited. While Kang Zhengguo listened, horrified, as radio announcers relayed news of the deaths in Beijing, across town Zhou Qing was strategizing. For over a month, Zhou, a 25-year-old staff writer at Northwest University, had coordinated protests in Xi'an's New City Square. On June 5, fearing more bloodshed, he dispatched trucks outfitted with loudspeakers, urging students to return home. Then he fled to the hills, where he hid out in peasants' sheds for three months. When he finally slinked back into town to check on his girlfriend in late September, he was seized at gunpoint.

Zhou spent the next two years in a Xi'an prison that was, he says, "like a movie." He was put to work in an assembly line that was required to turn out 12,000 matchboxes a day. If his line didn't make its quota, they didn't eat. Guards occasionally singled out prisoners for "vaccination," an intimidation tactic that entailed inserting insects into a cut in the forearm, yielding a slow and hideous infection. As punishment for trying to escape, Zhou was transferred to a labor camp where he spent another eight months surrounded by 17and 18-year-old political prisoners. At mealtime, older prisoners bullied the students out of their food. "One student used to come to me and tell me his dreams," Zhou recalls. "He dreamed of a street filled with steamed buns."

Other activists got away. Many of the 1989 movement's most famous leaders fled, like Wu'er and Wang, to the West. Several enrolled at U.S. universities. A few continued to advocate for human rights from abroad. Others went into business. Wu'er now manages an investment fund in Taiwan. After earning an M.B.A. from Harvard University, Chai Ling, another student leader, started a Boston software company that provides free Web portals to universities in exchange for students' contact information, promoting its product with press releases that invoked her role in the square. (Chai has also filed suit against the makers of The Gate of Heavenly Peace, who include several prominent China scholars in America, for linking on their Web site to news articles that reported critical information about her company.)

But outside of labor camps and Western democratic havens, the memory of what happened dulled. For a few years following 1989, videos about June Fourth — known in Mandarin simply as liu si, or "6/4" — circulated on the black market. Then the government began a campaign of forgetting, first spinning the event and then erasing it. The popular Chinese search engine Baidu now blocks at least 19 derivations of "six four," including Chinese character homophones, the abbreviation "sf," and "63+1."

Such controls are far from total, but they can be very effective. On June 4, 2007, a newspaper in Chengdu published a small advertisement recognizing the mothers of the 1989 victims. Online, chat-room users speculated about how such a message could have gotten past the paper's editors — until it was revealed that the young clerk who took the ad didn't recognize the event. What might have been a quiet act of resistance was instead a measure of a nation's forgetting.

"My students don't know what it is," says a professor at a city university in Shanghai who witnessed the protests as a teenager. "You say June Fourth and they say, 'What, my birthday'?"

Even the staunchest critics of China's regime acknowledge it now allows discussion in areas that were once off limits. After his release from prison, Zhou became an investigative journalist, tackling sensitive issues like food safety, and only sometimes encountering government intervention.

At the same time, some contend that economic growth has merely allowed the Chinese government to fine-tune its control of dissent. As the government's spending power grew, so did the carrots it could offer for obedience. "The government has great ambition for scholarly work that can make considerable breakthroughs, like shooting satellites into outer space," says Wang Chaohua, who edited a volume of work by Chinese intellectuals titled One China, Many Paths (Verso, 2003). "But to do work in the social sciences and humanities, you need to have a real independent spirit, and that isn't what the government wants to see. So you have a lot of political intervention."

Intellectuals who follow the state line are rewarded with trips abroad and generous research grants, critics say. "There are many research programs now that are sponsored by the government," says Wang Tiancheng, a former law professor at Peking University. "It's a type of corruption. They're buying scholars."

Wang, now a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Human Rights, knows that power play firsthand. He spent five years in prison in the 1990s as one of the "Beijing Fifteen," a group of intellectuals persecuted for their opposition to one-party rule. When he was released from prison in 1997, no university would hire him. "If you don't go along with the Communist Party, if you don't censor yourself, you'll lose out on many benefits, including promotions and honors," he says.

Inquiries related to June Fourth are particularly out of bounds. The events of 1989 shaped the work of the writer Ma Jian, who shuttled supplies to students in the square. His most recent novel, Beijing Coma (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008), is told from the perspective of a student who is shot in the back during the 1989 crackdown, only to live through two decades on life support — a not-so-subtle metaphor for what Ma sees as a numb post-Tiananmen China. The writer lives in London, where he is insulated by international fame, but he says the friends he saw on his trip back to China this spring were detained shortly after he left merely for associating with him. "Just a month ago we were eating together in Chengdu," he says, naming one friend. "And now he's in jail."

This past April 15, 20 years after the death of Hu Yaobang first brought students to Tiananmen Square, it was filled with police. The Monument to the People's Heroes was cordoned off, and a blue sign near its base read, in Chinese, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. Most of the people at the square that afternoon were tourists from the provinces; many wore the red and yellow baseball hats of organized tour groups. These days Beijing's students are more likely to congregate a few blocks away, at the flashy malls of Wangfujing.

Some say economic nationalism cannot hold. Since December, more than 8,000 scholars and professionals have signed Charter 08, a manifesto calling for the Communist Party to obey the Chinese Constitution and respect human rights. The Internet presents a thorny obstacle to government control, with new Web sites and code words springing up as soon as others are blocked. And even government-financed research trips can backfire. Scholars who leave for a few years tend to return with new ideas.

"The leadership of Hu Jintao is trying to return to a neo-Confucian education system where people don't challenge certain values," says Merle Goldman, a historian of Chinese intellectual life at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. "That's impossible in China today because of its openness to the outside world. No matter what this regime does, it's going to be very difficult for them to control the academic community."

But others say the academic community may control itself. On a trip back to China in 2000, Kang Zhengguo spent a few days with several former colleagues. In 1989, when they were professors and administrators at Xi'an Jiaotong, the men had joined him in speaking out against the violence in Beijing. Later his colleagues fled to Shenzhen, a freewheeling city that has sprung up in the wake of economic reforms. Two became successful businessmen; one philosophy professor became a high-level government official. Kang hoped the old friends, now all safely in senior positions, might reminisce about China's era of protest, but his attempts to bring up the Tiananmen demonstrations failed.

One colleague, the official, instead peppered him with questions about American universities; he hoped to send his son to study abroad. "I was nostalgic," Kang says. "And they were indifferent."

Mara Hvistendahl is The Chronicle's China correspondent.

Makalah

2009-05-26T00:14:00.000+08:00

Masalah agama, secara mudah, boleh disebut sebagai proses “keterbalikan hubungan antara alam ghaib dengan alam benda” – yakni kepastian atau kebenaran alam ghairah menjadi lebih kukuh dan nyata daripada alam benda.

Kita pasti saiz, bentuk, warna batu dan ia begitu jelas, nyata dan meyakinkan. Tiada pertikaian lagi. Kebenaran atau kepastian alam benda dicapai sebahagian besarnya melalui pancaindera atau proses empirical – proses asasi sains tabie aliran positif.

Alam benda melalui pengesanan pancaindera lebih objektif. Atau, keobjektifan mengatasi kesubjektifan penilaian seseorang.

Kita mula tidak pasti – tidak sepasti proses empirical mengenali seketul batu – apabila kita berdepan dengan bahan-bahan pengetahuan seperti seni, falsafah, berita atau agama.

Bahan-bahan pengetahuan dikesan bukan melalui pancaindera tetapi taakulan. Maka, ia menjadi kurang pasti, banyak tafsiran, terus diperdebatkan dan keyakinan seseorang mula bersifat peribadi atau semakin subjektif.

Seharusnya beginilah pendekatan seseorang yang siuman berdepan dengan dua dunia ini – alam benda dan alam bukan benda.

Tetapi agama berjaya menukar atau menterbalikkan proses ini. Sesuatu bahan ilmu – seni, falsafah, berita atau agama – yang seharusnya subjektif dianggap “lebih objektif” daripada seketul batu!

Bahan-bahan agama dianggap (atau, lebih tepat “dirasai”) lebih pasti, lebih nyata dan lebih benar daripada alam benda di atas muka bumi ini. Ajaran agama yang subjektif akhirnya bertukar menjadi “fakta keras”, hard facts. Imaginasi, atau lebih tepatnya aspek-aspek metafizik, bertukar menjadi fizik.

Oleh kerana manusia tidak digerakkan oleh alam benda tetapi oleh kesedarannya (di dalam dirinya, di alam akalnya), maka masalah-masalah dalam memahami agama – gejala ektremisme, kejahilan dan pendekatan memahaminya – haruslah bermula dengan penyusunan semula kaedah mendekati alam metafizik dan alam fizik.

Dengan bahasa yang lebih klise, kita boleh sebut bahawa usaha merungkaikan kekusutan ini harus bermula dengan pendidikan berfikir dan kaedah tepat mendekati ilmu pengetahuan.

Dalam istilah lain, saya sebut proses ini sebagai “kritik agama” yang saya takrifkan, lebih kurang seperti berikut:

Tanpa proses kritik agama, ramai orang menduga agama itu berkecuali, jujur dan benar sepanjang waktu. Kritik bertujuan mendorong pemahaman kritis dan reflektif terhadap asas-asas anutan agama tersedia ada (kukuh) yang bergerak dalam masyarakat, yang seolah-olah muncul secara semula jadi, dan akibatnya tidak dipermasalahkan atau dipertikaikan lagi.

Dalam bahasa yang mudah, proses ini beranggapan agama itu sebagai himpunan pengetahuan manusia yang terikat dalam ruang dan masa, maka mencari kejernihan beragama harus juga bererti membuka diri (yakni, kesedaran subjektif) kepada susur galur, genealogy, pembinaan pengetahuan agama itu sendiri khususnya dalam ruang sosial.

Isunya sekarang, apakah “metodologi” yang saya sarankan ini boleh disepakati sebagai satu jendela atau satu pendekatan untuk memberikan kesedaran kepada pengamal media dan pengguna media – di dalam (kandungan atau mesej media) dan di luar media (konteks luas yang melingkungi operasi media, wartawan dan pengguna)?

Apakah ia boleh dianggap common ground untuk membuka ruang dialog atau ruang komunikasi yang dimainkan oleh media?

[ii]

Salib di Biskut: Faith, Plurality and Freedom**

Laporan polis dibuat selepas satu persatuan pengguna Islam ternampak lambang kecil ‘+’ pada sekeping biskut.

Kata mereka, lambang itu “salib”, simbol agama Kristian, yang telah meresahkan sebilangan pengguna kerana sejak biskut itu berada dalam pasaran, dan promosi produk ini berleluasa di televisyen, semakin banyak aduan diterimanya.

Persatuan ini mahu pengeluarnya menarik balik produk itu dan memohon maaf kepada masyarakat Islam.

Selain akta penerbitan dan mesin cetak yang mengekang, Kementerian Keselamatan Dalam Negeri menyediakan satu garis panduan susulan setiap kali permit penerbitan dikeluarkan.

Garis panduan ini lebih khusus dan perinci — antaranya, pada garis panduan ini, disebutkan larangan menggunakan simbol (atau, foto dan imej Kaabah) dalam ruangan iklan. Tidak ada sesiapa yang boleh mencipta iklan seumpama itu, atau menerbitkannya di media masing-masing.

Kononnya Kaabah itu simbol kesucian umat islam. Maka foto, grafik dan imej Kaabah juga mempalitkan kekudusan seumpamanya.

Dalam media berbahasa Melayu, memang sudah lama iklan arak dilarang. Tetapi akhbar berbahasa Inggeris yang menyiarkan iklan arak tahun ini dinasihatkan tidak menyiarkan iklan itu di sebelah foto dan berita Perdana Menteri, kononnya tidak sesuai!

Bagi mereka barang kali simbol, atau syiar, akhirnya menjadi sebahagian pembawa makna yang kaku dan pejal — seperti membawa lemang di dalam pinggan. Biarlah seribu pinggan sudah bersilih ganti, selagi tidak dimakan, lemang tetap juga pulut yang dipanggang di dalam buluh.

Simbol, dan maknanya, tiba-tiba menjadi abadi dan qadim; bukan lagi wahana sementara untuk memahamkan manusia akan dunianya yang ruwet dan bercelaru.

Dan manusia, sebagai pemberi makna dan juga penafsir makna itu, yang memindah-mindahkan makna bersama kepentingan masing-masing sudah dihilangkan. Manusia tiba-tiba ghaib.

Manusia, pemberi dan penafsir makna, dalam konteks diri dan lingkungannya, tidak dianggap agen yang aktif tetapi penerima atau aktor yang pasif.

Dia menerima makna seperti jatuhnya titis-titis hujan dari langit. Tidak boleh dielak lagi, pasti basah. Makna, yang asalnya sebahagian dunia simbolisme dan kemujaradan manusia — dan hanya bermain-main di ruang akal dan khayalan, menjadi sebagian alam benda seperti batu-batu di pinggir jalan; boleh disepak dan dilontar dengan mengekalkan ketulan asalnya.

Manusia tidak boleh memberontak pada tuhan, maka manusia tidak pula dibenarkan memberontak terhadap makna. Seperti batu yang melayang ke kepala, kita harus menerima benjol makna yang singgah di benak.

Tetapi hakikatnya, manusia boleh (malah, selalu) memberontak terhadap tuhannya. Tetapi batu makna tetap juga membenjolkan!

(ii)
Dan celakalah mereka yang beragama — mereka yang beriman pada pada makna yang membenjolkan. Makna yang menjerut khayalan dan kesedaran sehingga semua yang cair ini membeku seperti pejalnya air apabila singgah di kutub.

Semua orang yang pejal selalu bermain di wilayah kutub — bayangkan air yang boleh menelan kita hidup-hidup menjadi dataran keras yang membina kehidupan. Di sini kebebasan dan kejamakan menjadi sempit atau semput.

Pegangan, akidah dan kepercayaan — yang asalnya bagian dunia khayalan dan simbolisme; dunia yang cair tanpa bentuk dan meruap-ruap — tercampak ke dunia pejal. Ia menjadi iconoclasm — ada waktu-waktunya semua ikon, sementara ada masa-masanya ikon-ikon terpilih sahaja dikekalkan, khususnya ikon yang menyenangkan.

Mujurlah ikon itu sifatnya benda dan nyata. Tetapi makna bukanlah ikon. Makna ibarat ruh sesat yang meronta-ronta, boleh berpindah-pindah pada ikon-ikon lain atau tanpa ikon sama sekali.

Makna tidak ada pada abjad, pada gelombang bunyi dari halkum dan mulut; ia tidak ada pada bahasa — baik bahasa warna, bahasa gerak, bahasa cahaya, bahasa bunyi atau bahasa kata. Makna mengatasi itu semua. Makna tidak ada pada ikon, simbol, warna dan alam fizik.

Makna hanya ada pada, dan melekat pada, pemberi dan penafsir makna. Makna ialah apa yang dimaknakan! Tetapi apakah yang dimaknakan itu, apakah yang bermakna itu?

(iii)
Makna lari bersembunyi ke dalam diri. Wap-wap air yang tidak terjangkau. Membingungkan. Apabila ia jatuh ke kanvas, bahasa warnanya pun mengalir dari satu manusia kepada manusia yang lain. Boleh disentuh, boleh dilihat tetapi masih lagi lincah, tiada bentuknya. Apabila ia jatuh ke kitab suci, ia mula membeku.

Agama, seperti ideologi dan sistem pengetahuan, bertujuan membekukan cairnya makna. Supaya semua tingkat akal — harap-harap — dapat menangkapnya. Makna seperti seekor rama-rama indah, jaringnya itu agama, ideologi dan pengetahuan.

Rama-rama tidak terbang ke jaring, ia bebas sebebas-bebasnya di ruangnya tanpa batas tetapi jaring membatasnya dan melemaskannya. Rama-rama di alam luas tidak kekal, ia boleh muncul, boleh juga tidak muncul-muncul. Tetapi rama-rama beku di dalam bingkai perhiasan boleh dipeluk dan dicium. Rama-rama dalam bingkai boleh dirancang dan diramal, tidak seperti rama-rama liar di alam luas.

Makna si rama-rama, makna air makna kita bersama — makna yang dikongsikan, bukan makna di dalam diri. Tetapi makna si rama-rama, maknanya air masih liar dan tanpa bentuk. Kita boleh sama-sama memandangnya dan kita boleh terus mengejarnya — dan kita boleh sama-sama kecewa setelah gagal menangkapnya.

(iv)
Kejamakan, plurality dan kebebasan, freedom sentiasa menjadi medan tarik menarik antara makhluk dengan tuhan, antara kudrat tuhan dengan kudrat manusia, antara rama-rama dengan jaringnya.

Mujurlah tuhan selalu lebih kaya, maka kita pun bebas, bebas memberontak padanya, bebas meninggalkannya, bebas menyemak kembali dirinya semahu diri kita. Kebebasan tuhan itu ada dalam akidah kita — ada pada kejamakan makna, budaya dan gerak.

Tetapi wakil tuhan, bagaimana? Mereka tidak selalu kaya sekayanya tuhan, mereka juga berpihak, mereka bernafas, berlari dan bersenggama. Makna siapakah yang mahu dipegang — makna tuhan, wakil tuhan atau manusia?

Akidah, pegangan atau sebut saja kepercayaan semuanya pada pemberi dan penerima makna yang terus-terusan bergelut dalam medan makna. Medan dan ruang. Wakil tuhan, dan juga wakil manusia, selalunya ingin menyempitkan ruang makna dan dengan itu memejalkan wap air menjadi ketulan ais yang memamah Titanic. Yang besar (titanic sebagai kata sifat) dikalahkan oleh yang lebih besar dan pejal. Manusia pun terkorban, dan cinta pun putus.

Sebab itu akidah, seperti tradisi, memutuskan cinta dan kehendak biologi kerana ruang imaginasi dan kemujaradan rupa-rupanya lebih pejal daripada jasmani manusia.

Apabila makna disejukbekukan, manusia berhenti menjadi manusia, manusia menjadi alat dan diperalatkan. Kudrat manusia bukan lagi cerminan dan ruhnya kudrat tuhan tetapi benda-benda yang diaturkan mengikut kemahuan segelintir manusia lain yang mengatasi segala kudrat.

Kudratnya wakil tuhan ini, atau wakil manusia, sama sahaja dengan kudrat kita. Jika terkena pisau, darah menitis dari jarinya. Tetapi keperkasaan kudratnya luar biasa kerana makna di tangannya lebih tajam daripada pedang, lebih berang daripada atom-atom yang tercerai-berai.

Dominasi, dan semua penguasaan, pada hakikatnya dominasi makna dan ruang makna. Medan tari menjadi sel penjara yang hapak. Jika dosa mengalir di lantai tari, sel menjadikan kaki keras membeku. Jika rancaknya irama mengundang asmara, sel penjara memekakkan kesepian, jauh dan jauh ke dasar jiwa.

Kecilnya sel penjara, boleh sekecil itu juga medan tari, bukan kerana saiznya tetapi kecilnya himpitan jiwa yang dicetuskannya. Ruang tari, walau sekecil sel penjara, tetapi imaginasinya terbang jauh ke luar jendela.

Penguasaan sejenis perkataan politik. Semua politik pada dasarnya untuk mengikat walaupun sewaktu halkumnya mendenguskan nafas kebebasan. Ia ada di mana-mana: pada agama, pada pengetahuan dan pada ideologi. Ia memenjara dan menyeragam.

Hanya makna yang membebaskan, sungguh bebas sehingga ia menyesatkan dan menyasaukan.
Siapa yang takut, berenanglah ke dataran ais dan mampuslah kamu bersama kebekuan. Makna tetap berdiri di pantai musim panas yang mengghairahkan, kalaulah kamu mengetahuinya.

Sesungguhnya hanya sedikit daripada kamu yang mengetahuinya.

————————
** Esei ini kali pertama diterbitkan pada katalog pameran faith, plurality & freedom anjuran Middle Eastern Graduate Center (MEGC) & Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAF), 30/11/2006. Esei yang sama kemudian diterbitkan di laman web Jalantelawi.com

Nathania

2009-05-23T15:07:00.004+08:00

Saya terpaksa jujur kali ini. Jujur sejujurnya.

Kehidupan berumahtangga ini memang ada asyik dan khayalnya sendiri, seperti sembang panjang berlarutan di dini hari, seperti membaca buku filsafat dan bersembang politik.

Seperti nikotina, memang ada ketagihannya.

Saya kini jatuh cinta pada Nathania, yang kecil dan suka tersenyum.

Gila! Memang benar cakap orang, sesiapa yang kahwin lambat akan menyesal ...

[ii]

Alison Gopnik describes new experiments in developmental psychology that show everything we think we know about babies is wrong.

Thomas Nagel famously asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” That question has become a staple of Philosophy 101 courses, but we might be better served asking a more basic one: What is it like to be a baby? Though all of us experience life as a baby firsthand, we’ve long held misconceptions about what babies are capable of thinking, feeling, and understanding. Only recently have we overturned dominant theories of development in which very young children were thought to be barely conscious at all.

In The Philosophical Baby developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik compiles the latest in her field’s research to paint a new picture of our inner lives at inception — one in which we are, in some ways, more conscious than adults. Gopnik spoke with Seed’s Evan Lerner about how babies and young children learn from us and what we can learn from them.

Seed: How does a better understanding of what’s going on in the minds of babies help us as adults?

Alison Gopnik: One of the things we discovered is that imagination, which we often think of as a special adult ability, is actually in place in very young children, as early as 18 months old. That ability is very closely related to children’s ability to figure out how the world works. Imagination isn’t just something we develop for our amusement; it seems to be something innate and connected to how we understand the causal structure of the real world. In fact, the new computational model of development we’ve created — using what computer scientists call Bayesian networks — shows systematically how understanding causation lets you imagine new possibilities. If children are computing in this way, then we’d expect imagination and learning to go hand in hand.

Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that?

AG: It’s related to one of the basic things that came out of our research: Why do children exist at all? It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have these creatures that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults. That period of dependence is longer for us than it is for any other species, and historically that period has become longer and longer.

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you’re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don’t have if you’re actually making things happen in the world. And when you’re making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined. The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don’t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We’re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we’re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

Seed: You think Freud’s and Piaget’s conceptions of young children’s theory of mind are wrong. What do we know that they didn’t?

AG: Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults. A lot of their characteristic traits, like their pretend play, are signs of how powerful their imaginative abilities are.

Seed: So is this just a matter of a changing frame of reference, where we now value imagination more?

AG: Well, the science has changed, too. For Freud and Piaget, it was a perfectly good hypothesis. If you just looked at young children and babies, they just did not seem very smart. We have new techniques we use to get more subtle measurements of what’s going on in children’s minds, and that’s the thing that has overturned that earlier view. When we take more than a superficial look at what children are doing, it turns out that they both know much more and learn much more than we ever thought before.

Seed: What are these techniques? How can we interrogate the minds of people who can’t yet fully communicate?

AG: Children are not very good at spontaneously telling you what they are thinking. With adults, we give them a questionnaire and have them give us answers. That doesn’t work for babies, who can’t talk, and for young children, who can only give a kind of stream-of-consciousness response. So one thing is to look at what they do rather than what they say. This works if you give them very focused questions with very simple answers. Rather than ask a child to explain how a toy machine works, we’ll ask, “Do you think this block or that block will make the machine go?”

Seed: What have you found?

AG: These techniques show that children can work with very complex statistical information. In the machine example, we show children’s patterns of conditional probability, the relationship between certain blocks and the machine turning on or off. If I tried to give you just a description of the sequence of events in one of these experiments in a conversation, I’d probably get it wrong and you wouldn’t be able to remember it — it’s pretty complicated for even adults to describe. But when you give kids these complicated sets of relationships and then just ask them to make the machine go or make the machine stop, they do the right things. Although they can’t consciously track how these conditional probabilities work, they are unconsciously taking that information into account. And they do this in the same way that sophisticated Bayesian network machine-learning programs do.

Seed: What about less objective causal inferences, such as ones dealing with morality?

AG: One of my favorites of these experiments is one that’s been around for quite awhile but hasn’t been fully appreciated. Two-and-a-half-year-olds already recognize the difference between moral principles and conventional principles. You can ask them if it would be okay to hit someone at daycare if everyone said it would be okay, versus asking them whether it would be okay to not hang up your coat in the cubby if everyone said it would be okay. These children say it’s never okay to hit someone, but whether or not you have to put your clothes in the cubby could change from daycare to daycare. They already seem to appreciate the difference between the kinds of morality that comes from empathy and the kind that comes from our conventional rules. From the time they are two, they recognize both are important but in different ways. That’s pretty amazing.

Seed: So where do adult philosophers go from here?

AG: Back to the 18th century, in some ways. If you look at someone like David Hume, he thought he was doing a kind of theoretical science — he didn’t think there was a line between what we find out from science and what we find out from philosophy. Increasingly, modern philosophers say that we can learn about the big questions by looking at science. But science, especially developmental psychology, can also tell us about philosophy; it can tell us about what we start with, what we learn, and what the basic facets of human nature are. The kind of picture you often get from scientifically oriented philosophy is often very much in the vein of evolutionary psychology, with everything innate and genetically determined. But one of the more important things that has come out of developmental work is that there’s also a powerful capacity for change. And we’re starting to understand how that change takes place at a very detailed neurological and computational level.

And the same is true when we look at our moral development. A lot of moral psychology has been saying that we have these innate moral instincts, or innate moral grammars. When we look at children, we do see some of these innate moral intuitions, but there is also this tremendous capacity for moral revision. In some ways, I think those are some of the most distinctively human abilities. They give us the ability to say, “Oh wait, the way that we’ve been operating is not working, and that’s wrong.” And this gives us the ability to change those things that are wrong and get to better moral principles than we started out with.

[Source: Seedmagazine.com, 'To be a baby' (5 May 2009) by Evan Lerner]

Pemberontakan sejagat menolak demokrasi

2008-09-21T07:23:00.002+08:00

(i)

The events unfolding in Thailand are part of a gathering global revolt against democracy?

(ii)

Bagaimana saya boleh terbabit dalam agenda Anwar Ibrahim menjadi PM menjelang, pada dan selepas 16 September? Ada lagi hujah-hujah bangang seperti ini!

Fedap & Boikot? Kah, kah, kah!

2008-07-08T02:14:00.005+08:00

Kah, kah, kah! Ada penulis-penulis blog, khususnya yang tersohor mula berasa fedap (asal: fed up) dan ingin memulaukan kegiatan memblog buat sementara waktu - mogok.

Demikian, kata mereka.

Ada kehidupan yang lebih penting daripada politik, orang politik dan segala kegilaan mengejar kuasa orang politik.

Maksud mereka, sejak peristiwa minggu lepas mula menguak perang politik - ada orang kata pengulangan 1998 - termasuk liwat dan pembunuhan Altantuya Shaariibuu.

Kah, kah, kah! Orang-orang ini sudah gila atau apa?

Kah, kah, kah! Orang ini mahu tunjukkan mereka lebih suci daripada binatang-binatang politik itu, political junkie?

Kah, kah, kah! Rasakan kamu semua!

Episod ini hanya satu permulaan (bagi sebuah pengakhiran?) atau satu pengakhiran yang sebenar-benarnya?

Kah, kah, kah! Rasakan keindahan politik Malaysia - lebih kotor dan keji, lebih mulia! Kenapa kita takut?

Kah, kah, kah - jika saya berdiri di depan mereka ini - saya juga akan ketawa dengan kepura-puraan mereka (atau, dengan ketulusan akal budi mereka)

Kah, kah, kah - ingin jadi nabi, konon! Bullshit, bros!

Kah, kah, kah - kegilaan kuasa (sama ada mereka yang ingin mencapainya, atau yang ingin mengekalkannya, atau yang baru mengecapi nikmatnya beberapa bulan) harus lebih kotor dan keji lagi!

Kah, kah, kah - sudah tidak sanggup? Cis, bodoh, jenis kelas menengah yang hidup di pinggir kota besar... beginilah lagaknya mereka? Kah, kah, kah!

Kalau langit jatuh menghempap satu per satu penulis-penulis blog ini dan binatang-binatang politik yang mereka keji itu, aku akan tetap terus ketawa. Kah, kah, kah!

[ii]

Hey orang PAS, kau orang ingat ucapan Mohamad Sabu itu lebih mulia daripada lagu liwat Carburator Dung?

Hey, sudahlah!

Hey kau orang fikir ahli-ahli politik itu bahasanya lebih poetic dan lyrical daripada lagu liwat itu?

Hey, sudahlah!

[iii]

Kau fikir jika kau orang terkenal, ada kuasa, ada glam, ada media - kau orang akan tegak di puncak selama-lamanya??? !

Kah, kah, kah...

Jangan berlagak sucilah, oiii! Sedar dirilah sikit, suluh muka sendiri di cermin!

Tidakkah kau takut?

2008-06-05T00:28:00.005+08:00

Barangkali saya tersalah tanya isu yang salah kepada tokoh muda yang salah.

Di hujung wawancara dengan Mohamad Ezam Mohd Nor kurang lebih seminggu lepas, saya bertanya (kira-kira berbunyi):

Apakah anda tidak takut melihat kehidupan berpolitik kita hari ini, apabila orang politik lebih banyak dan hebat mendedahkan isu-isu dan kes-kes rasuah berbanding media dan wartawan? [Apakah anda tidak takut melihat kehidupan berpolitik kita hari ini ...] sebahagian isu rasuah itu untuk menghentam orang lain dan menaikkan diri sendiri?

Soalan ini, di hujung sisa-sisa temubual di pejabat Malaysiakini pada Sabtu lepas, bukan soalan politik dan tidak wajar ditanyakan kepada tokoh politik -- walau Mohamad Ezam mahu dikenali sebagai juara anti-rasuah melalui GERAK.

Soalan ini juga, saya kira, bukan soalan berita yang wajar diperhitungkan untuk dimasukkan sebagai bahan santapan pengguna media.

Mohamad Ezam menjawab sesuatu, bukan berdiam diri atau termenung. Saya tidak pasti sama ada beliau memahami persoalan itu, atau cuba menduga siratan pertanyaan yang tersurat.

Namun saya dapat menduga beliau agak kekok dengan pertanyaan ini, dan janggal pula dengan persoalan ini.

Lalu saya cuba memancing lagi (sekali lagi, kira-kira berbunyi):

Di negara-negara lain pendedahan rasuah dan skandal orang politik, khususnya parti pemeritah, dan selebriti diusahakan oleh media, di tangan wartawan. Tetapi di sini, tidak. Media berdiri jauh di belakang pendedahan skandal dan rasuah yang dibuat orang politik.

Saya agak Mohamad Ezam, dan teman-teman seangkatannya sama ada pembangkang atau kerajaan, tidak dapat menduga sedalam mana persoalan ini daripada beberapa baris pertanyaan ini. Dan, mungkin jauh sekali untuk menduga kepentingan dan keberkaitannya dengan isu politik, rasuah dan kehidupan demokrasi di negara kita.

Saya tidak salahkah beliau dan saya tidak salahkan sesiapa -- sememangnya untuk menjadi mahkluk politik, dan political junkie, kita tidak perlu bertanya isu-isu yang lebih mendalam dengan cakupan yang luas.

Politik kita tidak memerlukan itu semua.

Persoalan saya itu persoalan kebudayaan, persoalan filsafat, persoalan yang bertujuan menerobos ke dasar kesedaran diri daripada sekadar retorika. Persoalan saya itu persoalan refleksi, renungan dan cerminan balik ke dasar-dasar persoalan.

Oleh kerana tidak ada lagi soalan yang lebih ingin ditanyakan kepadanya, sebagai wartawan, saya melontarkan persoalan tersebut. Oleh kerana sudah lama tidak mengemaskini blog ini dan oleh kerana tiada bahan yang hendak saya tulis, maka saya bangkitkan persoalan tersebut.

Ya, ia hanya sisa-sisa persoalan daripada semua yang berguna. Yang enggan dijawab, dan mungkin tidak mahu dipertanyakan orang.

[ii]

Sudah agak lama saya tidak berendam dengan buku, idea dan diskusi warung yang rancak. Mungkin sepanjang usia perkahwinan saya, atau lebih panjang lagi. Setidak-tidaknya, dalam ingatan saya, sejak kembali dari Jakarta dan sejak berhenti menulis kolum "Tiada Noktah" di Malaysiakini, saya hari demi hari semakin jauh dari buku -- maksud saya, buku yang memuaskan batin!

Sehinggalah, demi menghabiskan sisa-sisa perjalanan yang tidak terlalu membosankan dari Puduraya ke Tanjung Malim dan Besout, saya membelek-belek The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, buah tangan Mark Lilla.

Ternyata, ia memang mengasyikkan, boleh meningkatkan berahi intelek yang luar biasa -- kadang-kadang terasa juga buku ini, walaupun tentang tokoh, sejarah dan idea filsafat besar abad ke-20 hanyalah sekadar buku pop tentang orang, idea dan zamannya. Buku-buku yang lebih baik sedikit daripada biasa.

Namun, persoalan yang dibangkitkan oleh Lilla, memang berat dan mencabar. Persoalan ini semakin relevan apabila Pakatan Rakyat menguasai politik nasional dalam skala yang besar, sewaktu teman-teman, khususnya yang muda-muda 20-an usianya terseret dalam kancah kemenangan tersebut.

Kecuali seorang (agak saya), teman-teman lain belum membacanya -- walau hubungan dan peranan intelektual dengan politik sudah tidak terlalu asing kepada kami. Saya baru sampai di halaman 206 bab "The lure of Syracuse", yang kononnya pernah ditanyakan kepada Martin Heidegger selepas Nazisme tumbang.

Walaupun tidak mendalam dan biasa-biasa sahaja, saya sering juga menyentuhnya. Menghabisi bab demi bab The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics ibarat mengkhatam sejuzuk al-Quran, asyik dan rohani sekali kesannya.

Apatah lagi jika dibaca di dalam sebuah bas dingin yang tidak mempunyai (seorang pun!) gadis manis...

Debat baju sekolah

2008-05-27T23:03:00.000+08:00

Isu-isu ini memang panas. Perkataannya - "seksi" - panas, dan sindirannya juga pedas. Jawapan dan kecaman terhadap sindirannya tidak kurang panas... Tetapi foto dari negara jiran ini, yang ditunjukkan oleh editor saya yang pernah bertugas di negara jiran, lagilah panas. Pakaian seragam untuk mahasiswi Thailand yang dikenali sebagai "pakaian pensil" kerana warnanya yang hitam dan putih.

Baju sekolah memang 'seksi'
(Malaysiakini.com, 26 Mei 2008)

Muslimat PAS bersetuju dengan saranan Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar Islam Malaysia (PKPIM) yang menggesa pakaian seragam pelajar perempuan diganti kerana jarang dan boleh mengundang gangguan serta jenayah seks.

Bagaimanapun setiausaha dewan itu Aiman Athirah Al Jundi berkata isunya bukan warna baju pelajar itu tetapi jenis kainnya yang jarang dan menarik perhatian.

"Kita tidak dapat menafikan bahawa material (bahan) kain putih yang digunakan selama ini adalah agak nipis dan menyebabkan pelajar-pelajar perempuan kelihatan agak seksi khususnya apabila tidak mengenakan tudung yang dapat membantu menutup dada mereka (sekiranya dilabuhkan sedikit)," katanya.

"Apatah lagi sekiranya mereka hanya memakai coli tanpa mengenakan singlet dalam. Lebih ketara apabila warna pakaian dalam mereka lebih terang atau kontra dengan seragam putih yang mereka pakai.

"Lebih malang bagi pelajar perempuan ialah apabila hari hujan."

Tukar baju elak gangguan seks
(Malaysiakini.com, 21 Mei 2008)

Kementerian Pelajaran dicadangkan menukar pakaian seragam pelajar perempuan bagi menangani jenayah seksual melibatkan remaja dan hubungan seks sebelum perkahwinan dalam kalangan mereka.

Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar Islam Malaysia (PKPIM) berkata, kementerian boleh menukar baju putih kepada baju berwarna kerana ia tampak sesuai dan tidak jarang untuk dipakai oleh pelajar perempuan.

"Baju berwarna putih sangat jarang untuk dipakai oleh pelajar perempuan menyebabkan ada daya tarikan di situ," kata pemimpin wanita PKPIM, Munirah Bahari hari ini.

"Lebih-lebih lagi ia (baju jarang) akan mengganggu mata lelaki, sama ada suka melihatnya atau pun tidak. Baju berwarna putih itu tidak sesuai dipakai oleh pelajar perempuan di sekolah kerajaan.

"Di sinilah punca yang boleh kita saksikan bahawa pelajar perempuan itu sendiri mempunyai daya tarikan supaya lelaki mendekatinya.

"Oleh itu terjadilah perkara-perkara seperti pencabulan, penzinaan dan sebagainya."

Beliau mencadangkan kementerian menilai semula secepat mungkin baju seragam sekolah untuk pelajar perempuan.

The art of the novel is anti-political

2008-05-25T23:25:00.002+08:00

Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His most recent book of essays is entitled Other Colors. He has just finished a new novel, The Museum of Innocence. He spoke recently with Paul Holdengraber, director of public programs at the New York Public Library. Below are excerpts of that interview.

NPQ: You offered a unique interpretation of Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky in your introduction to a Turkish edition of that book, focusing not on individual alienation but on the relationship between the center and the margin. You say that "the true subject of that book is the jealousy, the anger and pride of a man who cannot make himself into a European." This obviously has resonance today in the Turkish situation vis-a-vis Europe.

Orhan Pamuk: Yes, Dostoevsky is an author with whom I tend to identify. I have learned a lot from him. In Notes From the Underground, he was waging a war against shallow Occidentalists, didactic writers who were always extolling the wonders of the West.

Dostoevsky himself, of course, was made of the stuff of the West. He went to military school, but studied engineering as taught in the West. In his youth, he was a radical Westernizer. But, later, in his middle life, he converted into a conservative pan-Slavist. It was at that age, when he was developing his ideas for this novel, that being Western, having the positivist outlook of Western science, was so admired among the Russian youth. Dostoevsky hated that.

Not only did he hate this admiration of the West. He wanted to contradict the core ideas of Western civilization at that time, among which were that all human beings are rational, and their rational self-interested actions would be good for them and their society.

He wrote, long before Freud, that human beings were not rational creatures but acted on instincts they didn't understand. He tried to understand this dark side of the human spirit.

Clearly, also, there was jealousy here. As a Russian, he was aware of the fact that Russian culture was considered by the West as barbarian and undeveloped. That upset him. He was angry at the West and the Westernizers for looking down on his people.

Of course, in my case, I am a Turk. I come from Istanbul. I'm heavily imbedded in my culture. But Turkish culture and Turkish language have never been the center of the world. So, like Dostoevsky, I too carry a certain anger and resentment toward the center.

NPQ: V.S. Naipaul always writes about this theme of the center and the margin. Do you identify with him?

Pamuk: Let me tell you a story about Naipaul I've never told anyone. In May, we were staying in the same hotel in Italy. We met in the lobby briefly, and he said, "Pleased to meet you," and left.

As I was leaving the hotel, the butler came up to me and said, "Mr. Naipaul admires you a lot, he said such nice things to me about you." But Naipaul didn't say these things to my face, but to the butler. What an irony! Two non-Western writers communicating through a European butler!

Now, when you raise the name of Naipaul, everyone immediately rises to condemn his politically incorrect remarks. But this is not the point. The point about writers is not where they fail, but what they have achieved. Few authors are geniuses all the time. Sometimes they write something extraordinary, and that is what ought to count. That is what we should pay attention to.

Their failures, their silly comments in some interview here or there are not so interesting.

The fact remains that Naipaul was the first writer to pay attention to what we call today non-Western "post-colonial societies" when, after the bad imperialists left -- and they were bad -- a new generation of national leaders took over. Because of the guilt in the West, the tendency was to praise these post-colonial societies without understanding what was happening there. Naipaul, for the first time, paid closer attention to the horrors going on in the places where he belonged, from which he came.

NPQ: In the frontispiece to your novel Snow, you quote Stendhal: "Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair, though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters."

Albert Camus said something similar, that the perfect political story portrays politics not as something we have eagerly sought, but as "an unhappy accident we are obliged to accept."
How do these views fit in with your idea of the novel and politics?

Pamuk: If you put the two together, you get my view: An unhappy accident may happen to all of us, and we will find ourselves facing ugly matters.

This is certainly what happened to me in Turkey. I didn't seek out politics, I didn't have an agenda but found myself in a political situation. [Editor's note: Pamuk was accused last year of "un-Turkish" behavior for discussing in a Swiss newspaper the massacre of Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire.]

My experience going back to my early 20s when everyone was politicized in Turkey is that serving a cause destroys the beauty of literature. Most of the time I saw that well-meaning authors had destroyed their talent through politics.

If you look at the whole corpus of novels, politics is not the most interesting subject. These subjects are love, happiness, bourgeois life, the meaning of life, goals in life that end in disillusionment.

There is so much cheap morality in writing political fiction. I wrote a political novel, Snow, but I did my best not to pass a moral judgment on any of my characters. The problem with the political novel is that there is a high expectation from the reader that you will pass judgment on a character.

But the very strength of the art of the novel is that the writer identifies with the character he creates with such great intensity that no moral judgment should be passed on a character.

The art of the novel is based on the unique capacity of human beings to identify with the Other with whom we have no common interests. In my mind's eye I try to understand what this person -- who is not like me but is of a different race, gender, culture or class, who may be perverse or strange -- is thinking and feeling. But at the same time he or she is a human being like me. It's called compassion.

Of course, I'm not saying human beings are like this all the time. We are capable of killing 200,000 Iraqis and don't care about it anymore, and just pay attention to what George Bush says. We are capable of doing this as well as being compassionate. But the art of the novel is based on this human capacity for compassion.

A novel works if the writer manages to identify with the characters. That means putting oneself in the shoes of others, not judging them.

Don't let this writer go to jail

2008-05-07T23:59:00.005+08:00

Kenapa saya sokong Raja Petra dibebaskan?

Pertama, kerana saya yakin dan percaya bahawa apa yang ditulisnya di bawah ini mengandungi kebenaran (kalau tidak semua, sebahagiannya).

Kedua, perbicaraan kes bunuh Altantuya Shaariibuu dipenuhi keraguan -- oleh orang ramai, sejak awal.

Ketiga, saya mempunyai "sumber tertinggi" di "jabatan tertinggi" bahawa perbicaraan ini ... menimbulkan keraguan!

Let’s send the Altantuya murderers to hell
Posted by Raja Petra
Friday, 25 April 2008

Today, we shall not be talking about politics. We shall also not be talking about race or religion. Today, we shall talk about doing the human thing. Today, let’s discuss how to launch a ‘Justice for Altantuya: restore Malaysia’s dignity’ campaign. And let’s send those bastards who murdered Altantuya to hell where they belong.

NO HOLDS BARRED Raja Petra Kamarudin

I had dinner with a few friends last night and on the way to the restaurant another good friend, Din Merican, phoned to fill me in on the details of Dr Setev Shaariibuu’s press conference that was held earlier that day. I listened as Din filled me in on what transpired and could not help but blurt out, “I am a father of two daughters. I can imagine what Shaariibuu must be feeling. Fucking assholes!”

“I have three daughters,” Din responded. “These people are animals, bloody animals. Fuck them! Fuck them!” This is what I would call ‘at a loss for words’ -- and when you just have to say something but no words can fully describe how you feel, then ‘fuck’ is the only word you can use which will console you enough and make you feel you have expressed your anger and disgust in a most ‘appropriate’ manner.

“Hey, don’t insult animals,” I replied. “Animals are cute. I love cats, dogs and horses. These people are worse than animals. Even animals will not do something like this.”

“Even pigs can be cute,” my wife who was driving the car butted in and I repeated what she said. “Yes, even pigs are cute. These people are not even the same level as pigs. They are lower than pigs. Melayu babi, the whole lot of them.”

I found it very difficult to hold back my tears as Din continued with his narration of what Dr Shaariibuu said at his press conference. Yes, I am a very emotional person as many may have suspected by now. But I can also be very stubborn and stiff-lipped as well when facing an adversary, as the Special Branch officers from Bukit Aman have discovered. I am what the Malays would call ‘marah nyamuk, bakar kelambu’. And I would not hesitate to deny my body food and water as an act of defiance just to prove to my jailors that they may incarcerate my body but they can never own my mind or break my spirit. But hearing what Dr Shaariibuu had to say ‘broke’ me. Even my degil got tamed.

“Let’s bring these bastards down,” I told Din. “Let’s launch a ‘Justice for Altanatuya: restore Malaysia’s dignity’ campaign’ or something like that. These assholes must be sent to hell.”

Understandably, much of the dinner conversation thereafter was focused on the Altantuya murder. What was most amusing -- not that I would classify this tragic murder as ‘amusing’ -- is that none at the dinner table are lawyers by profession. But all were able to skilfully ‘argue their case’ as any seasoned lawyer with decades of litigation experience under his or her belt can -- or maybe even better than that because not all lawyers are smart (trust me on this one). I always say you need brains to become a lawyer but you do not need to be a lawyer to have brains.

Sure, ‘certified’ lawyers would pooh-pooh such ‘coffee shop’ arguments as just that, coffee shop arguments. And have we not overheard and scoffed at many an ‘expert’ at the next table offering his or her legal prognosis to all and sundry who would care to listen? Yes, opinions are like assholes -- everybody has one.

But there are opinions and there are opinions -- and, just like assholes, no two are alike. So, while we value the expert opinions of our ‘learned’ legal eagles (yes, that is what they call each other in court even though they may be arguing -- how civil), we too have conducted our own trial by court of public opinion and we have already arrived at our verdict even while the Altantuya murder trial is halfway through and long before we can see the end of what many consider a show-trial in a kangaroo court.

Of course, we are not at liberty to say this as this may tantamount to subjudice or contempt of court or something like that (the courts have all sorts of fancy words and phrases to throw at you when they want to send you to jail whenever you differ with their opinion). So I would never dare state that the Altantuya murder trial ‘a show trial in a kangaroo court’ for fear of getting sent to jail. All I am at liberty to say is that many consider the Altantuya murder trial a show-trial in a kangaroo court and leave it at that without declaring whether I too share the opinion of the majority of Malaysians (not sure whether that statement can still get me sent to jail).

Anyway, back to the dinner last night and to what all those ‘self-made lawyers’ who never argued even one case in court their entire life had to say. As I said, neither they nor I am a lawyer but I have attended a decade of trials and hearings since the birth of Reformasi in 1998 and my ‘practical experience’ has exposed me to much of what goes on in court. And all I can say is that, and I repeat, while you need brains to become a lawyer, you really do not need to be a lawyer to have brains, as my dinner friends proved last night.

It was a long dinner and much was discussed and everyone had an opinion plus, as I said, all skilfully ‘argued their case’. However, to avoid this piece turning into a fifty-page thesis, which may see me getting an honorary law degree (or see me getting sent to jail), allow me to summarise how the ‘case’ was argued last night.

First concerns the Affidavit that Razak Baginda submitted to the court during his bail application hearing in the Shah Alam High Court. Justice Segera had initially cautioned Razak’s lawyer that there was no necessity in submitting an Affidavit since it was only a bail application hearing and, anyway, bail is not allowed in murder cases. But the lawyer insisted in pursuing the matter in spite of repeated warnings from the Judge. So the Judge had no choice but to accept the Affidavit as it is the right of the accused to defend himself/herself the way he/she sees fit.

Justice Segera then read the Affidavit and remarked that, after reading it, he is even more convinced that Razak is guilty. How then to grant bail, notwithstanding the fact that bail should automatically be denied anyway in cases of murder? Justice Segera was then immediately removed from hearing the case and was replaced by a junior judicial commissioner.

Note that Justice Segera is a senior Judge and the most suited to hear this very controversial and high-profile case. Was he removed because he had prejudged the case or because he was now privy to certain information that may influence his decision or because they want to ‘kill’ the Affidavit?

This was the first bone of contention. Karpal Singh, who is holding a watching brief on behalf of Altantuya’s family, then raised this matter during the trial and he asked the police officer on the stand as to why they did not investigate the Affidavit since much has been revealed in that document. The police officer replied that they did not investigate the Affidavit because ‘tidak ada arahan dari atas’ (so instructions from the top).

This further enhances the belief that there is some very damaging evidence in that Affidavit and which the government is trying to hide. The fact that the Affidavit exists and Karpal raised the matter in court and the police did not deny it -- other than explain they did not investigate it because of no instructions from the top -- convinces most that something is amiss here.

It seems the Affidavit also reveals that Altantuya was camped outside Razak’s house and this caused him to panic. He then went running to Najib, and Rosmah summoned Najib’s ADC, Musa Safri, and instructed him to solve Razak’s problem. Musa then summoned the two police officers currently on trial. So, it appears like Razak and the two police officers are not the only ones involved. Najib, Rosmah and Musa have also been implicated in this entire thing. And why the need for the police officer to declare that he had already killed six people before this if murder was not what was on everyone’s mind?

Then the Attorney-General did a very strange thing. Just before the trial started, he made a public announcement that only three people and no others are involved in the murder. This is not only strange but highly irregular as well. It is not the Attorney-General’s job to determine this. This is for the court to decide. Furthermore, the trial had not even started yet so how does the Attorney-General know what is going to surface in the trial? No one has testified yet and until all the testimonies are heard who knows who else is involved and whether the three accused who on trial are even guilty or not? The Attorney-General made it appear like he knows the outcome of the trial even before the trail commenced? How not to feel that the trial is a show-trial?

The Sunday morning before the trial was supposed to start, I received a SMS that said the charges against Razak would be withdrawn. At 4.00pm, I received another SMS saying that the entire team of prosecutors will be replaced because they did not agree to drop the charges against Razak. The following morning, the new prosecutor requested a one-month postponement on the excuse that he had just that very morning been told he is taking over the case so he needs time to study the files. The judge gave them a two-week postponement. The SMS may have been inaccurate but the actions thereafter lent credence to the SMS. And this SMS was from a Deep Throat in the Attorney-General’s Chambers so I am not about to just dismiss it as lies and slander.

The next point is about where Altantuya’s remains were found, which was deep in the jungles. The three accused deny killing Altantuya yet the police knew exactly where to go to look for the remains. How did the police know where to go when the three denied killing her? Did they use a bomoh? Was there an informer? No, the police just happen to know that deep in the jungles they would find Altantuya’s remains without anyone having to tell them.

It makes one wonder whether the police knew where to go because it is a ‘gazetted dumpsite’ where all ‘bumped off’ people are disposed. Does this then mean that the two police officers on trial alongside Razak are police hit men whose job it is to bump people off and then get rid of their bodies at that site where they retrieved Altantuya’s remains? This, of course, remains mere speculation but there is certainly cause for speculation and the evidence all seem to point to this assumption.

The whispering amongst those who walk in the corridors of power is that when they went to the ‘dump site’ they retrieved the remains of many others as well. Some say it was the remains of seven people and others say nine. So Altantuya was not the first. There were many others before this, almost ten judging by the remains.

This, of course, has never been made public and probably never will. So, until it is, we must assume that the ‘whispering’ is unfounded. But then, what about Razak’s Affidavit we talked about earlier, which stated that the police officer had admitted to killing six people before this. This would then make Altantuya the seventh victim. Against this backdrop, the ‘whispering’ about the police retrieving the remains of seven or nine people begins to sound like very loud whispers.

Many other ‘key issues’ raised by my non-lawyer friends, who all argued as if they were conducting the Altantuya murder trial, were matters such as how Altantuya’s immigration records could be erased from the Immigration computers, the letters Najib wrote to the Malaysian embassy supporting Altantuya’s visa application, the photograph of Altantuya, Najib, Razak and Kalimullah taken during Altantuya’s birthday party in the Mandarin Hotel in Singapore, and much more.

Rumour has it, and it remains just that, a rumour, is that all this ‘evidence’ has been given to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. Okay, maybe Abdullah is using this information to keep Najib in line -- which appears to be working seeing that he is constantly licking Abdullah’s hand. But this is not about politics and should not be dealt as such. This is about the Prime Minister of Malaysia withholding crucial evidence in a murder trial. Abdullah is an accessory to murder and burying evidence that will affect the outcome of the trial and interfere in seeing justice done renders Abdullah as guilty as those currently on trial and those who also should be on trial but are not.

I really wish I could write about all the above which was discussed by those at the dinner table last night. Unfortunately, since the trial is still ongoing, I will not be able to talk about any of these matters. The best I can do is relate what those at the dinner table discussed last night and leave it at that without giving my opinion. And the above is what was discussed by those who are not lawyers and never once in their lives argued any case in court.

Of course, since all these people are not lawyers, most of what they said is based purely on logic and not on points of law. It is actually quite ridiculous that people not tutored in matters of law would attempt to dissect and analyse the Altantuya murder trial and pass judgement as if they are trained and certified lawyers. Anyway, as I said, opinions are like assholes and every one has one so we should not take too much notice of what my dinner friends said last night. Meanwhile, read what my friend, Din Merican, e-mailed to me this morning:

******************************************

In ancient times, nations go to war at the slightest provocation. In the 21st century, fortunately, we are more civilised than our progenitors, although there are still exceptions. After all, we are members of the United Nations and, I am told, we subscribe to the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Yet, we in Malaysia, treat foreign nationals with total disregard for compassion and human decency. Are we a bunch of cynics? I wonder.

Take the case of the beating-up of the Indonesian karate/judo coach and the brutality towards, and extortion of, Indonesian guest workers by Rela, the murder of a Mongolian national, etc. Is the way we deal with our neighbours and other nation states? I wonder whether we are a nation of laws or a country run on the basis of the law of the jungle.

Our Prime Minister, Badawi, and his Foreign Minister (at that time Syed Hamid) did not have the courtesy to reply to the letters from their counterparts in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, seeking a fair trial and justice for the family of the late Altantyua Shaariibuu. Too busy maybe? Surely not!

It is going to be tragic for Malaysia’s image if the Altantuya family cannot get justice for the brutal murder of their loved one. How can we blow to smithereens a human being, someone’s loved one, and a mother to two young children, using an explosive which is only utilised in times of war to destroy bunkers, bridges and buildings? This is unheard off anywhere in the world.

This case, therefore, has a lot of international implications, especially when the deed was done by ‘servants’ of this country.

We are being viewed as arrogant by the Indonesians, Thais, Singaporeans, as well as by many of our neighbours. Now, we add to this list the Mongolians. How indecent and irresponsible of the PM and his Foreign Minister for not even acknowledging the receipt of letters from their Mongolian counterparts. Who are we protecting?

There is no point in Badawi trying to convince us that his Administration is keen to restore the image of the judiciary. He cannot even fix his own Police Force and the AG’s Office. Frankly, Malaysians should have sent Badawi and his cohorts in BN out of office in the last general election.

The mainstream media is just hopeless in the cause of justice for Altantuya and dignity for Malaysia. Malaysians and civil society movements must now pressure the Badawi government to expose the real culprit behind this murder and bring to closure this long and costly trial. Let justice prevail and let us put an end to the culture of impunity, where the powerful and politically connected are above the Law.

As a father of six kids (of whom three are girls, including a 16-year old) and a grandfather, I feel for Dr. Setev Shaariibuu and his family. I was at the press conference on April 24 at the Office of Dato Seri Anwar Ibrahim and I personally saw the agony on Dr. Shaariibuu’s face.

It is time for Malaysians to push this issue and not allow the murderers who walk in the corridors of power to get away with this vile and evil deed unscathed. It is time to ‘storm the Bastille’. It is time we sent these sorry excuses for human beings to hell where they deserve to be.

Rustam A Sani (1944-2008)

2008-04-25T03:08:00.002+08:00

Obituary: Rustam A. Sani
By Jomo K. S.

I write this in haste from afar without the benefit of any reference material. But I must do so, as I have lost another brother, taken away before his time.

I first met Rustam, soon after joining the UKM economics faculty in early 1977, then still at its temporary campus in Pantai. The crammed facilities in the PKNS flats there forced a certain physical closeness which was, in turn, conducive to generating close personal relations.

Rustam was then in the Anthropology and Sociology Department with Halim Ali, Sanusi Osman, Hood Salleh, Dahlan Hj Aman, Ting Chew Peh, Cheu Hock Tong, Shamsul Amri and others, many of whom had been students of Syed Husin Ali at the University of Malaya in the 1960s.

Struggle for the Nation
Born towards the end of the Japanese Occupation in the Perak border town of Tanjung Malim, Rustam grew up in the shadow of his famous father, Abdullah Sani @ Ahmad Boestamam.

As a mature student at university, Rustam quickly established a reputation in his own right as an essayist, poet and pamphleteer in the Socialist Club and promoting the national language at the University of Malaya. He often joked that if he had agreed to run in the May 1969 election, he would have become Selangor Mentri Besar at the age of 25!

Instead, he opted to do a Masters at the University of Kent in Canterbury where he indulged and mentored a variety of undergraduates including PAS Secretary-General Kamaruddin Jaffar, economist Ghazali Atan and publisher Tan Siang Jin.

There, he deepened his preoccupation with the challenges of Malaysian nationhood, an enduring theme in his writings since the 1970s, and the subject of one of his two latest books to be launched posthumously by his old friend from the 1960s, citizen Anwar Ibrahim.

Soon after I joined UKM, I left for a semester to finish my thesis, returning only to find him preparing to leave soon after with his wife, Rohani, and young children, Azi and Rini, for Yale. But after passing the tough comprehensive exams there, he lost interest, preferring instead to write a statistics textbook for those afraid of such quantitative methods.

Back at UKM, he switched to the Politics Department as his old Canterbury friend, then ABIM Secretary-General Kamaruddin left to join Anwar in UMNO and the government. With Syed Husin at the helm of the Malaysian Social Science Association (PSSM), Rustam and I started a bilingual quarterly journal, Ilmu Masyarakat, to try to open new Malaysian debates under the then new Mahathir dispensation, to which the former UKM academic as well as PNB and Guthries chief executive, Selangor Mentri Besar Khalid Ibrahim was an early and insightful contributor.

Patriot and Statesman
At the end of the 1980s, Rustam accepted Nordin Sopiee’s invitation to join ISIS. There, he crafted Mahathir’s historic February 1991 speech promising a ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ as part of his Vision 2020 (thankfully translated by Rustam as Wawasan 2020, instead of the earlier Visi 2020), changing the terms of national discourse in one fell swoop.

Frustrated by its lack of serious commitment, he left ISIS in the mid-1990s to become a writer, translator and reluctant businessman. Soon after, he agreed to become Deputy President of PSSM, later inaugurating the biennial series of international Malaysian Studies Conferences in which we tried to reposition Malaysian studies as a national -- and nationalist --discourse, rather than as post-colonial area studies.

However, the events of 1997-1999 disrupted our plans, and Rustam rose to the popular national call for reformasi following Anwar’s incarceration and persecution, becoming its most thoughtful ‘participant observer’. As deputy president of the party his father had founded almost half a century before, he negotiated its principled unification with the political movement which had emerged around Anwar despite several high profile defections.

Rustam was always a reluctant politician and had little patience for the intrigues which seemed to preoccupy some of his counterparts, including his fellow former academics. Generous in spirit and encouraging of younger talents, he never hesitated to give his all to the writing he enjoyed, regardless of the sacrifices involved. Although principled, he never claimed the high moral ground or used his language, writing and other talents to put down others.

Although I only saw him a few times after leaving the country in 2004, we kept in touch. March 8, International Women’s Day, must have given him great satisfaction indeed, as he saw the people give the nation another chance. He must have been pleased that Anwar – another son of the Burhanuddin Al-Helmy tradition to which he himself belonged -- will launch his last two books today as he moves to take his rightful place in our nation’s history.

Boestaman-Nationalist Father
Boestamam -- who had allegedly taken the names of his two heroes, Ahmad Sukarno and Subhas Chandra Bose -- had been a young follower of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda (KMM) from the late 1930s in Perak, emerging after the war as the militant youth leader of API (Angkatan Pemuda Insaf) to the older and more moderate Dr Burhanuddin Al-Helmy and Ishak Haji Muhammad (Pak Sako) of the Malay Nationalist Party (PKMM).

PKMM, in turn, led PUTERA (Pusat Tenaga Rakyat) which joined with the Malayan Democratic Union (MDU)-led All Malayan Council of Joint Action (AMCJA) to craft the People’s Constitution in 1947 as the basis for Malayan independence, years before UMNO switched its slogan from ‘Hidup Melayu’ to ‘Merdeka’ under Tunku Abdul Rahman’s leadership.

Boes was detained without trial for seven long years from early 1948, before the Emergency was declared in mid-1947, together with thousands of other Malay youths demanding independence. This pre-emptive repression by the colonial power was to ethnically colour the subsequent anti-colonial resistance.

Soon after he was released in 1955, he set up the Partai Rakyat Malaya, and later joined with the Labour Party of Malaya, chaired by Pak Sako, to create the Socialist Front, which later also included the popular expelled UMNO agriculture minister Aziz Ishak’s National Convention Party. Detained again without trial over the mid-1960s together with many other leftist politicians and activists, Boes faded from the headlines of Malaysian politics as Rustam came of age.

Jomo K. S. is United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development and received the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

Reformasi apa lagi, Pak Lah!

2008-04-18T23:58:00.002+08:00

Berikut tiga kenyataan/artikel yang dikeluarkan dalam tempoh beberapa hari mutakhir. Perdana menteri menggelarkan kabinetnya pada 18 Mac sebagai "kabinet reformasi". Sebulan selepas itu (hari ini), reformasinya bertukar deformasi....

Dan, kita pun layak maki-hamunnya (kalau kita mahu)!

Reform or repression? Badawi's reform cabinet (18 April 2008)

When Prime Minister Badawi named his new cabinet on March 20th. after the unprecedented election bashing he got, he called his new cabinet the reform cabinet and that he is willing to institute major reforms. In the March 8 election, the 14-party National Front(Barisan Nasional) government lost five states to the opposition coalition (Pakatan Rakyat) as well as lost two-thirds majority in Parliament.

Parti Sosialis Malaysia make the following observation in the wake of the recent reforms called by Badawi and the power struggle within UMNO :

While the Police Force has a new uniform, yet they don't seem to have a reform attitude. The Black 14 peacefully in-door gathering at a private venue was disrupted by the police at 10.20pm. when Anwar Ibrahim was giving his speech. What was even more high handed was when the police went to serve 111 notices as early as 6.30am to four leaders of Pakatan Rakyat including the Menteri Besar of Selangor , Khalid Ibrahim and PKR President Dr Wan Azizah Ismail. This is sheer harassment and an infringement to freedom of assemble. How does this action speak about the reform cabinet of Badawi?

Then comes the banning of popular Tamil-language newspaper -Makkal Osai. No reason was given though it is clear that it is a political decision as the daily has been critical of the leadership of the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC). The paper also gave wide ranging coverage to the rally organised by the Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) in November 2007 and the issues surrounding the rally and its leadership. Our own assessment of Makkal Osai is that the paper ensures that it gives a 50% coverage to both Government and opposition news. But such mathematics does not help in Malaysian freedom of media, where the daily newspapers must give at least a 80-20% advantage to the Ruling parties' controlled newspaper. This ban takes place while new Information Minister, Shabery Cheek talks about freedom of the media. How does this ban fit into the new reform cabinet?

On the issue of the ISA, the new Home Minister, Syed Hamid Albar has made it clear that ISA is going to stay by refusing to immediately and unconditionally release the Hindraf detainees as well as other ISA detainees , some of them going into their seventh year of detention. So what does this say about the new reforms brought by the new cabinet.

Yesterday, Badawi once again tried to hood-wink by introducing reforms to the Judiciary. Badawi was very careful not to utter the word apology as well as the word "independent" when naming the new commission -Judicial appointments commission" which will give the Prime Minister prerogative to select the members of the Commission. Nothing was said about the other Commissions he set up before this and his failure to pass the IPCMC bill. Though Badawi has been quite radical is setting up Commission but nothing radical has been done to implement the outcomes. This announcement would keep the State controlled TV and media busy for another few weeks.

With this backdrop, it is therefore quite clear that the BN's Govermment intention to introduce an anti-hopping law has nothing to do with democracy and fundamental liberties. On the contrary, it is designed to control and contravene fundamental liberty as well as freedom of association. PSM, a party which has been denied the right to freedom of association for a decade now, can vouch on this.

No reform can reform the obsolete state the Barisan Nasional is today and the politics it offers. It is time for to take over power at the Federal level and undo the structures and the political systems created by the BN. In order to do that, BN has to go. BN rules the day by reform and repression.

The future of Malaysian politics cannot be held by a minority class using reform and repression to be in power. While the future of Badawi seems uncertain, the road to change is not going to be easy. BN leadership with its 50 years legacy of Emergency law and ISA will not transfer power easily to any new Government. It is this time, that the will of the people will have to prevail.

PSM and its front organizations are committed to face whatever consequences and call upon the people to raise as they have done many times before against this tyranny of BN rule. It is only when the mass majority of the people are united as a single united class led by principles of justice, conscious and equality can we overthrow the BN brand of politics of race, religion and corruption

S.Arutchelvan, secretary general PSM

Makkal Osai: Reform? What reform? (17 March 2008)

It seems that it is business as usual for the Barisan federal government and the insincerity underlying the promises of reform becoming more evident.

The Home Affairs Ministry has refused to extend the permit of Makkal Ossai (‘Daily threatened racial harmony: Syed Hamid’, Malaysiakini, 17.04.2008).

In the usual double speak that we have become so familiar with, we are told by the Minister, Syed Hamid Albar, that there is no question of the permit having been cancelled, it is merely not being extended.

Tell that to the employees of the newspaper who have suddenly found themselves facing unemployment. Explain to them how they are supposed to meet their financial commitments be they mortgages, car repayments or just food on the table. Glib sophistry is not going to be consoling them.

But, oh wait, that is the point, isn’t it? Force the editors through concern for their colleagues into becoming more Barisan friendly or at the least, Pakatan unfriendly. The nuances of the promise of an ‘appeal’ by the Minister resonate loud and clear.

In legal speak, we refer to such pressure as duress. But then, what else can one expect from a Ministry that is equally responsible for the implementation of the Internal Security Act.

The Minister says that the newspaper threatened racial harmony. He does not say how nor does he specify when. He appears to have adopted a very broad-brushed approach, one that could have equally resulted in the conclusion that the New Straits Times or the Berita Harian or the Utusan Malaysia or any other major daily had similarly threatened racial harmony at some point or other.

The Minister after all does not specify that the threats arose from editorial pieces or from news reports or, if so, from style as opposed to content. He should recollect that, if one wants to stretch a point, we have been exposed by major dailies to content that could arguably be said to be racist or supremacist or divisive from time to time.

The recent speech of Tengku Faris of Kelantan that raised many an eyebrow was dutifully reported by the major dailies as were the incredible speeches at the last two UMNO general assemblies.

"Makkal Sakti" does not deserve to be singled out. We have heard of no specific incident recently that created controversy, that shook the nation to its very core. The refusal of the renewal smacks of arbitrariness and has made victimis those who work for the newspaper.

Views are views. I think that is why it is called press freedom. And as for racial harmony, Malaysians are more mature than the government gives them credit for. That is why they voted the way they did. But perhaps, the seemingly continuing inability of the government to see that is the real problem.

The government says that it is pushing for reforms, that it made the mistake of overlooking the significance of alternative media. I find this hard to believe in the face of this kind of indifferent, callous, self-serving sort of conduct. If the government was sincere, Makkal Ossai would continue operating, its staff would not be facing the prospect of joblessness and we would not be having this discussion.

For any of you doubting the wisdom of having voted against the Barisan this last general election, keep in mind that with behaviour like this, there really is no other choice.

Malik Imtiaz Sarwar

Umno's and BN's post-March 8 schizophrenia (17 March 2008)

Umno and Barisan Nasional leaders should end its post-March 8 schizophrenia – claiming to have finally heard the voice of the people and yet still refusing to “walk the talk” of reforms like closing down the Tamil daily Makkal Osai, continued detention of Hindraf leaders under the Internal Security Act (ISA) and stonewalling the proposal for an Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) to create an efficient, incorruptible, professional world-class police service to keep crime low and make the country safe for Malaysians, visitors and investors.

Such political schizophrenia seizing Umno and Barisan Nasional has become a daily staple in the mass media, as illustrated by the following two headlines today:

• Najib tells BN: Win over support from non-Malays (NST);
• Makkal Osai loses licence – Tamil daily’s application rejected (The Star)

Has it occurred to the Umno and Barisan Nasional leadership, including the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, that the best way to ensure that the Barisan Nasional will lose even more support from the non-Malays are high-handed, arrogant and undemocratic actions like the closure of Makkal Osai, the refusal to release the five Hindraf leaders, P. Uthayakumar, newly-elected Selangor DAP State Assemblyman for Kota Alam Shah A. Manoharan, V. Ganabatirau, R. Kenghadharan and T. Vasantha Kumar or refusal to give Uthayakumar the best medical treatment while under ISA detention?

In fact, such political arrogance and contempt for human rights will also offend all right-thinking and justice-loving Malays, as illustrated by the March 8 “political tsunami” which saw Malaysians voting across racial and religious divides.

New Straits Times announced today that the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is expected to announce several measures to reform the judiciary at a dinner organized by the Malaysian Bar at Hotel Marriot, Kuala Lumpur tonight.

I will attend the dinner. While DAP and Pakatan Rakyat will support judicial reforms to restore national and international confidence in the independence, impartiality, integrity and quality of the judiciary after two decades of “judicial darkness”, however belated, they are merely first steps in a journey of a thousand miles of major national reforms whether in mindsets, institutions, laws or governance if Malaysia is to rise to the challenges of globalization where the competition is not between Malays and non-Malays but between Malaysians and the rest of the world.

Lim Kit Siang, MP for Ipoh Timur

Zam sindir Khairy

2008-03-12T11:24:00.003+08:00

Kenyataan,
Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin,

di sidang akhbar
11 Mac 2008

Tsunami politik telah mematahkan suatu percubaan untuk mengambil alih kepimpinan Negara oleh golongan muda yang dibuat secara terurus dan terancang menerusi Pilihan Raya Umum ke-12 untuk perubahan politik secara drastik.

Ini adalah kerana tuhan masih sayang kepada kepimpinan Perdana Menteri Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi dan juga Timbalannya Datuk Seri Mohd Najib Tun Abdul Razak dan juga UMNO.

Maka itu, tsunami politik ini adalah satu hikmat yang memberikan pengajaran yang cukup besar kepada kepimpinan Negara dan golongan ini.

Apa yang perlu dilakukan oleh semua ahli UMNO sekarang ini ialah memberikan sokongan kepada Presiden UMNO, Datuk Seri Abdullah dan juga Timbalannya Datuk Seri Mohd Najib, untuk kembali mengukuhkan UMNO dan meletakkan UMNO kepada jalan yang benar, yang selama ini sentiasa mengimbangi pengorbanan golongan tua dan inspirasi serta idealisme golongan generasi muda.

Sekarang bukan masa untuk menuding jari atau menuduh sesiapa atas apa yang telah berlaku, tetapi keutamaan perlu diberikan kepada usaha untuk menjernihkan suasana dan mengembalikan kepercayaan rakyat kepada UMNO.

Jadi ditoleh ke belakang dalam sejarah Malaya dan Malaysia, setiap tragedi politik yang menimpa UMNO dan rakyat, ianya membawa hikmah, membuka fikiran dan penggemblengan semula kepimpinan UMNO dan kesedaran rakyat bagi muhasabah diri dan meletakkan semula kepimpinan UMNO kepada jalan yang dihasratkan oleh rakyat, sekalipun ianya adalah sesuatu yang amat berat untuk dilakukan.

Sesungguhnya saya percaya, kepimpinan UMNO ini adalah lebih mementingkan negara dan rakyat dan menganggap tanggungjawab ini adalah lebih besar dari kepentingan diri, keluarga dan juga harta.

Sebagai konklusinya, bagi saya apa yang berlaku dalam Pilihan Raya Umum ke-12 ini merupakan satu nikmat dan rahmat yang amat besar kepada masa hadapan negara, dan secara khususnya kepada UMNO.

(Berikut berita di halaman dua Utusan Malaysia, 12 Mac 2008)

Cubaan golongan muda ambil alih kepimpinan gagal

KUALA LUMPUR 11 Mac – Bekas Menteri Penerangan, Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin hari ini mendedahkan ada golongan muda telah membuat percubaan untuk mengambil alih kepimpinan negara secara terurus dan terancang melalui Pilihan Raya Umum Ke-12.

Bagaimanapun, menurut beliau, cubaan untuk membuat perubahan secara drastik tersebut gagal berikutan tsunami politik yang berlaku pada pilihan raya umum itu.

Zainuddin yang diminta menjelaskan dakwaannya itu bagaimanapun enggan mengulas lanjut. Sebaliknya beliau meminta wartawan jangan membuat provokasi terhadapnya.

“Saya tidak akan jelaskan dengan lebih lanjut, biarlah pembaca (orang ramai) menilai sendiri kenyataan saya ini,” katanya pada sidang akhbar terakhirnya di Kementerian Penerangan di sini hari ini.

Zainuddin menjelaskan, tsunami politik itu yang menyaksikan Barisan Nasional (BN) gagal memperoleh majoriti dua pertiga adalah satu hikmah yang memberikan pengajaran yang cukup besar kepada kepimpinan negara dan golongan muda tersebut.

Katanya, Tuhan masih sayang kepada kepimpinan Perdana Menteri, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi dan juga timbalannya, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak.

Beliau memberitahu, apa yang perlu dilakukan oleh semua ahli UMNO sekarang adalah memberikan sokongan kepada Presiden UMNO dan timbalannya.

Katanya, sokongan itu penting bagi mengukuhkan kembali UMNO dan meletakkan parti utama kaum Melayu itu pada landasan yang betul.

“Selama ini parti UMNO sentiasa mengimbangi pengorbanan golongan tua dan inspirasi serta idealisme generasi muda.

“Sekarang bukan masa untuk menuding jari atau menuduh sesiapa atas apa yang telah berlaku, tetapi keutamaan perlu diberikan kepada usaha menjernihkan suasana dan mengembalikan kepercayaan rakyat kepada UMNO,” katanya.

Ketika ditanya mengenai kekalahannya di Parlimen Sungai Petani, Zainuddin berkata, beliau kalah kerana para pengundi Cina tidak ramai keluar mengundi.

“Saya mengakui kekalahan saya juga disebabkan saya tidak banyak berkempen di kawasan tersebut,” katanya.

Namun, beliau menggunakan pendekatan tersendiri iaitu bertemu rakyat secara lebih dekat bagi mengetahui permasalahan mereka.

PM a 'lovable teddy bear'

2008-03-11T00:34:00.001+08:00

Among those missteps, analysts said, Mr Abdullah ignored Malaysia's widening poverty gap and increasing cost of living. He appointed his son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin as an adviser. And when the southern state of Johor was struggling after floods in 2006, Mr Abdullah was in Perth to inaugurate his brother's curry restaurant.

M'sian PM 'failed to gauge public anger'

KUALA LUMPUR - MALAYSIA'S prime minister may have made his biggest political blunder by calling early elections that only exposed public anger over simmering racial tensions and his perceived missteps.

Mr Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was sworn in on Monday for a new five-year term in office, following a stinging defeat by his ruling coalition in general elections. Mr Abdullah is rejecting calls to step down, but analysts say Saturday's poll results will place Mr Abdullah under pressure to resign.

"He misread the signs. A lot of people were voting against Badawi," said Mr Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a human rights lawyer and political commentator. "He became the face of the mismanagement of the country."

Mr Abdullah's National Front coalition lost its two-thirds majority in the 222-member parliament for the first time in four decades, winning only a simple majority of 140 seats.
The opposition gained control of five of Malaysia's 13 states and a third of its parliament in the biggest electoral upset in the country's history.

The results were seen as a verdict against a string of perceived missteps by Mr Abdullah, 68, and his failure to fulfill promises made ahead of the 2004 elections, which the National Front won in its biggest victory ever.

Among those missteps, analysts said, Mr Abdullah ignored Malaysia's widening poverty gap and increasing cost of living. He appointed his son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin as an adviser. And when the southern state of Johor was struggling after floods in 2006, Mr Abdullah was in Perth to inaugurate his brother's curry restaurant.

Mr Abdullah also has faced criticism for remarrying less than two years after his first wife died of cancer and engaging in public displays of affection with his new wife.

'At a time when the country is crumbling around us we have to watch his lovey-dovey going-ons with his wife,' said Mr Malik.

"People don't want to see a lovable teddy bear. They want a tough leader." Mr Abdullah's next big test will come later this year when he faces the general assembly of the United Malays National Organisation, the largest party in the National Front coalition. A date has not yet been set.

"The reality is that there will be tremendous pressure within Umno for him (Abdullah) to step down," said Ms Bridget Welsh of the Johns Hopkins University, a Southeast Asia expert who was in Malaysia to monitor the polls.

Former longtime leader Mahathir Mohamad already has called for Mr Abdullah's resignation, saying he had 'apparently made the wrong choice' when he hand-picked Mr Abdullah to succeed him in 2003.

Dr Mahathir's son Mukhriz, an active member of Umno, joined the call. 'The message is clear from the results of the elections. That's the voice of the people. We have to respect it. It is a very humbling experience and points to dissatisfaction of the prime minister's leadership,' he said.

The Front's formula for success all these years was simple. It is a coalition of 11 small parties and three major ones that represent Malaysia's main ethnic groups - the majority Muslim Malays who make up 60 per cent of the 27 million population, the Chinese at 25 per cent and Indians at 8 per cent.

Traditionally, Malays have voted for Umno, the Chinese for the Malaysian Chinese Association and the Indians for the Malaysian Indian Congress.

The power-sharing arrangement has worked as long as the three races believed only their parties could look after their respective communities' interests. But the minorities have become increasingly disappointed with their parties.

The Chinese and Indians are angry about an affirmative action programme known as the New Economic Policy that has given Malays preference in jobs, education, business, housing, finance and religion since 1971.

They also worry that their religious rights are being eroded by the government. Several Indian temples were destroyed by authorities last year, purportedly for illegal construction, and many courts presiding over religious disputes ruled in favor of Muslims.

Ordinary Malays also are unhappy, many charging that the benefits of the New Economic Policy are being reaped only by rich and well-connected Malays.

Repressive police tactics have further aggravated racial tensions. In October, officers dispersed thousands of people with tear gas and water cannons at a street protest for electoral and judicial reforms.

A month later, Indian demonstrators were chased away by police when they held a rally to protest discrimination. Five of their leaders were jailed under a law that allows indefinite detention without trial.

These tensions were tapped by the opposition parties, which for the first time set aside their ideological differences and came together to pose a united challenge. They countered National Front propaganda in government-controlled media with campaigns on the Internet.

In the end, the Indian and Chinese minorities abandoned the National Front in droves. MCA, the Chinese party, won only 15 of the 40 seats it contested, and the Indian MIC won three out of nine.

Umno won only 78 seats compared to 109 in 2004.

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim campaigned on a platform that urged people to look outside race-based politics. Although the opposition parties are also identified by race, they have agreed to build a multiracial alliance where all races will be treated equally.

'What is crucial now is how the opposition works as a coalition,' Ms Welsh said. 'The mandate given to them has created a national opposition for the first time.' -- AP

Tahniah! Tahniah! Tahniah!

2008-03-09T05:24:00.002+08:00

Saya tak sangka, keputusannya membingungkan dan sama sekali luar jangka. Bagaimanapun ...

TAHNIAH

TAHNIAH

TAHNIAH

Editorial saya tentang gejala ini -- satu kenyataan tentang kejutan dan kebingungan...

Islam & Pluralisme (himpunan)

2008-03-02T23:08:00.004+08:00

Berikut catatan blog, berita, surat pembaca & sedikit latar belakang isu pengharaman buku, khususnya korban terkini Islam & Pluralisme. Halaman ini boleh juga dicapai melalui majalah web REPUBLIK KATA.

Forum bahas larangan buku baru
Malaysia Bodoh.com
Forum MISG Online
Forum Tempur Politik Maya KMU

Siaran media
>>> "Islam & Pluralisme" diharamkan: MEGC minta penjelasan (5 Feb)
>>> Maklumat asas buku "Islam & Pluralisme" (5 Feb)

Blog (bahasa Melayu)
Kecek-kecek soal pengharaman Islam & Pluralisme (31 Jan)
Bila Muslim tidak kompeten (1 Feb)
Hadhari haram (1 Feb)
Sial, kenapa? (1 Feb)
Di sebalik pengharaman ‘Islam & Pluralisme’ (2 Feb)
Kempen Sapere Aude! - Jangan Haram Buku 1 (2 Feb)

Pengharaman buku: Satu lagi projek Islam Hadhari! (3 Feb)
Pupuk tradisi ilmiah, bukan sikap bebal (3 Feb) oleh Anwar Ibrahim
Perlu haram buku? (4 Feb)
Buku haram (4 Feb)

Blog (English)
Banned books in Malaysia (Daniel Pipes, 29 Jan)
11 more books on Islam banned (30 Jan)
On the dangerous topic of Islam and haram (30 Jan)

The opposite efffect of book-banning ( 1 Feb)
Book banning: Another project by Islam Hadhari! (3 Feb)
So, we are more FREE? (Rocky Bru, 7 Feb)

Protest against Malaysian book ban (31 Jan) must read

Berita/news/surat/letters
11 buku Islam diharamkan kerana fakta menyeleweng (29 Jan)
Ministry bans 11 books about Islam (29 Jan)
Malaysia bans 11 books on Islam (30 Jan)

11 books banned: What hadhari? (Merdekareview.com, 4 Feb)
Kenapa perlu KKDN haramkan buku? (Harakahdaily.net, surat, 6 Feb)
Book ban: the two faces of Islam Hadhari (Malaysiakini.com, letter, 11 Feb)
Book ban: who are we to question gov't? (Malaysiakini.com, letter, 13 Feb)

Di mana boleh dicari? Want to get a copy?
Toko Buku Faisal
Silverfish Books
Institut Kefahaman Islam Malaysia (IKIM)

Bacaan latar/background reading
Senarai Penerbitan Haram (KKDN - senarai lengkap tahun 2000-2008)
Tujuh buku diharamkan kerana sentuh kesucian Islam (12 Nov 2007)
KDN Haram 18 Penerbitan Cemar Islam (18 Jan 2007)
Jawatankuasa Penapisan Peraku Haram 11 Buku, 4 CD (16 Feb 2006)
Jawatankuasa Penapisan Penerbitan Berunsur Islam (1 Jul 2005)
Bahagian Penyelidikan (Larangan Buku) JAKIM

>>> Wawancara bersama Al-Mustaqeem: Gerakan reformisme, kebebasan pendapat & pendidikan Islam (Jun 2007)
>>> Authorities ban films, books, television talkshow (Feb 2007)
>>> They Still Ban Books and Shackle Minds? (May 2005)
>>> Manuscripts Don't Burn (Bloggers Against Book Banning)
>>> Malaysia: Restrictive Laws in a Parliamentary Democracy (Amnesty International, 1999)

Catatan isu pengharaman buku di blog ini (komentar)
Fiqh Perempuan (15 Nov 2007)
Kamasutra (19 Jan 2007)
Mayat (buku) (19 Jun 2006)

PM: Saya jamin inilah pilihan raya teradil

2008-02-16T08:11:00.000+08:00

EC chairman Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman appealed to the media to give equal airtime and press coverage to all political parties. (The Star, 15 Apr)

Bagaimanapun kementerian yang diketuai oleh Abdullah Ahmad Badawi menekan akhbar. Jelas dan nyata baca di edisi Melayu Malaysiakini.com (15 Apr):

Oriental Daily mengeluarkan “garis panduan” khas kepada wartawan pada 13 Feb, hari Parlimen dibubarkan.

‘Garis Panduan Membuat Liputan Pilihanraya 2008’ itu yang memuatkan 10 perkara, antaranya:

>>> Isu-isu lazim masyarakat Cina seperti 'desakan untuk menambah bilangan sekolah' atau 'pengundi Cina kini tidak memihak kepada BN' tidak wajar dibangkitkan kerana dianggap "tidak menarik minat" pembaca dan "mengancam" (masa depan) Oriental Daily.

>>> Berhati-hati melaporkan berita calon-calon pembangkang, jangan letakkan di bahagian-bahagian depan atau utama.

>>> Laporan tentang BN haruslah 65 peratus, sementara liputan tentang pembangkang sekadar 35 peratus.

Pluralist Islam: Who are you?

2008-02-14T07:38:00.000+08:00

Book ban: who are we to question gov't?
S Abdullah (Malaysiakini.com, Feb 13, 2008)

I am refer to the letter Book ban: the two faces of Islam Hadhari.

I believe the Internal Security Ministry banned all the books the writer mentioned in good faith because the ministry, as I understand it, has religious experts to evaluate all the books.

Furthermore, they can refer material to Islamic Development Department (Jakim), a division under the Prime Minister’s Department, or state religious departments and muftis.

In fact, as I was told, a well-known mufti Harussani Zakaria chairs the Jakim's censorship committee. He is also the chairperson of the National Fatwa Committee and the Perak mufti.

This committee then recommends to the Internal Security Ministry to ban any book deemed detrimental to Islamic beliefs and values. The ministry does not ban any book because of political pressure or political reasons as suggested by the writer or the author Stephen Schwartz.

The writer’s claims that ‘our government is protecting and nurturing a fundamentalist mindset among Muslims’ and that ‘his Islam Hadhari project has been infiltrated by fundamentalist elements’ are a far-fetched insinuations.

One of the books recently banned is the locally published Islam dan Pluralisme edited by Al-Mustaqeem Mahmod Radhi and Khairul Anam Che Menteri. The book tried to project the idea that Islam can tolerate or accept any truth, even those from other religions. This is a fatally dangerous notion propagated by liberal Muslims worldwide.

The banned book tried to sell the idea that Islam and other religions are ‘the same’ because any religion will lead its followers to the Truth and heaven. See, for instance, Chapter Three of Islam dan Pluralisme as written by Asghar Ali Engineer. The whole section argues that other religions are as true as Islam!

See also the next chapter ‘Macam-macam Jalan ke Syurga’ authored by an Iranian by the name Reza Shah-Kazemi, and his subsequent chapter ‘Kristian di Masjid Nabawi: Renungan ke dalam Sunnah’ and ‘Pluralisme Keagamaan dan Islam’ written by John Hick.

Very unfortunately, however, Muslims cannot swallow such liberal, pragmatist ideas. If the writer may refer to the Quran, it says ‘the only religion recognised by Allah is Islam’. Religious experts and our muftis, including Harussani Zakaria, have criticised such ideas and warned Muslims against the danger of being influenced by them.

"If left unchecked, liberalism and pluralism will be difficult to control," said Harussani Zakaria when speaking at the Ulamak 2006 Convention.

I wonder why the writer only highlighted only one book, The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism and did not refer to the other 10 banned books.

Is he trying to accuse the present prime minister with dissemination of Wahhabism, allegedly funded by the Saudi Arabian government as insinuated by Stephen Schwartz’s term ‘Saudi- Wahhabi agents in Malaysia’?

Is he also saying the Malaysian government now is under ‘fundamentalist’s hands’?

The writer’s analysis not only provides an incomplete picture of the censorship policy of the ministry, but also distorts the truth and puts the Malaysian government in bad light. By portraying the wrong picture, he accused Islam Hadhari of having ‘two faces’ or double standard.

If the writer is willing to see the truth, he may refer to Jakim’s website or call the ministry’s office. This before writing a letter with such a bend.

The two faces of Islam Hadhari

2008-02-11T23:56:00.000+08:00

Book ban: the two faces of Islam Hadhari
Ismail Che Yahaya (Malaysiakini.com, Feb 11, 2008)

On Jan 29, the Malaysian government banned 11 books, one of them The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism authored by Stephen Schwartz, a Muslim convert.

Schwartz suggested that ‘Saudi-Wahhabi agents’ in Malaysia had become alarmed by the publication of the book in Bahasa Indonesia, Dua Wajah Islam.

In a protest statement against the Malaysian ban, Schwartz commented: ‘It’s contemptible and, frankly, reveals the backward-looking attitudes of authorities in Malaysia, a country which prides itself on its alleged modernisation as an economic tiger.

‘In reality, books cannot be banned today. They are smuggled, pirated – especially in Southeast Asia – downloaded, and, in the case of my book, can easily be imported from Indonesia and read by Malaysians who do not know English’.

Regardless of Schwartz’s wild guess, book banning in Malaysia of late has gone beyond ‘Saudi- Wahhabi agents’.

Before The Two Faces of Islam, the Internal Security Ministry banned four titles on religious fundamentalism over two years. They are: Islamic Fundamentalism since 1945 (banned on 7 June 2007), Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis (26 April 2007), The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (8 June 2006) and, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and The Emergence of Islamism (8 June 2006).

See the ministry's full list of banned books here.

Islamic fundamentalism is a broad phenomenon, not solely engineered or funded by the Saudi regime. In fact, fundamentalism is no longer a Christian or Muslim political landscape. It has gained currency and inflicted other religions too.

Karen Armstrong, in her banned book, describes religious fundamentalism of the 20th century as a response to modern, liberal, materialist globalised civilization. She writes: ‘The West has developed an entirely unprecedented and wholly different type of civilisation, so the religious response to it has been unique’.

Religious fundamentalists, she elaborates, ‘have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these ‘fundamentals’ so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action’.

Therefore, it is of no surprise that even Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism and Confucianism have developed fundamentalist factions.

That is why I find the banning is so overwhelming in that it shows the ‘two faces’ of Islam Hadhari as formulated by our present prime minister. On one hand, he tries to promote more tolerant, progressive and moderate Islam but on the other hand, his government has time and again banned such scholarly books on fundamentalism.

Does it mean our government is protecting and nurturing a fundamentalist mindset among Muslims? Has his Islam Hadhari project been infiltrated by fundamentalist elements in his bureaucracy?

Protest against Malaysian book ban

2008-02-06T00:02:00.000+08:00

The Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP), an international network of Muslim moderates with operating groups and correspondents in the U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and other countries PROTESTS a decision by Federation of Malaysia authorities to ban The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism, authored by CIP Executive Director Stephen Schwartz.

The Two Faces of Islam was published by Doubleday, New York, 2002, and has been translated and published in Bosnian, Croatian, Albanian, and Bahasa Indonesia – the latter readable by Malaysians, under the title Dua Wajah Islam. Translations into other major languages read by Muslims are in preparation.

Executive Director Schwartz commented on the news, “It’s contemptible and, frankly, reveals the backward-looking attitudes of authorities in Malaysia , a country which prides itself on its alleged modernization as an economic tiger. In reality, books cannot be banned today. They are smuggled, pirated – especially in Southeast Asia – downloaded, and, in the case of my book, can easily be imported from Indonesia and read by Malaysians who do not know English. I consider this ban a badge of pride. I do, however, call on moderate Muslims and those who sympathize with moderate Islam, as well as all supporters of freedom of expression, to protest to the Malaysian authorities against this absurd decision.”

Schwartz suggested that Saudi-Wahhabi agents in Malaysia had become alarmed by the publication of the book in Bahasa Indonesia. In addition, fundamentalist advocates trained in Malaysia have recently stirred up trouble in the Balkans, using their past solidarity with embattled Bosnia-Hercegovina as a pretext for extremist agitation.

“The Two Faces of Islam will continue to be published in Muslim countries and read by ordinary Muslims,” Schwartz said.

“The counter-jihad has hardly begun, and the arbitrary abuses committed by Malaysian and other radicals will do nothing more than call attention to our work. I do not believe this ridiculous decision reflects on the people of Malaysia or their Islam; rather, it reveals that a serious confrontation is underway in that country between moderates and extremists. The notable fact that my book, which is supported by numerous Muslim scholars, was banned in a ‘grab-bag’ list including Islamic and non-Islamic works, demonstrates the immoral use of the ‘technique of the amalgam,’ which was made famous by Communist regimes in suppressing their critics. It is unworthy of any Muslim to support such desperate intrigues as undertaken in Malaysia. No books on any religion should be banned in Malaysia . The involvement of the Ministry of Internal Security in this disreputable action is ludicrous; my book is in no way a threat to the internal security of Malaysia .”

Schwartz concluded his comments on the incident with the Quranic citation, “ ‘Say: “I seek refuge in the Lord of men, the King of men, the God of men, from the mischief of the slinking prompter who whispers in the hearts of men.”’” (Surah 114).

* * *

The Center for Islamic Pluralism requests that protestors against this ban address communications to:

U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
800 N. Capitol Street, N.W., Suite 790
Washington , D.C. 20002 USA
E-mail: communications@uscirf.gov

U.S. Embassy to Malaysia
Amb. James Keith
376 Jalan Tun Razak 50400
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
E-mail: klconsular@state.gov

Federation of Malaysia
Ministry of Internal Security
Blok D1 & D2, Parcel D,
Pusat Pentadbiran Kerajaan Persekutuan
62546 Putrajaya Malaysia
E-mail: pro@mois.gov.my

Embassy of Malaysia
3516 International Court NW
Washington, DC 20008-3002 USA
E-mail: malwashdc@kln.gov.my

Permanent Mission of Malaysia to the United Nations
313 East 43rd Street
New York, NY
10017 USA
E-mail: malnyun@kln.gov.my

Malaysian High Commission in UK
45-46 Belgrave Square
London SW1X 8QT UK
E-mail: mwlon@btconnect.com

Malaysian High Commission in Singapore
301, Jervois Road
249 077 Singapore
E-mail: mwspore@singnet.com.sg

Malaysian Embassy to Indonesia
Jalan H.R. Rasuna Said Kav, X/6,
No. 1-3 Kuningan 12950 Jakarta Selatan
Jakarta Indonesia
E-mail: mwikarta@indosat.net.id

Note: To avoid spam filters, please write in the subject line of e-mails: PROTEST AGAINST MALAYSIAN BAN ON “TWO FACES OF ISLAM”

Copies of protest e-mails should be blind-copied to: schwartz@islamicpluralism.org

Imran

2008-02-05T01:15:00.000+08:00

Buat Imran & Alfian, terima kasih kerana sudi berziarah dan bersembang-sembang.

Tiada buah tangan untuk dibawa pulang, inilah sahaja sedikit "huraian tambahan" tentang maksud saya di warung tadi.

>>> Hati-hati makan nasi lemak, roti canai

Pluralisme

2008-01-31T17:11:00.000+08:00

Akhirnya buku Islam dan Pluralisme diharamkan oleh Kementerian Keselamatan Dalam Negeri (KKDN).

Buku yang disusun sahabat saya MR al-Mustaqeem menjadi kontroversi seawal perhimpunan Pemuda Umno pada 2006, tidak lama selepas diterbitkan.

al-Mustaqeem, yang memimpin organisasi penerbitan, penterjemahan dan penulisan yang mula bertapak Middle Eastern Graduate Centre (MEGC atau sebutannya MEG-Si), bermula sebagao seorang calon graduan syariah di Jordan dan berakhir sebagai seorang liberal di Jalan Telawi.

al-Mustaqeem, seorang sahabat, juga editor buku saya Patah Balek; Catatan terpenting reformasi.

Hari ini saya boleh berbangga, kerana buku seorang teman dekat saya akhirnya diharamkan oleh kerajaan setelah beberapa lama penerbitan yang saya pernah terlibat, atau menyumbang rencana, ditarik permitnya oleh KKDN.

Saya masih menunggu-nunggu bila pula buku-buku seperti Islam dan Dasar Pemerintahan (karya Ali Abdul Raziq, terjemahan al-Mustaqeem, terbitan Institut Kajian Dasar) atau Pengalaman Bertuhan (kumpulan esei pelbagai agama, suntingan al-Mustaqeem, terbitan terbaru MEGC) diharamkan!

Loloq

2008-01-30T15:43:00.000+08:00

Inna lillahi wa inna ilahi raajiuun!

Perginya penulis lirik terkenal Loloq, atau Rosli Khamis, ke pangkuan-Nya.

Menurut laporan Utusan Online, Loloq meninggal dunia di Hospital Pakar Damansara, di Petaling Jaya hari ini.

Penulis lirik yang berasal dari Singapura itu meninggal dunia pada pukul 1.37 petang akibat pendarahan otak.

(c) Foto ini diambil tanpa kebenaran dari blog Normal Girl Living a Crazy Life

Hanya ada satu kata, ...

2008-01-27T15:27:00.000+08:00

... lawan!

(Mengenang Wiji Thukul di hari perginya Soeharto)

1998-2008

2008-01-24T06:59:00.000+08:00

Sebagai mengulas coretan Najwan Halimi (23 Jan 2008)

Saya fikir persoalan Reformasi harus bermula daripada reformasi pemikiran, atau perubahan cara kita berfikir, atau penerokaan cara-cara baru/lain untuk melihat Malaysia.

Sebab itu, pada malam perbualan kita itu, saya tekankan persoalan meningkatkan mutu perdebatan isu-isu (khususnya nasional) agar kepadatan dan kedalaman perbahasan dapat disalurkan (exchange) dengan minima/ringkas.

Dalam contoh mudah, saya sebut persoalan bahasa, budaya dan pemikiran. Khususnya memadatkan sesuatu istilah sehingga ia berfungsi semacam "sponge" atau "hyperlink".

Sering saya perhatikan, kelemahan ini wujud di kalangan kita yang menuntut perubahan politik dan kritis pada kerajaan yang sedia ada. Tidak lupa juga pemimpin-pemimpin, tokoh-tokoh, orang-orang popular.

Kita/mereka menghabiskan banyak masa menyampaikan sesuatu (sesama sendiri) dan juga orang ramai kerana bahasa yang digunakan untuk menyalurkan idea bukan bahasa ilmu dan bahasa idea, tetapi bahasa politik, bahasa propaganda, bahasa "nak menang" (yakni: bahasa ingin menguasai pihak lain).

Bahasa kita bahasa yang menundukkan, bahasa yang mengikat, dan bahasa pembujukan yang menjadikan pendengar/sasaran komunikasi sebagai "alat" untuk dieksploitasi.

Contohnya, artikel saya sewaktu mengupas kempen menentang "Islam Liberal" yang diguna pakai oleh puak-puak Islam. >>> Lihat artikel saya: ‘Islam Liberal’ wacana terdesak (Ummahonline.com, 16 Mei 2005)

Bahasa seumpama ini bukan bahasa untuk menggalakkan dialog, bukan bahasa untuk mencungkil kelemahan sedia ada dan kemungkinan baru, bukan bahasa untuk rakan komunikasi yang setara/setaraf. Tetapi bahasa yang bertukar fungsi sebagai penyalur ideologi, kuasa dan penundukan psikologi.

Dalam perbahasan mutakhir tentang demokrasi dan masyarakat sivil, sarjana kini bercakap tentang "modal budaya" atau "modal sosial" sebagai prasyarat awal untuk membangunkan demokrasi dari bawah. Jadi, bagi saya, bahasa politik yang wujud pada hari ini belum membentuk modal budaya/modal sosial ke arah Reformasi.

Oleh itu, pada hemat saya saat ini, bidang inilah yang jangan sekali-kali kita abaikan. Dan .... ia menjadi suatu aspek perjuangan Reformasi yang maha mustahak.

Kajian Media (1)

2008-01-19T08:48:00.000+08:00

Modern propaganda is distinguished from other forms of communication by its deliberate and conscious use of false or misleading information to sway public opinion. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century gradually made it possible to reach large numbers of people.

But it was not until the nineteenth century that state governments began to employ propaganda for political purposes to any wide degree deliberately aimed at influencing the masses. The invention of radio and television in the twentieth century made it possible to reach even more people. The development of modern media, global warfare, and the rise of extremist political parties provided growing importance to the use of propaganda.

>>> Propaganda

But propaganda can be as blatant as a swastika or as subtle as a joke. Its persuasive techniques are regularly applied by politicians, advertisers, journalists, radio personalities, and others who are interested in influencing human behavior. Propagandistic messages can be used to accomplish positive social ends, as in campaigns to reduce drunk driving, but they are also used to win elections and to sell malt liquor.

As Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson point out, "every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate, but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda." (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1991)

With the growth of communication tools like the Internet, the flow of persuasive messages has been dramatically accelerated. For the first time ever, citizens around the world are participating in uncensored conversations about their collective future. This is a wonderful development, but there is a cost.

>>> Propagandacritic.com

Political propaganda in principle is active and revolutionary. It is aimed at the broad masses. It speaks the language of the people because it wants to be understood by the people. Its task is the highest creative art of putting sometimes complicated events and facts in a way simple enough to be understood by the man on the street. Its foundation is that there is nothing the people cannot understand, but rather things must be put in a way that they can understand. It is a question of making it clear to him by using the proper approach, evidence and language.

Propaganda is a means to an end. Its purpose is to lead the people to an understanding that will allow them to willingly and without internal resistance devote themselves to the tasks and goals of a superior leadership. If propaganda is to succeed, it must know what it wants. It must keep a clear and firm goal in mind, and seek the appropriate means and methods to reach that goal. Propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks.

Propaganda must be creative. It is by no means a matter for the bureaucracy or official administration, but rather it is a matter of productive fantasy. The genuine propagandist must be a true artist. He must be a master of the popular soul, using it as an instrument to express the majesty of a genuine political will. Propaganda can be pro or con. In neither case does it have to be negative. The only thing that is important is whether or not its words are true and genuine expressions of the people. During its period of opposition, the National Socialist movement proved that criticism can be constructive, indeed that in a time which the government is in the hands of destructive powers it may be the only constructive element.

>>> "Goebbels on Propaganda" dalam Propaganda - General (theory, practice and history)

Khalid

2008-01-18T00:08:00.000+08:00

Oleh: AYU UTAMI
(Seputar Indonesia.com, 6 Januari 2008)

Khalid Jaafar adalah seorang cendekia. Bagi saya, dia bukan Malaysia, bukan Indonesia. Tulisan-tulisannya membuat saya teringat bahwa intelektual tidak berbatas negara. Ia tinggal di KL, tapi suka berburu buku antik sampai ke Pasar Senen.

Sama seperti Ulil Abshar Abdalla, pada masa mudanya ia pernah terpukau oleh pemikiran Sayid Qutb sebentar saja, sebab ia membaca setumpuk buku dan kitab lain. Buah pikir dan bahasanya menghibur saya di tengah hubungan miring dua negeri serumpun bertetangga.

(Lihatlah, perang copyright tradisi, perebutan pulau-pulau, penganiayaan pembantu ”Indon” oleh majikan Malaysia, tapi juga korupsi yang sangat memalukan oleh kedutaan kita atas para tenaga kerja migran—bagaimana Malaysia tidak memandang rendah Indonesia jika kita sendiri memperlakukan pekerja kita sedemikian?)

Kita tak bisa melihat ada Indonesia dan ada Malaysia saling berseberangan. Sebab, di dalam masing-masing wilayah ada orang-orang dan kelompok-kelompok yang melintas batas maupun yang terpinggirkan. Apa itu Reformasi? Khalid Jaafar pernah menulis dalam memperingati lima tahun ”reformasi” di Malaysia (yang bagai mati selagi janin), yang dihitungnya mulai Anwar Ibrahim memakai kata itu sebagai slogan.

Tahun ini kita akan merayakan sepuluh tahun reformasi di Indonesia, yang dihitung sejak ”keberhasilannya”, yaitu mundurnya Soeharto dari Binagraha pada Mei 1998. Tapi, apa itu Reformasi? Di Malaysia, tulis Khalid, seorang senator dan seorang penyair berkata bahwa kata ini tak dimengerti betul oleh masyarakat. Ia terasa janggal dan elitis. Tapi, perkataan ”keadilan” juga telah tak memiliki kesegaran lagi.

Di Indonesia, tak seorang pun ragu atau bertanya tentang kata ”reformasi”. Sebab, dalam segera hasilnya jelas: presiden yang telah 32 tahun berkuasa itu mundur. Artinya, setidaknya ada perubahan. Perubahan seperti apa, itu persoalan kemudian. Yang tertinggal adalah reformasi di bidang pemikiran. Penulis muda Malaysiakini.com Fathi Aris Omar pernah bertanya, ke manakah para pemikir reformasi.

Berbeda dengan Khalid yang bergabung dalam kubu Anwar Ibrahim, Fathi cenderung berjarak dari politik.Ia menginginkan penerukaan di bidang pemikiran. Pertanyaannya, ke mana gerangan para pemikir reformasi, tak hanya berlaku di Malaysia, tetapi juga di Indonesia.

”Masyarakat intelektual reformasi belum wujud,” tulis Khalid dalam salah satu buah pikirnya di Tumit Achilles dan Lain-lain Esei.

”Ini mungkin terbalik dengan Revolusi Prancis, yang meledak dengan didahului pemikir-pemikir Pencerahan seperti Montesquieu,Voltaire, dan Rousseau. Tapi, reformasi di Malaysia (juga di Indonesia) meledak dahulu dan setelah hampir lima tahun (atau sepuluh tahun pada kita) di kalangan aktivis mereka baru sadar bahwa ada satu kekosongan yang perlu diisi.

Banyak pemberontakan terjadi di sejarah umat manusia, tetapi sebagian besar dilupakan karena tiada membawa gagasan baru. Namun, Revolusi Prancis kekal dalam ingatan.”

Di era Perang Dingin, Indonesia maupun Malaysia berpihak pada blok Amerika.

”Kekosongan pemikiran alternatif dari golongan kiri diambil sepenuhnya oleh gerakan Islam bermula dari pertengahan 1970-an,” tulis Khalid pula.

Di Malaysia, Jemaah Tabligh, Arqam, dan Abim menyebarkan ”Islam sebagai satu-satunya penyelesaian”. Beberapa, seperti juga Anwar Ibrahim, tetap membuka diri pada pengaruh Ivan Illich, Paolo Frerie, Herbert Marcuse, dan pemikir kiri baru. Di Indonesia kita mengenal pemikir Islam seperti Nurcholis Majid juga Gus Dur, cendekia yang menjadi presiden pertama yang ”digulingkan” di era reformasi.

Khalid, yang memang pernah menjadi juru bicara Anwar, menulis bahwa Anwar bagai tak mendapat khalayak dan retorika Islam lebih mudah menangkap imajinasi generasi muda. ”Pemikiran Islam mengambil arah yang lebih konservatif. Sifat konservatif ini merentasi polarisasi politik kepartaian.” Tak persis demikian di Indonesia. Sebab, pemikiran Islam sebetulnya begitu rancak.

Sayangnya,retorika Islam yang tidak toleran justru mendapat tempat. Paling tidak, jika ada konflik, aparat cenderung berkompromi pada mereka yang tak tahan pada keragaman. Ini terlihat, antara lain pada penyerangan Ahmadiyah yang mendasarkan diri pada fatwa MUI—sebuah ormas yang sesungguhnya ganjil karena dibiayai pajak yang juga datang dari warga Ahmadiyah.

”Apa itu Reformasi” sebetulnya digubah Khalid dari ”Apa itu Pencerahan” dari Immanuel Kant dan ia mengingatkan bahwa penyakit pemikiran hari ini adalah yang disebut Kant sebagai ”ketakutan untuk menggunakan akal”.(*)

Big think

2008-01-12T00:07:00.000+08:00

In June 2006, Peter Hopkins, a civic-minded and idealistic 2004 Harvard graduate, trekked up to his alma mater from New York for a meeting with Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary. Mr. Hopkins, who finagled the appointment through his friendship with Mr. Summers’s assistant, had a business idea: a Web site that could do for intellectuals what YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, did for bulldogs on skateboards.

The pitch — “a YouTube for ideas” — appealed to Mr. Summers. “Larry, to his credit, is open to new ideas,” Mr. Hopkins recalled recently. “He grilled me for two hours.” In the age of user-generated content, Mr. Summers did have one worry: “Let’s say someone puts up a porn video next to my macroeconomic speech?”

It took awhile, but a year after that meeting, Mr. Summers decided to invest (“a few tens of thousands of dollars,” he said, adding “not something I’m hoping to retire on”) in the site, called Big Think, which officially makes its debut today after being tested for several months.

Big Think (http://www.bigthink.com/) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system. It plans to add new features as it goes along, including a Facebook-like application for social networking, and Mr. Hopkins said he would like the site to become a popular place for college students looking for original sources.

“I’ve had the general view that there is a hunger for people my age looking for more intellectual content,” said Mr. Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 after making controversial comments about the lack of women in science and engineering. “I saw it as president of Harvard when I saw C.E.O.’s come up to my wife and want to discuss Hawthorne.” (His wife, Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard).

A handful of other deep-pocketed investors also decided to chip in, including Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, the online payments site; Tom Scott, who struck it rich by founding, and selling, the juice company Nantucket Nectars and now owns Plum TV, a collection of local television stations in wealthy playgrounds like Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons; the television producer Gary David Goldberg, who was behind the hit shows “Spin City” and “Family Ties”; and David Frankel, a venture capitalist who was the lead investor in Big Think.

“I tend to follow my own curiosities, and I know millions of people are like me,” said Mr. Scott. “I’m into this kind of thing. I do think there is a market for this.”

Mr. Frankel, the lead investor, said, “The initial investors may put in more. I imagine we will go out and raise more money in the future.”

Mr. Hopkins and his partner, Victoria Brown, germinated the idea for Big Think while working together at PBS on the “Charlie Rose” show in 2006.

When they surveyed the landscape, Mr. Hopkins, 24, and Ms. Brown, 33, saw a vast array of celebrity and sophomoric video content (remember the clips of cats urinating in toilets that caused a sensation on YouTube?).

“Everyone says Americans are stupid — that’s what we generally heard from venture capitalists” when trying to raise money, Mr. Hopkins said. Obviously, Mr. Hopkins and Ms. Brown felt differently, and the success of the business basically hinges on proving that Americans have an appetite for other kinds of content.

Of course, Mr. Hopkins and Ms. Brown are not the first to see the Internet as an opportunity to further public discourse. It was invented largely by academics; numerous sites, like Arts & Letters Daily, an offshoot of the Chronicle of Higher Education, seek to serve intellectuals.
Big Think’s business model right now is rudimentary: attract enough viewers, then sell advertising. “We’re going to wait until it gets attention before going after advertisers,” Mr. Hopkins said.

>>> Full Text see : Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly by Tim Arango (The New York Times, 7 Jan 2008)

Nabi Gibran

2008-01-06T00:24:00.000+08:00

Finally, Haskell offered to be his mistress.

He wasn’t interested.

In a painful passage in her diary, Haskell records how, one night, he said that she was looking thin.

On the pretext of showing him that she was actually well fleshed, she took off her clothes and stood before him naked.

He kissed one of her breasts, and that was all.

She got dressed again.

She knew that he had had affairs with other women, but he claimed that he was not “sexually minded,” and furthermore that what she missed in their relationship was actually there.

When they were apart, he said, they were together.

They didn’t need to have “intercourse”; their whole friendship was “a continued intercourse.”

>>> Teks lengkap, baca 'Prophet Motive: The Kahlil Gibran phenomenon' by Joan Acocella (The New Yorker, 7 Jan 2008)

Asmara

2008-01-01T21:36:00.000+08:00

Asalnya saya bercadang memuatkan foto daripada sekeping DVD seks yang kontroversi. Tetapi tidak sanggup! Jadi saya gantikan dengan foto ini, kekasih presiden Perancis --- yang manja.

Sebab itu, sering saya nasihatkan kepada teman-teman, kalau mahu berselingkuh dengan "kekasih gelap", pastikan seindah imaginasi dengan Carla Bruni.

* * *

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt takes the subject so seriously that he says he is working on a book—his third—to be titled Politics, Porn & Power: An Intimate Look at Sexual Hypocrisy and Its Impact on American Politics.

>>> Jangan lupa, baca di sini.

2007-12-14T11:44:00.000+08:00

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The Internal Security Act

2007-12-13T23:35:00.000+08:00

CHAPTER 4: THE INTERNAL SECURITY ACT
1. Introduction

While the lifting of the 1948-1960 State of Emergency signalled the substantive defeat of the communist insurrection, never-the-less the government, on the basis of Article149 as amended, proceeded to enact the 1960 Internal Security Act (ISA). Rather than being merely an extension of the 1948 Emergency Regulations, regarded as extraordinary measures which automatically lapsed on an annual basis, the ISA was a permanent law, and gave the Executive sweeping powers including the ability to deprive a person of his or her liberty indefinitely without trial solely for ‘preventive’ reasons, and to prohibit meetings, ban publications and exclude books and periodicals.

The ISA’s preamble referred to a situation in which ‘action has been taken and further action is threatened by a substantial body of persons both inside and outside Malaysia ....to cause a substantial number of citizens to fear, organised violence against persons and property; and...to procure the alteration, otherwise than by lawful means, of the lawful Government of Malaysia....' ( emphasis added).

In the first instance, therefore, the authorities justified the ISA as necessary to effect the ‘mopping up’ of the communist guerrilla threat or, in the mid-1970s, to check a feared resurgence of armed insurgency in the context of communist advances in Indochina. Additionally, for many years the government asserted that the underground tactics of the proscribed Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) and its suspected infiltration of various front organisations could only be effectively countered through the use of the ISA. However these justifications became progressively weaker over the years - and lost all credibility with the signing of a formal peace treaty with exiled remnants of the CPM in Thailand in 1989. In recent years the government has evoked the memory of the 1969 ethnic riots and emphasised the maintenance of inter-communal harmony as a justification for maintaining the extraordinary powers extended by the ISA. However this position has been increasingly open to question as inter-communal tensions have receded in the context of sustained economic growth and increased prosperity.

In 1996 the government, indicating that the scope and frequency of ISA detentions had waned, announced that there were no longer any ‘political’ ISA detainees, and that all the remaining ISA detainees, reportedly numbering fewer than 230, were held for offences involving identity paper forgery and the ‘smuggling’ of illegal migrant workers. The last six remaining communist detainees were reported to have been released in 1995.(18)

The Internal Security Act (ISA) remains the core of the permanent, arbitrary powers to detain without trial available to the Executive. The arrest of Anwar Ibrahim and his supporters under the ISA in late 1998 shows the potential for this restrictive legislation to be used at any time against anyone for the peaceful exercise of their human rights.

As with other restrictive laws in Malaysia, the ISA, through a series of amendments, has incrementally extended Executive powers, while stripping away the judicial safeguards designed to protect against their abuse. Now, once a person is detained under the ISA, he or she has no effective recourse to legal protection, nor any opportunity to establish their innocence of the accusations levelled against them. As such the ISA is contrary to fundamental principles of international law, including the right to liberty of the person, to freedom from arbitrary arrest, to be informed of the reasons for arrest, to the presumption of innocence, and to a fair and open trial in a court of law.

The broad terms of the ISA fail to provide any precise definition or criteria for determining which individuals pose a danger to state or public security. The Executive has been given permanent, unfettered discretion to determine, according to their subjective interpretation, who, what and when a person or activity might pose a potential threat to the wider national interest, national security or public order - and to order indefinite detention without trial.
Beyond the violation of basic rights experienced by particular individuals, the ISA has had a wider, intimidating effect on civil society, and a marked influence on the nature of political participation and accountability in Malaysia. The ISA has been used to suppress peaceful political, academic and social activities, and legitimate constructive criticism by NGOs and other social pressure groups. It limits the political space for important debates on issues of economic policy, corruption and other social challenges.

Amnesty International has repeatedly called for the repeal of the ISA, or, at the very least, for its amendment to bring it in line with international standards. For over twenty years the organisation has called for the immediate and unconditional release of scores of ISA detainees whom it considered to be prisoners of conscience held solely for the peaceful expression of their political or religious beliefs. It has called for those other ISA detainees who may have advocated or been involved in violence to be either granted a fair, speedy and open trial, or else released. The organisation has also raised persistent serious concerns about patterns of grave ill-treatment, at times amounting to torture, of those detained under the law.

The authorities have continued to defend the ISA in recent years, arguing that it is used less and less against ‘political’ figures, but that it remains an essential deterrent to maintain stability in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. Various reform proposals have been aired by ministers, including, in February 1996, potential amendments that would define offences to be covered by the Act (espionage, incitement to racial and religious hatred, economic sabotage and falsifying identification and travel documents). However such reform proposals have not been taken forward.

2. The Powers
(A) Detention Orders
Under the terms of Section 8 of the ISA the Minister of Home Affairs (Interior Minister) has the right to have any person detained if he is satisfied that the detention is necessary to prevent the person from,

‘s8(1) ...acting in any manner prejudicial to the security of Malaysia or any part thereof or to the maintenance of essential services therein or to the economic life thereof...’ The Minister is empowered to ‘make an order’ directing that person to be detained for any period not exceeding two years. The detention order may be renewed indefinitely.

(B) Warrantless Arrests: The 60-day Interrogation Period
Additionally, Section 73(1) of the ISA allows the police to arrest without a warrant and detain pending enquires, for a period of up to 60 days, any person ‘in respect of whom [the police officer] has reason to believe,

"a) that there are grounds which would justify his detention under Section 8; and b) that he has acted or is about to act or is likely to act in any manner prejudicial to the security of Malaysia or any part thereof or to the maintenance of essential services therein or to the economic life thereof."

Any person arrested in this manner may be held for up to 60 days if an officer above the rank of Deputy Superintendent reports the circumstances of the arrest and detention to a police officer designated by the Inspector General of Police (IGP), and if that officer deems that the inquiries cannot be completed within 30 days.

Since the initial powers of arrest can be exercised lawfully by any police officer without a warrant, the potential for abuse of police powers, especially by the Special Branch (security police) is largely unrestricted. If, after 60 days, the police choose not to submit grounds to the Minister, and a detention order is not issued, the detainee is released.

(C) Restriction Orders: The Denial of Rights of Association, Expression and Movement
Additionally, under Section 8(5) of the ISA the Minister may impose on any person in respect of his activities, freedom of movement, or places of residence or employment, a restriction order containing any of the following restrictions and conditions;

"b) for prohibiting him from being out of doors between such hours as may be specified in the order...;

c) for requiring him to notify his movements in such manner at such times and to such authority or person as specified in the order;
d) for prohibiting from addressing public meetings or from holding office in, or taking part in the activities of or acting as adviser to any organization or association, or from taking part in any political activities; and
e)for prohibiting him from travelling beyond the limits of Malaysia or any part thereof specified in the order..."

Restriction orders, covering a period of up to two years, may be renewed indefinitely.

(D) Controls on Printing and Publications
Additionally, Section 22(1) empowers the Minister to ban the printing and circulation of publications that are deemed prejudicial to security and public order. He may do so if he finds that the publication,"

f) contains any incitement to violence;
g) counsels disobedience to the law or any lawful order;
h) is calculated or likely to lead to the breach of the peace, or to promote feelings of hostility between different races or classes of the population; or
i) is prejudicial to the national interest, public order, or security of Malaysia.

(E) Mandatory Death Penalty: Firearms, Ammunition and Explosives
Section 57 of the ISA prescribes a mandatory death penalty for certain offences to be tried in court,

"(1) Any person who without lawful excuse, the onus of proving which shall be on that person, in any security area carries or has in his possession or under his control -
a) any firearm without lawful authority therefor: or
b) any ammunition or explosive without lawful authority therefor,
shall be guilty of an offence and shall, on conviction, be punished with death."
(see page 26: Nallakaruppan case)

3. The Safeguards
After arrest by police, the authorities have no legal obligation to inform individuals held under the ISA of the allegations against them until the end of the 60-day investigation period. During this period detainees are held incommunicado, mostly in solitary confinement. Especially in the first weeks of detention access to legal counsel and to family members is denied - though family visits may be permitted during the later stages of police custody.

The failure to notify detainees of the reasons for their detention and the denial of access to their families and lawyers is in contravention of international standards, including the UN Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment.(19)

(A) The Advisory Board.
After a maximum of 60 days detention, the Minister is required to sign a detention order, having referred to police reports, including findings of interrogations, which he may or may not take into account. The detainee has the right to see a copy of the order, along with a statement of the grounds on which the order is made and the allegations of fact on which the order is based.

Article 151 of the Constitution requires that any law sanctioning preventive detention should contain provisions which allow the detainee the opportunity to make representations to an Advisory Board, made up of three members appointed by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (advised by the Cabinet), and including a judge or retired judge. This is reflected in the provisions of the ISA (s.11). Under a 1989 amendment the provision (s.12.1) that the Advisory Board had to make a recommendation within three months of a detainee’s representation was altered to allow undefined periods before recommendations had to be made to the King. Having made a recommendation the Advisory Board is required to review the detainee’s case every six months. This practice reportedly has often not occurred.

Under the ISA, unlike under the 1948 Emergency Regulations, the Advisory Board does not have the power to order the release of a detainee, but can only make recommendations for release or continued detention to the King at his discretion. The decision of the King is final and cannot be called into question by any court.

The effectiveness of the Advisory Board as a safeguard against abuse of ISA powers is further weakened by the fact that past judicial rulings have held that the vagueness or insufficiency of the allegations of fact on which the grounds for detention are based cannot render a detention order unlawful. To a great extent the assessment of the grounds for detention by the Advisory Board is influenced by the findings and recommendations of the police Special Branch, at times based on confessions extracted during prolonged and aggressive interrogation, often involving ill-treatment amounting, at times, to torture (see page 27). Given these circumstances a number of ISA detainees have refused to participate in the Advisory Board review process.

(B) Judicial Review: Rendering Habeas Corpus Ineffective
The writ of habeas corpus is a key safeguard, recognised in international law, upholding the right of liberty of the person by ensuring the legality of administrative detention through a judicial review and determination. Article 5(2) of the Constitution reflects Principle 32(1) of the UN Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, which states:

‘A detained person or his counsel shall be entitled at any time to take proceedings according to domestic law before a judicial or other authority to challenge the lawfulness of his detention in order to obtain his release without delay, if it is unlawful.’

In Malaysia a series of progressively restrictive legislative amendments, parallelled by judicial rulings interpreting these laws, have rendered the writ of habeas corpus essentially meaningless in relation to ISA detainees.

Malaysian judicial rulings and case law have established the principle that once the Minister determines the necessity to detain a subject pursuant to a valid detention order, the courts cannot ‘go behind’ that order, i.e. the courts cannot and will not question the basis for detention. This applies when grounds for detaining a person adduced in court are not the same as those contained in the original detention order. Thus, the subjective finding of the Minister cannot be challenged unless it was given male fide - in bad faith(20). The onus of proving improper motive or male fides on the part of the authorities lies on the detainee.(21)

The scope of judicial review, including habeas corpus, was weakened further in 1989 when Parliament passed amendments to the ISA that prevented acts of the Minister taken under the ISA being brought into question by the courts. Section 8B(1) as amended read,

"There shall be no judicial review in any court of, and no court shall have or exercise any jurisdiction in respect of, any act done or decision made by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong or the Minister in the exercise of their discretionary power in accordance with this Act, save in regard to any question on compliance with any procedural requirement in this Act governing such act or decision."

Dr Mahathir said only the government was able to determine, from information it received, what action was necessary to preserve the country’s stability and security and that,

"It is not appropriate for us to follow the practice in other countries where courts play an interventionist role in substituting the decisions of the Executive as this is against the concept of ‘separation of powers’ between the Executive and the Judiciary. "(22)

In December 1997 two Muslim academics, Professor Lupti Ibrahim and lecturer Fadzullah Shuib, who had been detained the previous month under the ISA because of the practice of their Shi’a faith (see page XX), had their habeas corpus petitions upheld after the court recognised a procedural error - a copy of the ISA police detention order had not been dated. The two were immediately re-arrested on leaving the court house and returned to detention under a new ISA order.

The only previous effective application for habeas corpus had been that of Jamaluddin Othman who was arrested in October 1987 (Operation Lallang) and served a two-year detention order for alleged involvement in a plan to propagate Christianity among Malays. The grounds for detention stated only that the respondent had participated in Christian meetings and seminars, and in October 1988 the High Court ruled that the Minister has no power under the ISA to deprive a person of his constitutional right to profess and practice his religion (Article 11). The ruling was upheld by the Federal Court.

4. The Detentions

(A) 1960 - 1980
The first two decades of the ISA were marked by the campaign against the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) and their suspected sympathisers. However the use of the ISA went beyond suppressing communist insurgency and their supporters and extended to a far broader spectrum of political activity in Malaysia. The use of the ISA in this period was extensive: the number of people arrested and detained under the Act rose from 1119 between 1960 and 1969, to 1713 between 1970 and 1979.(23) Detainees included hundreds imprisoned for peaceful political activity with periods of detention ranging from a few months to up to 12 years.(24)
During the 1960s the principal multi-racial left-wing party, the Labour Party of Malaya, which mainly recruited from among the Chinese working-class, was weakened by a series of ISA arrests, as was its initial partner in the Socialist Front opposition alliance, the Party Sosialis Rakyat Malaysia (PSRM). By 1978, of the approximately 100 ISA detainees at the Batu Gajah detention camp, at least 22 were Labour Party activists arrested in the mid- and late 1960s. Additionally, during the 1963-5 Confrontation with Indonesia, opposition party members, particularly those belonging to the Socialist Front, were subject to arrest. The government, dominated by UMNO, claimed that most of the detained members of the Socialist Front were communist sympathisers.

In the aftermath of the 1969 racial riots the leader of the ethnic Chinese based opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) Lim Kit Siang was detained under the ISA in 1970. In 1976, amid factional tensions within UMNO, six senior politicians, including two government ministers, two DAP parliamentarians, and the PSRM chairman, were arrested. Police stated the men had been detained,

"...because of their involvement in the activities of the Communist United Front or in activities which could be regarded as assisting the advancement of the Communist United Front, whether directly or indirectly, deliberately or unknowingly".

In 1971 the ISA was amended to allow the detention of anyone perceived to be a threat to the essential services and economic life of the country. The Socialist Front was active in a resurgence of trades union activities, and party members and unionists were vulnerable to ISA detention. One trade unionist, Chang Ben San, was held for nine years after being arrested in 1969. In February 1979 22 members of the Airlines Employers Union (AEU) were detained under the ISA after a pay dispute at the state-run Malaysian Airline System (MAS) had led to a work to rule and a government order to deregister the union. The police announced that the unionists were being held to prevent them continuing to act in a manner ‘prejudicial to the maintenance of an essential service’. They were released in April 1979 but the de-registered union became defunct. (see page 52, Trades Union Act)

In 1974 amid increasing student protests in Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere, in solidarity with evicted Malay urban squatters and impoverished farmers in Baling in the north of the Peninsular, the authorities arrested over a thousand students for illegal assembly on university campuses and at the National Mosque. Over 20 students, academics and government critics were also arrested under the ISA in late 1994, including University of Malaya Professor of Anthropology Syed Husin Ali, who was detained for six years, and also then President of the Muslim Youth Movement (ABIM), Anwar Ibrahim, who was held for 22 months.(see page 48, Universities Act)

In 1976, in a move that was to have a long-lasting effect on press self-censorship in Malaysia, Ahmad Samad Ismail, the managing editor of the New Straits Times (NST) newspaper, and Samani Mohd Amin, News Editor of Berita Harian, were arrested under the ISA, allegedly for involvement in a communist subversion plot to weaken the belief in religion among Malays and convert them to communism.

(B) The 1980s and Operation Lallang (October 1987)
When Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad took office in 1981 there were indications of a more liberal approach by the authorities toward peaceful dissenting activity. In 1982 Amnesty International welcomed the release of at least 168 ISA detainees during the Mahathir premiership.

The apparent decline in the number of ISA arrests during the 1980s raised hopes that the government might rely less on the ISA, but these proved illusory. In April 1987, against a backdrop of a sharp economic downturn and bitter factional divisions within UMNO, Prime Minister Mahathir only narrowly survived a leadership challenge by Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah in party elections. Tengku Razaleigh’s defeated faction appealed to the courts to declare the results void citing voting by ‘false’ delegates and alleged vote-buying. The High Court ruled that failure to register a number of UMNO branches, as required under the Societies Act, made UMNO an illegal organisation and that no new elections could be held until lawfully constituted organisations were created.

Amid this political crisis, Dr Mahathir, citing signs of rising ethnic tensions,(25) ordered the launch in October 1987 of Operation Lallang (‘Lallang’ means weed). In this operation 106 people across a wide political and social spectrum were arrested under the ISA, accused of provoking racial and religious tensions. Those detained included 15 members of PAS, DAP leaders Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh and seven other DAP parliamentarians, two PSRM leaders and 16 members of the Barisan Nasional (BN) ruling coalition. Other detainees included trade unionists, Chinese educationalists, Islamic teachers and Christian church and community workers and activists. At least 40 of the 106, none from the BN, were given two-year detention orders, and were adopted by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience. The last detainees to be released, DAP leader Lim Kit Siang, and his son parliamentarian Lim Guan Eng, were set free in April 1989, several months after the other remaining Lallang detainees. Attempts to question the validity, through judicial review, of the Executive’s grounds for the detention of individual Lallang detainees had proved almost completely ineffective.

(C) The 1990s
With the release of the final Lallang detainees in 1989, the numbers of political ISA detainees continued at low levels during the early 1990s. However the ISA continued to be used periodically against political and religious activists and other individuals regarded as a potential threat to national security or to the national interest. For instance, in 1991 Sabah Chief Minister Joseph Pairin Kitingan’s brother, Jeffrey Kitingan, and six other members of Bersatu Sabah Party (PBS) were detained under the ISA for alleged involvement in a plot to withdraw Sabah from the Federation.

Al Arqam
The Muslim Al Arqam group, a mystical Sufi sect derived from within the Shi’a tradition, had an estimated 10,000 members and over 100,000 followers in Malaysia by the early 1990s. The group ran a extensive network of schools and communes, and had broad business interests. In 1994 the government accused Al Arqam of preaching ‘deviationist’ Islamic teachings and made charges, never substantiated, that the group was training over 300 ‘holy warriors’ in Thailand for presumed use against the state. In justifying its suppression officials stated the sect not only posed a threat because of ‘deviationism’, but also because it was ‘developing in isolation from the mainstream of Malaysian society’.(26)

In August 1994, after the National Fatwa Council (the highest authority on Islamic law in Malaysia) ruled that the teachings and beliefs of the group contravened Islamic practice and tenets, the government declared Al Arqam unlawful under the Societies Act (see page 45). Some 150 members were subsequently arrested as a result of the banning, but were released on bail.Seven senior members were detained under the ISA, including Al Arqam leader in exile Ashaari Muhammad, who had been handed over to Malaysian police by the Thai authorities in September 1994. In October 1994 Ashaari announced the disbanding of Al Arqam, saying that he had accepted the charges of ‘deviationist’ beliefs while discussing religious issues with police during his detention. Amnesty International declared the detainees possible prisoners of conscience held solely for the peaceful expression of their religious beliefs. The organisation’s concerns about possible ill-treatment of the Al Arqam detainees were confirmed when, during Anwar Ibrahim’s trial in November 1998, a Special Branch officer stated that ‘turning over’ techniques had been used against Al Arqam detainees.

All the Al Arqam ISA detainees were subsequently released, though most were subject to orders restricting their freedom of movement and association. In mid-1996, 18 former members of Al Arqam were detained under the ISA, and nine were served two-year detention orders on suspicion of attempting to revive the movement. All were subsequently conditionally released.

Shi’as
The minority Shi’a Muslim community in Malaysia is estimated to number approximately 2000 people scattered through the country. In November 1997 ten Shi’as, in various locations, were arrested under the ISA. Amnesty International declared the detainees to be prisoners of conscience, held solely for their peaceful activities and religious beliefs, and called for their immediate release.

Government minister Abdul Hamid Othman stated that such use of the ISA was appropriate as ‘religious disharmony is a national threat which places the country’s political and economic development at an unsafe position’. The detainees were reportedly placed under pressure in detention to renounce their beliefs and underwent ‘Islamic faith rehabilitation courses...aimed at making self-evaluation as a Malaysian Muslim citizen holding to the Sunni sect teachings’.

Three were released, subject to restriction orders, in early 1998, but seven, including Professor Lutpi Ibrahim, professor in Islamic studies at the University of Malaya, Fadzullah Shuib, lecturer at Mara Institute of Technology, Syed Sulaiman bin Syed Hassan, Zainal Adam, Said Muda, Ustaz Abdul Hassan and Che Kamarulzaman Che Ismail remained in detention. Six of the detainees were released in stages from late October 1998. The last Shi’a detainee, Che Kamarulzaman Che Ismail, was reported released in early 1999. All the men are reported to remain under restriction orders.

Other ISA arrests and threats
In December 1996 following the breakup of an international NGO forum on East Timor (see page 57), and a proposal by local NGOs to hold a ‘Public Tribunal’ forum to discuss alleged abuses of police powers (see page 47), Prime Minister Mahathir accused the NGOs of including ‘leftists’ and ‘traitors’.(27)

The Home Ministry threatened to detain participants of the proposed forum on policing under the ISA, forcing its cancellation. Dr Mahathir, commenting on the proposal, warned that the authorities might be ‘forced’ to use the ISA if the situation got worse, and that the ISA could not be abolished because of the existence of such ‘irresponsible people’.(28)

In April 1998, two Acehnese were arrested under the ISA for allegedly instigating riots in immigration detention camps in March, when large numbers of Indonesians from Aceh province tried to resist forcible deportation to Indonesia. One of these men was released after being detained incommunicado for 60 days without charge or trial, while the other, Razali Abdullah, was ordered detained for two years. He was released in January 1999.

In August 1998, four people were detained under the ISA for allegedly spreading false rumours, by forwarding messages through the Internet, of ethnic riots in Kuala Lumpur. They were charged in September under the Penal Code (s505b) for circulating statements likely to cause alarm, punishable with up to two years in jail, a fine or both. The accused pleaded not guilty, and the trials are continuing.

Additionally in September 1997, as the Asian financial crisis intensified, government officials threatened to use the ISA to detain local financial traders suspected of ‘economic sabotage’ by aiding foreign financial speculators to sell off stocks and the ringgit. No arrests took place.

(D) 1998: Arrest of Anwar Ibrahim, His Political Associates and Other Reformasi Supporters
Anwar Ibrahim with his wife, Dr. Wan Azizah© Reuters 1999

From Anwar Ibrahim’s detention under the ISA on 20 September 1998 until early 1999, Amnesty International recorded at least 27 other people arrested under the ISA. All are reported to have been released before the end of their 60-day interrogation period, and were not served detention orders and transferred to Kamunting detention camp. Some however, including Anwar Ibrahim, either remained in detention or were subsequently re-arrested, under separate criminal charges.

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad dismissed Anwar Ibrahim from his posts as Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister on 2 September 1998. The next day the police announced publicly that Anwar Ibrahim was under criminal investigation, and lodged at the High Court a number of affidavits alleging that Anwar Ibrahim had been involved in acts of sexual misconduct, tampering with evidence, bribery and threatening national security. The Attorney-General stated that, subject to investigations, Anwar Ibrahim could be held under the Internal Security Act (ISA) or charged under the Official Secrets Act (OSA), the Penal Code, the Women and Girls Protection Act or the Prevention of Corruption Act.

Despite the threatened criminal charges facing him, public rallies in support of Anwar Ibrahim and of reformasi gathered momentum. On 20 September Anwar Ibrahim led some 35,000 demonstrators through the streets of Kuala Lumpur and called on Prime Minister Mahathir to resign. Later that night Anwar Ibrahim was arrested at his home. He was initially told he would be charged under the Penal Code s377B (see page 65), but a few hours later was informed he was detained under the ISA.

Subsequently, from 21 to 29 September 1998, police detained under the ISA 16 of Anwar’s political associates who were perceived to have potential political influence within UMNO and the wider Malay community, especially the Islamic student movement. The detainees included UMNO National Youth chief Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and Negri Sembilan state UMNO Youth chief Ruslan Kassim; leaders of Muslim youth organisations, including Muslim Youth Movement (ABIM - Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia) president Ahmad Azam Abdul Rahman and National Muslim Students Association president, Amidi Abdul Manan. Additionally, Kamarudin Jaafar, the head of the Institute for Policy Development (IKD), a think-tank closely linked to Anwar; Professor Siddiq Baba, Student Affairs Rector at the International Islamic University; and Zulkifli Nordin, a member of Anwar’s legal defence team, were detained. Shaari Sungip, president of the Islamic NGO Jamaah Islah Malaysia (JIM), was detained on 13 October. Of this group all had been released by early November.

ISA arrests continued in October and in the following months, and appeared to expand from an original core of Anwar supporters to those who were suspected of organising the wider reformasi movement or coordinating the continuing reformasi demonstrations. They included UMNO Youth Culture Committee secretary Lokman Noor Adam and UMNO member Mohammad Khair Noor, arrested on 24 October, and UMNO member Abdullah Rasid Ahmad, arrested in 25 October. On 22 November, as he was being released from remand custody following his arrest for alleged illegal assembly on 15 November, Fadhillah Abu Bakr was detained under the ISA on suspicion of organising demonstrations. Similarly, businessman Monashofian Zulkairnan was arrested on 4 December under the ISA as he left a magistrate’s hearing after six days remand custody for alleged illegal assembly. In February 1999 a computer technician, Shaharudin Abdul Kadir, was reportedly arrested under the ISA on suspicion of links to the reformasi movement. Police are reported to have removed computer disks and hardware from his residence at the time of detention.

All of the above are reported to have been released from ISA detention before the end of the 60 day interrogation period, but some faced further charges. ISA detainee Lokman Noor Adam was released on 18 December, but re-arrested and charged in May 1999 with alleged refusal to disperse from an illegal assembly on 17 October 1998. If found guilty he will prohibited from holding any office in a political party or registered society, (see page 45 - Societies Act, and page 63 - Prosecution of Demonstrators).

On 23 September Anwar Ibrahim’s wife, Dr Wan Azizah, was served an ISA restriction order prohibiting her from holding gatherings in her home, speaking in public or carrying out political activities. Apart from family members, press and those with signed invitations, visitors were barred from entering her house and police roadblocks temporarily erected near her residence (see also page 39, Sedition Act). The government also issued a blanket ban against all demonstrations supportive of reformasi, and in late October officials warned that anyone attending an illegal assembly could be arrested and detained under the ISA. Demonstrations, however, continued.

al-Jazeera

2007-12-09T00:07:00.000+08:00

[i]

Sebuah stesen radio Jerman, DW, edisi Indonesia, pernah mengutip pandangan saya sewaktu stesen TV al-Jazeera bercadang membuka pejabatnya di Kuala Lumpur. Transkrip laporan radio itu diterbitkan di laman web DW pada 3 April 2006. Teks lengkap seperti di bawah:

Stasiun televisi Arab Al Jazeera yang bermarkas di Doha, Katar, akan memulai siaran internasionalnya, pertengahan 2006.

Rencana perluasan stasiun televisi Arab Al Jazeera menjadi stasiun internasional dengan bahasa Inggris mengundang kontroversi. Tapi, sejumlah pengamat media menilainya positif. Ada pandangan, sebagai stasiun siaran yang mengudara dari sebuah negara kecil di Timur Tengah, Al Jazeera tidaklah dibebani tekanan untuk menyiarkan berita dari perspektif tertentu. Seperti yang diungkapkan pengamat media TV Indonesia Veven Wardana:

Veven Wardana: “Munculnya siaran Al-Jazeera diharapkan dapat menjadi penyimbang perspektif. Jadi anggaplah siaran saat ini lebih banyak dari perspektif ’barat’, Al Jazeera ini dari sisi yang berbeda, sehingga dapat memberi informasi beragam bagi publiknya.”

Masalahnya, di Timur Tengah, Al Jazeera justru bermasalah karena pemberitaannya dinilai bias. Stasiun televisi yang berdiri tahun 1996 itu awalnya dielu-elukan sebagai tonggak kebebasan pers di Timur Tengah. Tapi, karena pemberitaan yang dinilai provokatif, misalnya saat meliput perang Irak, atau pemberitaan yang terlalu kritis terhadap pemerintah sejumlah negara Timur Tengah, Al Jazeera berulang kali dikecam dan bahkan menghadapi ancaman pembredelan. Wartawan Malaysia Fathi Aris Omar menilai, kontroversi bias media adalah hal yang wajar:

Fathi Aris Omar: “Semua media ada kepentingan dan kecondongan masing-masing, walau idealnya semua media harus objektif, harus fair dan balanced, namun dalam media bisnis hal itu sudah diperhatikan dan diperhitungkan.”

Saluran berita Al Jazeera International akan menyiarkan berita 24 jam sehari, 12 jam dari Doha, Katar dan masing-masing empat jam dari studio di London, Washington dan Kuala Lumpur.

Menurut Nigel Parsons, redaktur pelaksana Al Jazeera International, Kuala Lumpur terpilih sebagai lokasi studio regional karena di sana tersedia banyak tenaga kerja berbahasa Inggris dan biaya pengoperasian terhitung murah. Tapi, dapatkah Malaysia mentolerir standar jurnalisme ala Al Jazeera? Malaysia punya reputasi buruk dalam pengawasan ketat terhadap media. Tentang ini, Fathi Aris Omar:

Fathi Aris Omar: “Misalnya CNN, ada beberapa pengalaman, laporan-laporan CNN itu disensor atau dipersulit penayangannya, khususnya saat krisis politik beberapa tahun lalu.”

Menurut Fathi Aris Omar, selama pemberitaan Al Jazeera tidak menyentuh politik domestik atau kebijakan dalam negeri Malaysia, kemungkinan besar siaran Al Jazeera tidak bermasalah. Lebih-lebih karena Al Jazeera seakan muncul sebagai tandingan bagi dominasi media barat. Siaran perdana Al Jazeera Bahasa Inggris yang akan berlangsung pertengahan tahun ini, diperkirakan mencapai 30 sampai 40 juta rumah tangga di seluruh dunia. (reu/zer)

[ii]

Al-Jazeera bukti kebebasan akhbar negara: Zainuddin
19-05-2006 08:14:25 PM

KUALA LUMPUR: Pembukaan hub Al-Jazeera International untuk rantau Asia di sini membuktikan keyakinan dunia kewartawanan antarabangsa terhadap kebebasan media di negara ini, kata Menteri Penerangan Datuk Zainuddin Maidin.

Zainuddin berkata beliau dimaklumkan Al-Jazeera sebelum memilih Malaysia sebagai satu daripada lokasi untuk empat hubnya telah menjalankan kajian yang mendalam di beberapa buah negara.

"Akhirnya mereka memilih Kuala Lumpur atas pelbagai sebab termasuk kebebasan akhbar, kestabilan ekonomi dan politik dan lain-lain lagi," katanya kepada pemberita selepas menerima kunjungan Pengarah Urusan Al-Jazeera Network Wadah Khanfar di pejabatnya di sini hari ini.

Turut hadir pada pertemuan itu ialah Pengarah Berita Al-Jazeera International Steve Clark, wakil mereka di Malaysia Sohaib Jassim, Pengurus Besar Bernama Datuk Syed Jamil Syed Jaafar dan Setiausaha Bahagian Perhubungan Awam Kementerian Penerangan Resat Salleh.

Zainuddin berkata: "Al-Jazeera merupakan satu agensi berita bertaraf dunia yang setaraf dengan CNN dan BBC dan pembukaan pejabat mereka di sini merupakan sesuatu yang positif untuk negara kita."

"Walaupun mungkin mereka akan melaporkan perkara yang baik ataupun buruk, tetapi apa yang lebih penting bagi negara kita ialah wartawan asing akan bertugas di negara kita, dan ini akan membantu mereka untuk memahami Malaysia yang sebenarnya," katanya.

Zainuddin berkata, Malaysia mempunyai banyak perkara yang positif termasuklah dalam soal keharmonian antara kaum, kebebasan beragama, pembangunan ekonomi dan juga masyarakat, dan semua itu menjadi tarikan kepada agensi berita itu untuk datang ke sini.

Katanya, pembukaan pejabat di Kuala Lumpur bukanlah suatu perkara yang remeh tetapi sebaliknya memerlukan perbelanjaan yang besar, dan tentunya pihak terbabit tidak akan datang ke sini kalau tidak mendapat maklumat yang menyakinkan.

"Pembukaan ini juga secara tidak langsung mampu untuk merealisasikan hasrat kerajaan untuk menjadikan Kuala Lumpur sebagai hub media dan menambahkan lagi jumlah media asing yang beroperasi di negara ini," katanya.

Al-Jazeera International dijangka akan memulakan operasinya di Kuala Lumpur bulan depan dan akan menyiarkan berita terutamanya mengenai Malaysia, empat jam sehari.

Berita dalam bahasa Inggeris itu akan dipancarkan dari Kuala Lumpur ke ibu pejabat Al-Jazeera di Doha sebelum dipancarkan ke seluruh dunia.

Zainuddin juga berkata, Al-Jazeera telah menawarkan untuk memberikan latihan kepada para wartawan Malaysia di pejabat mereka di sini dan beliau telah menerima tawaran itu dengan baik.

Katanya latihan itu mampu untuk meningkatkan lagi pengetahuan para wartawan tempatan serta mampu membantu memperbaiki lagi mutu penulisan dan laporan yang dibuat oleh mereka.

"Al-Jazeera mempunyai ramai wartawan daripada pelbagai bangsa dan keturunan yang mempunyai pengalaman luas dalam liputan berita, saya percaya latihan yang ditawarkan ini adalah berlainan daripada apa yang diadakan di negara ini.

"Ini secara tidak langsung tentunya akan membantu meningkatkan lagi keupayaan wartawan-wartawan di negara ini," katanya. BERNAMA

Sumbangan ayam Pahang kepada kajian virus dunia

2007-12-01T19:04:00.000+08:00

HIV, the only retrovirus that most people have heard of, has caused more than twenty-five million deaths and infected at least twice that number of people since the middle of the twentieth century, when it moved from monkey to man.

It may be hard to understand how organisms from that same family, and constructed with the same genes, could have played a beneficial, and possibly even essential, role in the health and development of any species.

In 1968, Robin Weiss, who is now a professor of viral oncology at University College London, found endogenous retroviruses in the embryos of healthy chickens. When he suggested that they were not only benign but might actually perform a critical function in placental development, molecular biologists laughed.

“When I first submitted my results on a novel ‘endogenous’ envelope, suggesting the existence of an integrated retrovirus in normal embryo cells, the manuscript was roundly rejected,’’ Weiss wrote last year in the journal Retrovirology.

“One reviewer pronounced that my interpretation was impossible.’’ Weiss, who is responsible for much of the basic knowledge about how the AIDS virus interacts with the human immune system, was not deterred.

He was eager to learn whether the chicken retroviruses he had seen were recently acquired infections or inheritances that had been passed down through the centuries. He moved to the Pahang jungle of Malaysia and began living with a group of Orang Asli tribesmen.

Red jungle fowl, an ancestor species of chickens, were plentiful there, and the tribe was skilled at trapping them. After collecting and testing both eggs and blood samples, Weiss was able to identify versions of the same viruses.

Similar tests were soon carried out on other animals. The discovery helped mark the beginning of a new approach to biology.

“If Charles Darwin reappeared today, he might be surprised to learn that humans are descended from viruses as well as from apes,” Weiss wrote.

[Teks lengkap di sini, halaman 2 perenggan terakhir]

>>> Bacaan lanjut yang sangat menarik "Darwin’s Surprise: Why are evolutionary biologists bringing back extinct deadly viruses?" (By: Michael Specter. New Yorker, 3 Dec 2007)

Turun ke jalan

2007-11-25T07:20:00.000+08:00

Oleh GOENAWAN MOHAMAD

Jalan raya adalah sejarah politik dan kebrutalan. Di sanalah kekuasaan dikukuhkan. Tapi di sana pula kekuasaan disanggah. Di tahun 1966, di Jakarta, para mahasiswa ”turun ke jalan”, sebuah istilah yang kini masuk ke dalam kamus politik Indonesia, dan sejak itu aksi yang serupa berkali-kali terjadi, menjatuhkan rezim Soeharto, menggagalkan rancangan undang-undang ini dan itu. Selamanya dengan korban: ada yang mati ditembak, remuk dipukuli, ada bangunan yang dirusak. Ketika kota bertambah penting dalam percaturan politik, jalan raya jadi arena tersendiri. Di sana mereka yang ingin mengubah kehidupan menemukan pengeras suara alternatif, ketika forum yang tersedia (parlemen, mahkamah, media) tak punya sambungan lagi dengan orang ramai.

Jalan raya adalah sejarah politik.

Di Indonesia, cerita ini dimulai di tahun 1808. Untuk persiapan perang, Daendels membangun ”jalan raya pos” sepanjang 1.000 kilometer antara Anyer di Jawa Barat dan Panarukan, kemudian disambung sampai Banyuwangi di Jawa Timur. Ia, seorang opsir tinggi kerajaan Prancis, yang diangkat Maharaja Louis Bonaparte untuk memegang kekuasaan di Jawa, berencana membuat infrastruktur militer buat memperlancar gerak pasukan. Ia harus menghadapi serbuan Inggris.

Dengan tangan besi, Daendels memaksa agar proyek itu rampung dalam setahun. Ribuan orang di Pulau Jawa mati karena dikerahkan untuk kerja rodi. Pemberontakan timbul tapi ditindas. Kita tak akan melupakan kekejaman itu—seraya memanfaatkan hasilnya. Jalan yang disebut Daendels La Grande Route itu kini sebuah monumen tentang kekuasaan yang efektif dan brutal.

Jalan raya adalah sejarah politik dan kebrutalan. Di sanalah kekuasaan dikukuhkan, seperti dilakukan Daendels dan para penguasa di abad ke-20 dan 21. Tapi di sana pula kekuasaan disanggah. Di tahun 1966, di Jakarta, para mahasiswa ”turun ke jalan”, sebuah istilah yang kini masuk ke dalam kamus politik Indonesia, dan sejak itu aksi yang serupa berkali-kali terjadi, menjatuhkan rezim Soeharto, menggagalkan rancangan undang-undang ini dan itu. Selamanya dengan korban: ada yang mati ditembak, remuk dipukuli, ada bangunan yang dirusak.

Ketika kota bertambah penting dalam percaturan politik, jalan raya jadi arena tersendiri. Di sana mereka yang ingin mengubah kehidupan menemukan pengeras suara alternatif, ketika forum yang tersedia (parlemen, mahkamah, media) tak punya sambungan lagi dengan orang ramai.

Tema ini tak cuma ada dalam cerita Indonesia. Sejak jatuhnya monarki di Mesir, sejak Nasser memimpin, di Timur Tengah para analis politik selalu memasang radar mereka ke arah ”the Arab streets”. Kata ”streets” di sini sama dengan ruang tempat rakyat berdesak-desak, bersua, bertemu, mendengar, bicara, bergembira, marah, benci, tentang segala sesuatu yang menyangkut negeri mereka, bangsa mereka, kelas mereka. Mereka tak membentuk partai, tak berwujud ”NGO”. Tapi mereka sebuah faktor yang tak dapat diabaikan. Di Arab Streets, tak ada tempat bagi para politikus di parlemen yang bukan dipilih, juga bagi kepala negara yang kehilangan legitimasi. Revolusi bisa meletus dari kawahnya.

Sejarah politik tentu saja tak hanya terdiri dari kejadian yang gemuruh dan spektakuler. Asef Bayat mengamati satu gejala dalam politik Iran yang tak banyak dilihat. Dalam Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (terbit di tahun 1997), ia menyebutnya the quiet encroachment of the ordinary. Dalam uraian Bayat, proses itu tak punya dampak politik yang langsung. Tapi masuknya kaum miskin dari pedalaman ke Teheran, yang sering tak mendapat tempat dalam lapangan hidup dan percakapan, diam-diam adalah sebuah perubahan tersendiri. Para penguasa yang di atas tak dengan sendirinya guyah. Tapi di bawah, tulis Bayat, ”praktek yang sehari-hari dan bersahaja itu mau tak mau akan beralih ke ranah politik.”

>>>> Teks lengkap dan lebih asyik di blog Caping (Catatan Pinggir)

Pramoedya: Sejarah, Novel dan Politik Pembebasan

2007-11-24T20:00:00.000+08:00

Forum Pramoedya: Sejarah, Novel dan Politik Pembebasan
Tarikh: 24 November 2007 (Sabtu)
Masa: 8 malam
Tempat: Dewan Perhimpunan Cina Selangor, Jalan Maharajalela, Kuala Lumpur

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006), merupakan sasterawan Indonesia yang terkenal di mata dunia. Beliau telah menghasilkan lebih 50 karya dan diterjemahkan dalam 41 bahasa asing.

Beliau merupakan tokoh penulisan yang berhaluan kiri, karyanya menyampaikan pemikiran progresif yang menentang penjajahan dan pemerintahan zalim. Karyanya yang mendapat sambutan hebat termasuklah Bumi Manusia dan Anak Semua Bangsa, yang ditulisnya semasa dalam penahanan di Pulau Buru.

Pramoedya pernah ditahan selama tiga tahun pada zaman penjajah, setahun semasa pemerintahan “Orde Lama” Soekarno dan 14 tahun semasa pemerintahan “Orde Baru” Soeharto. Beliau ditahan selama 18 tahun secara total.

Beliau ditahan pada masa Orde Baru bersama ribuan orang atas tuduhan memihak kepada Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI). “Had Pramoedya Ananta Toer been a Soviet dissident he would have received the Nobel Prize, but his status as a literary master is secure and, unlike some Latin American contemporaries, he remained unapologetic throughout his life.” - Tariq Ali

Ahli Panel:

Topik: Sejarah dalam Tangan Pramoedya: Revolusi belum selesai

Max Lane, seorang penulis, penyelidik dan penterjemah yang berasal dari Australia. Beliau mempunyai pengalaman lebih 36 tahun bekerja di Indonesia, Singapura dan Filipina. Hasil kerja beliau terbaru adalah penterjemahan karya Pramoedya, Arok Dedes, ke dalam bahasa Inggeris, Arok of Java. Beliau juga banyak menulis tentang pergerakan masyarakat di Indonesia, termasuklah buku terbaru beliau, Bangsa Yang Belum Selesai: Indonesia Sebelum dan Sesudah Suharto.

Topik: Politik anti-perkauman Pramoedya

Sumit Mandal, penyelidik di Institut Kajian Malaysia dan Antarabangsa (IKMAS) UKM

Anjuran: Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) & Community Development Centre (CDC)
Masuk: Percuma

Sebarang pertanyaan sila hubungi pejabat PSM (03) 22 74 77 91 atau Chon Kai 019 566 95 18

Yang 'setan' dalam diri sasterawan

2007-11-19T20:49:00.000+08:00

Milan Kundera, novelis yang terkenal dan 'ganjil' itu, bingung memikirkan bagaimana seniman Perancis boleh mendukung kezaliman politik di (bekas) negaranya sendiri, Czechoslovakia.

Penyair yang dikaguminya Paul Eluard secara terbuka dan megah mengalu-alukan tindakan pemerintah Prague yang mengirim seorang seniman republik tersebut ke tali gantung.

Kata Kundera: This episode (I wrote about it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) hit me like a trauma: when an executioner kills, that is after all normal; but when a poet (and a great poet) sings in accompaniment, the whole system of values we considered sacrosanct has suddenly been shaken apart.

[Terjemahan: Episod ini (saya tulis hal ini dalam The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) menyentak saya seperti satu trauma: Apabila seorang algojo membunuh, hal ini tidaklah terlalu menghairankan; tetapi apabila seorang penyajak (apatah lagi seorang penyair besar) menyanyikan sokongannya, seluruh sistem nilai (benar-palsu, baik-buruk) yang kita anggap mulia tiba-tiba rebah berkecai.]

Kejadian inilah, antara sebab, beliau mengarang novel Life is Elsewhere (1970), karya tentang Jaromil, penyair muda yang berjiwa muda dan sarat kespontanan dan ghairah hidup. Namun di lehernya terjerut bayang-bayang kawalan si ibu (Maman namanya), sang setia yang tertipu suami sendiri yang tergila-gilakan cewek Yahudi.

Jaromil, yang idealis dan pro-ideologi kiri lama, ingin menerbitkan sajak-sajak lirik sebagai simbol keghairahan mudanya yang spontan dan 'jiwang' tetapi tidak menyedari bahawa politik anutannya itu telah menghalangnya. Paradoks jiwa.

Jaromil, anak muda yang sakit, ada waktunya kejam dan melalui lidah Kundera, kita mengenali wataknya: "But his [Jaromil's] monstrosity is potentially contained in us all. It is in me. It is in you."

[Terjemahan: Tetapi kesetanan dia [Jaromil] ini mungkin juga tumbuh di dalam diri kita. Di dalam diri saya. Di dalam diri anda sendiri.]

Kundera, ganjil juga, tidak mahu seratus peratus menyalahkan sistem politik komunisme. Dia malah berhujah, ideologi itu sekadar menolong mencetuskan jiwa jahat dan rakus manusia seperti Jaromil (yang seperti kita juga!), penyair muda yang menikam dari belakang kekasihnya sendiri semata-mata, konon, mahu mempertahankan kepentingan negara dan ideologi anutannya.

Seniman, penulis kreatif dan pemikir – pada mata Czeslaw Milosz – bukanlah makhluk agung; jauh sekali nabi-nabi atau orang suci. Mereka ini pernah mengirim manusia ke penjara dan tali gantung; malah menolong membersihkan darah-darah dan dosa-dosa di tangan si diktator.

Milosz (baca: Miwas) pemenang Nobel sastera 1980, seumpama Kundera, sedar manusia seni seperti mereka boleh berbuat apa sahaja, menjadi malaikat atau syaitan, nabi dan algojo. Pilihlah, kita mahu menjadi apa?

Dalam karya besarnya The Captive Mind (1953), selepas lari dari Poland, sebuah lagi negara yang menjadi korban di tangan komunisme selepas jenuh bergelut menentang Hitler, Milosz mencatatkan semua bentuk kekejian kaum seniman, sasterawan, budayawan dan intelektual.

Mereka boleh berbuat apa sahaja – termasuk membunuh, bukan sahaja kerjaya, tetapi jasad! Kerjaya rakan-rakan sendiri yang sama-sama berjuang menjadi porak-peranda, prasangka berkembang biak, demi mendaki tangga-tangga kerjaya di sebuah negara tidak demokratik.

Nilai baik atau buruk, semangat setiakawan, hancur.

Yang masih jujur, harus menelan ludah kebenaran di halkum sendiri; hilang rasa yakin untuk terus hidup bersama sebagai kelompok pemikir yang sedar dan ada harga diri – semata-mata kerana, memang, politik sudah menjadi terlalu sempit dan kesetiaan pada Negara (baca juga: ideologi) harus mutlak.

Milosz melarikan diri ke Amerika Syarikat tidak lama selepas tamat Perang Dunia kedua, kemudian menerbitkan karya kreatifnya itu. Dia sudah tidak sanggup berpura-pura bertemankan takiyyah (istilah Milosz, ketman) – satu-satunya semangat palsu untuk bertahan hidup.

Sama seperti gambaran Kundera, semua watak dalam catatan 'minda terpasung' Milosz seakan-akan ada di tengah-tengah kita, di kalangan sasterawan, seniman, ahli akademik, pemikir dan wartawan kita.

Ngeri, walau tanpa komunisme, negara kita berjaya membiakkan kaum intelektualnya seburuk Poland dan Czechoslovakia. "But his [Jaromil's] monstrosity is potentially contained in us all. It is in me. It is in you."

Fiqh Perempuan

2007-11-15T00:05:00.000+08:00

Pada mulanya saya sangka buku Fiqh Perempuan yang diharamkan. Tetapi tidak pasti buku Fiqh Perempuan yang mana satu kerana judul lengkapnya dan nama pengarangnya tidak diberikan dalam berita tersebut.

Isnin lalu, Bahagian Kawalan Penerbitan dan Teks Al-Quran di Kementerian Keselamatan Dalam Negeri mewartakan perintah larangan itu menurut Seksyen 7(1) Akta Mesin Cetak dan Penerbitan 1984.

Kemudian, seorang teman KsJT menyebutkan pengarang tersebut, seorang kiai dari Indonesia, yang pernah saya temui di Petaling Jaya beberapa bulan lepas. "Husein Muhammad," katanya.

Lalu saya pun menyemak semula judul buku tersebut. Rupa-rupanya buku ini Fiqh Perempuan: Refleksi Kiai Atas Wacana Agama dan Gender telah disaran untuk dilarang oleh Jawatankuasa Penapisan Bahan-bahan Penerbitan Berunsur Islam (dipengerusikan oleh Harussani Zakaria) sejak Jun 2005.

Dan memang pengarangnya KH* Husein Muhammad !!! Buku ini terbitan LKiS Yogyakarta, pada 2001.

Setahu saya buku yang sama diterbitkan kembali dengan judul Fiqh Wanita: Pandangan Ulama Terhadap Wacana dan Gender. Dan penerbitnya, tidak lain dan tidak bukan, Sisters in Islam (SIS). Lihat di sini (no 19).

Alamak, macam mana Zai?

* KH ertinya kiai haji

Jihad Terlarang: Cerita dari Bawah Tanah

2007-11-13T23:51:00.000+08:00

Mataharitimoer: Jihad Terlarang Adalah Pergulatan Pribadi Saya

Saya trauma dan sakit hati melihat elite pergerakan saya yang mengatasnamakan Islam demi kepentingan sendiri. Mereka melakukan banyak tindakan yang merusak citra Islam, dan NII sudah menjadi momok yang menakutkan bagi setiap orang. Mereka menganggap kelompok merekalah yang representatif terhadap kebenaran, terhadap Islam. Mereka sulit menerima kritik dan lebih mengandalkan kekerasan ketimbang dialog.

Dianggap ”murtad” dari pergerakan Negara Islam Indonesia (NII), Mahataharitimoer justru menunaikan janji untuk menerbitkan sebuah novel otobiografis yang menggugah. Dalam Jihad Terlarang, Cerita dari Bawah Tanah (Kayla Pustaka, 2007), ia mengungkapkan pergulatan batinnya ketika masih menjadi aktivis pergerakan. Berikut wawancara Novriantoni dari Jaringan Islam Liberal dengan Mataharitimoer tentang novelnya dan suasana inside NII, di Radio 68H Jakarta, 29 Agustus lalu.

Bung MT, judul novel Anda, Jihad Terlarang, cukup provokatif dan merangsang rasa ingin tahu. Apa sesungguhnya yang mendorong Anda menulis novel ini?

Selama kurang lebih sepuluh tahun saya aktif di sebuah pergerakan Islam garis keras. Tapi setelah itu saya berpikir, apakah pergerakan yang saya ikuti ini benar dasar-dasar perjuangannya? Kenapa mereka begitu mudah mengkafirkan orang—bahkan orangtua kita sekalipun—jika tidak bergabung ke dalam gerakan ini? Itu ditambah lagi banyaknya friksi di tubuh pergerakan yang saling sengketa.

Akhirnya, saya memilih keluar. Tapi keluarnya pun tidak mudah. Terjadi konflik batin yang berat dan panjang. Kalau keluar, berarti saya murtad, tidak lagi dianggap Islam. Belum lagi tekanan dari teman-teman yang bertahun-tahun jalan bersama saya. Mereka tahu ke mana saja saya ngumpet. Tapi pada akhirnya, sebuah kondisi memaksa saya harus pergi. Tapi ada hal penting yang ingin saya lakukan setelah keluar. Saya harus menceritakan semua ini kepada semua orang, agar mereka tidak terjebak seperti saya. Itulah sebabnya mengapa saya menulis novel Jihad Terlarang ini.

Spesifiknya, pergerakan apa yang Anda maksudkan?

Kebetulan yang saya ikuti adalah gerakan NII, Negara Islam Indonesia.

Kenapa dulu Anda tertarik mengikuti pergerakan NII?

Saya masuk pergerakan ini ketika saya mengikuti sebuah organisasi remaja masjid. Di situ saya mengikuti pengajian-pengajian yang rutin diadakan seminggu sekali. Pengajian itu memberikan wawasan baru pada saya yang kala itu masih SMA kelas satu. Pengajiannnya pun berbeda. Zaman dulu, kita tahu, yang namanya ngaji ya umumnya membaca Alquran saja. Tapi kok pengajian ini lain?! Di sana saya diajari sejarah Islam dan tafsir-tafsir Alquran; hal yang tidak saya dapatkan sebelumnya. Nah, saya merasa ada hal baru di sana. Saya merasakan sebuah dunia yang baru sama sekali.

Apakah itu sangat memukau bagi orang yang punya hasrat besar untuk belajar Islam seperti Anda?

Sangat memukau! Pada saat itu rekrutmen belum terjadi. Mereka (para perekrut anggota baru NII) masih dalam tahap melakukan pengkondisian pemikiran melalui materi-materi pengajian.

Proses perekrutan Anda sendiri bagaimana?

Ketika beberapa kali pengajian berlangsung, diam-diam para pencari bakat dari belakang memperhatikan anak-anak yang potensial untuk direkrut. Biasanya anak-anak yang berpikiran kritislah yang dibidik. Nah, saya termasuk anak yang mereka inginkan. Ketika sasaran sudah ditentukan, mereka melakukan pendekatan persuasif kepada saya. Sering saya dikerubung oleh tiga orang langsung untuk dipersuasi. Dari sana saya diarahkan untuk menjadi kader yang militan.

Anda dibidik karena dinilai cerdas dan kritis. Mengapa kecerdasan dan kritisisme dijadikan kriteria utama dalam melihat calon target?

Mereka memang mencari kader yang cerdas dan kritis; sosok-sosok yang ingin mengetahui sesuatu yang baru, yang selalu tidak puas dengan tatanan lama. Di samping itu, ia harus memiliki antusiasme perjuangan terhadap agamanya. Ia diharapkan bisa menjadi kader potensial ketika sudah tergabung dalam pergerakan.

Setelah direkrut, apakah anda lantas merekrut yang lain juga?

Ya, selalu begitu. Setiap orang yang telah bergabung selalu mempunyai target. Dalam satu bulan, target bisa mencapai puluhan orang. Semua kader diwajibkan untuk berdakwah fi sabilillah. Rekrutmen adalah dakwah mereka yang paling nyata.

Kalau Anda ingat-ingat lagi, apa rahasia masih terus eksisnya pergerakan ini sampai sekarang?

Sistem kerahasiaan organisasinya begitu kuat. Para kader tidak pernah mengetahui siapa pemimpin di atasnya. Pergerakan ini menggunakan sistem sel atau multilevel marketing. Saya sendiri tidak pernah tahu siapa pemimpin-pemimpin utama di atas saya. Yang saya kenal hanyalah nama-nama samaran. Fakta inilah yang membuat gerakan ini terus eksis sampai hari ini dan cukup aman. Terbukti aparat tidak pernah bisa menghabisinya.

Setiap organisasi yang militan biasanya punya ideologi untuk mengukuhkan militansi para anggotanya. Apa ideologi yang memompa semangat bertindak dalam organisasi Anda?

Ada sebuah kalimat yang selalu menjadi ruh bagi semua aktivis NII. Kalimat itu adalah lâ ilâha illalLâh (tiada tuhan selain Allah). Kalimat tauhid itulah yang memompa kita untuk senantiasa berjuang mewujudkan hukum-hukum Allah dalam kehidupan kita. Jika kita tidak melakukannya, berarti kita belum berjihad. Semangat seperti itu didukung oleh buku-buku yang memang direkomendasikan para atasan. Salah satunya adalah buku yang berjudul Tauhid, karya Ismail Raji Al-Faruqi.

Lalu, apa misi tertinggi untuk mewujudkan keyakinan semacam itu?

Misinya adalah mendirikan negara Islam di Indonesia. Tanpa negara Islam, kita dianggap masih hidup dalam kekafiran. Sebab hukum yang dipakai di negara kita bukan berasal dari Alquran dan Sunnah Nabi. Dan ketika kita belum memiliki kekuatan untuk mewujudkannya, maka negara tersebut berwujud dalam bentuk sebuah gerakan ”negara” di dalam sebuah negara.

Jadi Anda dan teman-teman pernah merasa seperti berada dalam sebuah pulau terpencil, dengan ideologi tertentu, tapi masih dalam negara bernama Indonesia, ya?

Ya, benar. Dengan begitu kita langsung bisa menarik garis furqan (pembedaan) bahwa kita adalah warga negara Islam sedangkan orang lain bukan. Dan yang bukan warga negara Islam harus kita ajak untuk memasuki negara kita.

Bagaimana pergerakan Anda menilai orang yang sudah puas dengan NKRI yang berdasarkan Pancasila dan UUD 1945?

Kita menggagap mereka belum mendapatkan hidayah. Dan dalam kepala para aktivis (NII) hanya ada dua jalan: Islam atau kafir. Tidak ada jalan tengah. Kalau bukan Islam, ya kafir. Mereka kita anggap masih hidup dalam zaman jahiliyah. Orang-orang yang kita anggap kafir itulah yang menjadi target dakwah agar memasuki negara Islam kita, dan keluar dari kekafiran.

Mengapa para kader NII begitu militan?

Pembinaan yang dilakukan pergerakan ini sangat intensif. Seminggu sekali pasti ada. Tujuannya untuk mengubah cara pandang kita tentang Islam dan negara. Dulu, militansi ditambah juga oleh sikap rezim Orde Baru yang sangat represif terhadap para aktivis Islam. Jilbab dilarang, pengajian-pengajian dikontrol, dai-dai kritis ditangkap. Suasana seperti itu justru mempertebal semangat kita untuk melakukan perlawanan dan menjadi aktivis yang militan. Perjuangan semakin menarik karena banyak tantangannya.

Apa momen-momen dramatis yang sering Anda alami?

Kita selalu berhadapan dengan intel. Hampir setiap mau melakukan aktivitas, ada saja rasa waswas: apa nanti saya tertangkap atau tidak? Pada saat itu banyak sekali penangkapan, penggerebekan, terutama terhadap orang-orang yang berkelompok untuk melakukan diskusi agama.

Apa hubungan Anda dengan NII KW-IX? Apakah anda kenal tokoh-tokoh seperti Panji Gumilang, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, Abdullah Sunkar, dan Ajengan Masduki?

Kami dulu kebetulan tidak berada dalam sistem KW (Komandemen Wilayah). Sistem KW itu sudah lama bangkrut. Jadi kami tidak menyebut satuan kami dengan istilah itu. Hanya orang-orang yang memang masih belum mendapat informasi yang up to date-lah yang masih mengunakan nama KW. Kelompok kami tidak tergabung dalam KW-IX. Kami mempunyai sistem sendiri yang berbeda dengan sistem KW. Cara-cara kami pun tidak sekeras seperti yang sering muncul di media-media.

Apa pendapat Anda terhadap perjuangan sejumlah kelompok Islam yang targetnya hampir mirip NII, tetapi metode perjuangannya lebih lunak, seperti partai, organisasi atau kelompok yang memperjuangkan syariat Islam di Indonesia?

Saya keluar dari NII dalam keadaan yang tidak fresh. Saya keluar dengan sebuah trauma yang mendalam. Hal itulah yang membuat saya skeptis terhadap gerakan Islam yang misinya serupa dengan NII, baik itu partai politik maupun ormas keagamaan. Saya ingin membebaskan diri dari organisasi apa pun yang semacam itu.

Trauma apa yang Anda rasakan?

Saya trauma dan sakit hati melihat elite pergerakan saya yang mengatasnamakan Islam demi kepentingan sendiri. Mereka melakukan banyak tindakan yang merusak citra Islam, dan NII sudah menjadi momok yang menakutkan bagi setiap orang. Mereka menganggap kelompok merekalah yang representatif terhadap kebenaran, terhadap Islam. Mereka sulit menerima kritik dan lebih mengandalkan kekerasan ketimbang dialog.

Apakah anda tidak cemas terbitnya buku ini dicurigai sebagai propaganda intelijen?

Pada saat awal-awal penulisan Jihad Terlarang ini, saya sempat berpikir, jangan-jangan saya nanti dianggap sebagai kaki-tangan intel. Tapi sekarang saya berani menjamin, sampai detik ini saya belum pernah berhubungan dengan intel. Buku saya itu sekadar curahan hati saya, berdasarkan kejadian-kejadian nyata yang pernah saya alami dulu. Jihad Terlarang adalah pergulatan pribadi saya. Tidak melibatkan pihak mana pun.

(Sumber asal: Jaringan Islam Liberal 2 Oktober 2007)

Mahu jadi pengganas?

2007-11-13T08:04:00.000+08:00

What Makes a Terrorist
By Alan Krueger

The American.com (November/December 2007)
Filed under: World Watch, Public Square

It’s not poverty and lack of education, according to economic research by Princeton’s ALAN KRUEGER. Look elsewhere.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, policymakers, scholars, and ordinary citizens asked a key question: What would make people willing to give up their lives to wreak mass destruction in a foreign land? In short, what makes a terrorist?

A popular explanation was that economic deprivation and a lack of education caused people to adopt extreme views and turn to terrorism. For example, in July 2005, after the bombings of the London transit system, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “Ultimately what we now know, if we did not before, is that where there is extremism, fanaticism or acute and appalling forms of poverty in one continent, the consequences no longer stay fixed in that continent.” The Archbishop of Canterbury, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, King Abdullah of Jordan, Elie Wiesel, and terrorism experts like Jessica Stern of Harvard’s Kennedy School also argued that poverty or lack of education were significant causes of terrorism.

Even President George W. Bush, who was initially reluctant to associate terrorism with poverty after September 11, eventually argued, “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror.” Laura Bush added, “A lasting victory in the war against terror depends on educating the world’s children.”

Despite these pronouncements, however, the available evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as important causes of support for terrorism or participation in terrorist activities. Such explanations have been embraced almost entirely on faith, not scientific evidence.

Why is an economist studying terrorism? I have two answers. First, participation in terrorism is just a special application of the economics of occupational choice. Some people choose to become doctors or lawyers, and others pursue careers in terrorism. Economics can help us understand why.

The second answer is that, together with Jörn-Steffen Pischke, now at the London School of Economics, I studied the outbreak of hate crimes against foreigners in Germany in the early 1990s. Through this work, I concluded that poor economic conditions do not seem to motivate people to participate in hate crimes.

The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower. A pair of psychologists at Yale, Carl Hovland and Robert Sears, cited Raper’s work in 1940 to argue that deprivation leads to aggression. People take out their frustrations on others, the researchers hypothesized, when economic conditions are poor.

While this view seems intuitively plausible, the problem is that it lacks a strong empirical basis. In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data.

Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added.

In 1997, Pischke and I, writing in the Journal of Human Resources, studied the incidence of crimes against foreigners across the 543 counties in Germany in 1992 and 1993. We found that the unemployment rate, the level of wages, wage growth, and average education were all unrelated to the incidence of crimes against foreigners.

With evidence from hate crimes as a background, next turn to terrorism. Terrorism does not occur in a vacuum. So to start, I considered evidence from public opinion polls, which can help identify the values and views of those in communities from which terrorism arises.

The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project conducted public opinion surveys in February 2004 in Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey, involving about 1,000 respondents in each country. One of the questions asked was, “What about suicide bombing carried out against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq? Do you personally believe that this is justifiable or not justifiable?” Pew kindly provided me with tabulations of these data by respondents’ personal characteristics.

The clear finding was that people with a higher level of education are in general more likely to say that suicide attacks against Westerners in Iraq are justified. I have also broken this pattern down by income level. There is no indication that people with higher incomes are less likely to say that suicide-bombing attacks are justified.

Another source of opinion data is the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, headquartered in Ramallah. The center collects data in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One question, asked in December 2001 of 1,300 adults, addressed attitudes toward armed attacks on Israeli targets. Options were “strongly support,” “support,” “oppose,” “strongly oppose,” or “no opinion.”

Support turned out to be stronger among those with a higher level of education. For example, while 26 percent of illiterates and 18 percent of those with only an elementary education opposed or strongly opposed armed attacks, the figure for those with a high school education was just 12 percent. The least supportive group turned out to be the unemployed, 74 percent of whom said they support or strongly back armed attacks. By comparison, the support level for merchants and professionals was 87 percent.

Related findings have been around for a long time. Daniel Lerner, a professor at MIT at the time, published a book in 1958 called The Passing of Traditional Society in which he collected and analyzed data on extremism in six Middle Eastern countries. He concluded that “the data obviate the conventional assumption that the extremists are simply the have-nots. Poverty prevails only among the apolitical masses.”

Finally, the Palestinian survey included questions about whether people were optimistic for the future. Responses suggested that, just before the outbreak of the second intifada, the Palestinian people believed that the economic situation was improving—a judgment consistent with the falling unemployment rate at the time. The intifada, then, did not appear to be following dashed expectations for future economic conditions.

Public opinion is one thing; actual participation in terrorism is another. There is striking anecdotal evidence from Nasra Hassan, a United Nations relief worker in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who described interviews with 250 militants and their associates who were involved in the Palestinian cause in the late 1990s. Hassan concluded that “none of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires.”

Claude Berrebi, now of the RAND Corporation’s Institute for Civil Justice, wrote his dissertation at Princeton on the characteristics of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were involved in terrorist activities. For example, he compared suicide bombers to the whole male population aged 16 to 50 and found that the suicide bombers were less than half as likely to come from families that were below the poverty line. In addition, almost 60 percent of the suicide bombers had more than a high school education, compared with less than 15 percent of the general population.

Jitka Malecková and I performed a similar study of militant members of Hezbollah, a multifaceted organization in Lebanon that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. We were able to obtain information on the biographies of 129 deceased shahids (martyrs) who had been honored in the group’s newsletter, “Al-Ahd.” We turned translations by Eli Hurvitz at Tel Aviv University into a dataset and then combined it with information on the Lebanese population from the 1996 Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs Housing Survey of 120,000 people aged 15 to 38.

These deceased members of Hezbollah had a lower poverty rate than the Lebanese population: 28 percent versus 33 percent. And Hezbollah members were better educated: 47 percent had a secondary or higher education versus 38 percent of adult Lebanese.

This is also the case, apparently, with al-Qaeda. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer, has written a book titled Understanding Terror Networks. He found that a high proportion of members of al-Qaeda were college educated (close to 35 percent) and drawn from skilled professions (almost 45 percent). Research on members of the Israeli extremist group, Gush Emunim, that Malecková and I conducted, also pointed in the same direction. Perhaps most definitively, the Library of Congress produced a summary report for an advisory group to the CIA titled, “The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” which also reached this conclusion—two years before 9/11.

Why are better educated, more advantaged individuals more likely than others to join terrorist groups? I think of terrorism as a market, with a supply side and a demand side. Individuals, either in small groups or on their own, supply their services to terrorist organizations.

On the supply side, the economics of crime suggests that people with low opportunity costs will become involved in terrorism. Their costs of involvement are lower—that is, they sacrifice less because their prospects of living a rich life are less. In other domains of life, it is those with few opportunities who are more likely to commit property crime and resort to suicide.

However, in the case of the supply of terrorists, while consideration of opportunity cost is not irrelevant, it is outweighed by other factors, such as a commitment to the goals of the terrorist organization and a desire to make a statement. Political involvement requires some understanding of the issues, and learning about those issues is a less costly endeavor for those who are better educated. I argue that better analogies than crime are voting and political protest. Indeed, better educated, employed people are more likely to vote.

On the demand side, terrorist organizations want to succeed. The costs of failure are high. So the organizations select more able participants—which again points to those who are better educated and better off economically.

One of the conclusions from the work of Laurence Iannaccone—whose paper, “The Market for Martyrs,” is supported by my own research—is that it is very difficult to effect change on the supply side. People who are willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause have diverse motivations. Some are motivated by nationalism, some by religious fanaticism, some by historical grievances, and so on. If we address one motivation and thus reduce one source on the supply side, there remain other motivations that will incite other people to terror.

That suggests to me that it makes sense to focus on the demand side, such as by degrading terrorist organizations’ financial and technical capabilities, and by vigorously protecting and promoting peaceful means of protest, so there is less demand for pursuing grievances through violent means. Policies intended to dampen the flow of people willing to join terrorist organizations, by contrast, strike me as less likely to succeed.

The evidence we have seen thus far does not foreclose the possibility that members of the elite become terrorists because they are outraged by the economic conditions of their countrymen. This is a more difficult hypothesis to test, but, it turns out, there is little empirical support for it.

To investigate the role of societal factors, I assembled data on the country of origin and target of hundreds of significant international terrorist attacks from 1997 to 2003, using information from the State Department. I found that many socioeconomic indicators—including illiteracy, infant mortality, and GDP per capita—are unrelated to whether people from one country become involved in terrorism. Indeed, if anything, measures of economic deprivation, at a country level, have the opposite effect from what the popular stereotype would predict: international terrorists are more likely to come from moderate-income countries than poor ones.

One set of factors that I examined did consistently raise the likelihood that people from a given country will participate in terrorism—namely, the suppression of civil liberties and political rights, including freedom of the press, the freedom to assemble, and democratic rights. Using data from the Freedom House Index, for example, I found that countries with low levels of civil liberties are more likely to be the countries of origin of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks. In addition, terrorists tend to attack nearby targets. Even international terrorism tends to be motivated by local concerns.

Additional support for these conclusions comes from research I conducted on the nationalities of foreign insurgents in Iraq. Specifically, I studied 311 combatants, representing 27 countries, who were captured in Iraq. Although the vast majority of insurgents are native Iraqis, motivated by domestic issues, foreigners are alleged to have been involved in several significant attacks. I looked at the characteristics of the countries insurgents came from, and, importantly, of the countries with no citizens captured in Iraq. It turned out that countries with a higher GDP per capita were actually more likely to have their citizens involved in the insurgency than were poorer countries.

Consistent with the work on international terrorist incidents, countries with fewer civil liberties and political rights were more likely to be the birthplaces of foreign insurgents. Distance also mattered, with most foreign insurgents coming from nearby nations. The model predicted that the largest number of insurgents—44 percent—would have emanated from Saudi Arabia, a nation not known for its protection of civil liberties but with a high GDP per capita.

The evidence suggests that terrorists care about influencing political outcomes. They are often motivated by geopolitical grievances. To understand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extremist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.

Alan Krueger is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Princeton and has been an adviser to the National Counterterrorism Center. This article is adapted from his new book, “What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism,” which is based on the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures he gave at the London School of Economics in 2006. Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.

Cepat, tepat & tanpa kekerasan!

2007-11-11T04:24:00.000+08:00

Journalists attacked by riot police
Chua Sue-Ann (Malaysiakini.com 10 Nov 2007)

A number of journalists covering poll reform group Bersih rally today were kicked and beaten by riot police as they sought to disperse protesters at the Masjid Jamek area.

Chaos erupted at around 2.30pm as riot police fired a torrent of chemical-laced water and discharged a volley of tear gas canisters at more than 2,000 people.

In the melee, members of the press, both local and foreign, were not spared.

A female journalist, who declined to be named, said she was hit with a baton by a police officer who was trying to drive away the crowd.

“He hit... my buttocks and he was telling me ‘Go, go, go, like I’m some donkey’,” she decried.

Another journalist, who also requested anonymity, reported being kicked twice by the police - on his back and his thigh.

He ticked off the authorities for using “unnecessary force” against the journalists. “I’m surprised at the brutality of the police.”

The duo were among five journalists who were standing behind police lines before they were suddenly assaulted by about 10 police officers.

One of them, a female journalist from a local newspaper, was injured by the beatings.

A policeman kicked her neck as she lay on the ground, refusing to stop despite pleas from the other press members.

It is also claimed that Federal Reserve Unit officers attacked a Swedish journalist with their shields, while two others are said to have received injuries as a result of being targets of a tear gas canister and the water cannon.

>>> Journalists attacked by riot police
>>> Polis tidak guna kekerasan – Musa (Utusan Malaysia.com)
>>> Zainuddin tolak dakwaan al-Jazeera polis bertindak keras (Bernama.com)

Generasi Net

2007-11-09T22:29:00.000+08:00

Umno diajak fahami, dekati 'Generasi Net'

KUALA LUMPUR: Umno disaran mengambil langkah proaktif dengan lembut dan mesra bagi mendekati generasi baru orang Melayu yang semakin berani mempertikaikan kerajaan dan mempersoal kaum mereka sendiri.

"Sebilangan dari generasi ini (golongan terpelajar kelas menengah) mempunyai daya fikir yang berbeza, cita-cita politik yang berbeza, pandangan terhadap nilai-nilai kemelayuan yang berbeza," kata Pertubuhan Alumni Kelab-kelab Umno Luar Negara dalam satu rumusan yang diedarkan kepada media hari ini.

Rumusan keempat 'Menghadapi Kebangkitan Generasi Baru' itu merupakan satu daripada lapan resolusi Seminar Agenda Melayu ke-3: Melayu 2057 anjuran pertubuhan itu pada Ahad lalu.

"Generasi Net" yang ditaktif oleh pertubuhan itu antaranya mempunyai ciri-ciri "berfikiran kritis, berani berpolemik tentang kedudukan bangsa, berpartisipasi dalam dunia demokrasi dengan bertanya ke mana haluan negara, mempersoalkan apakah yang telah dilakukan pemimpin dan sentiasa menilai sama ada Ahli Parlimen dan Ahli Dewan Undangan Negeri membuat kajian dan kerja rumah sebelum berbahas."

Menurut resolusi itu lagi, generasi baru yang aktif menyebar dan mendapat maklumat melalui alam siber seperti melalui kumpulan komuniti penulis blog, Youtube, Myspace dan Friendster memerlukan kebijaksanaan kepemimpinan Umno dan kematangan berpolitik parti itu.

Menyedari realiti baru tersebut, pertubuhan itu menggesa Umno mengambil langkah "mengadakan pertemuan berterusan (didik dengan mesra) agar mereka dapat diasah untuk menjadi pemimpin masa depan yang cemerlang".

Langkah itu juga diambil, kata pertubuhan itu lagi, agar Generasi Net "mengenal realiti politik dan kemudiannya ikut serta mempertahankan kredibiliti Umno" dan strategi ini akan menjadi "aset penting mengekalkan orang Melayu sebagai bangsa penentu pada 2057."

Di sidang media itu, timbalan pengerusi pertubuhan tersebut Datuk Mohamad Rais Zainuddin berkata pihaknya sedang merangka satu pelan sebagai panduan untuk bangsa Melayu bagi memastikan hak dan keistimewaan mereka di dalam negara ini terus terpelihara.

[ii]

Coretan di atas tadi berita yang saya sediakan untuk mStar Online. Apakah anda boleh bersetuju dengan analisa Pertubuhan Alumni Kelab-kelab Umno Luar Negara?

Jika bersetuju, apakah anda senang dengan pendekatan yang disarankan itu?

Bahasa, wacana dan kuasa

2007-11-03T22:57:00.000+08:00

[Asalnya terbit pada 25 September 2006]
Untuk dibahaskan kepada yang berminat, silakan ...

Diri seseorang, medan bahasa, wacana, struktur dan kuasa sebetulnya berada dalam satu jaringan yang kompleks. Semua kita dibesarkan dalam lingkungan yang membentuk diri kita (istilah 'habitus' di sisi Bourdieu). Lingkungan itu tidaklah 'satu' tetapi pelbagai 'medan' atau ruang sosial. Namun, medan dan diri kita ini dibentuk oleh permainan bahasa dan wacana.

Bahasa dan wacana sebagai pengetahuan, telah distruktur oleh kumpulan-kumpulan dominan. Misalnya, bahasa rasmi dan juga beberapa sistem negara yang kuat pengaruhnya ke atas individu – sekolah dan media. Dalam ungkapan Louis Althusser, alat-alat ideologi negara (ISA atau ideological state apparatuses).

Pengaruh kumpulan-kumpulan dominan ini terlalu kuat sehingga, jika anda membaca buku The Politics of Misinformation (2001) karya sarjana komunikasi politik Murray Edelman, anda cenderung 'kecewa' dan 'patah hati'!

Kumpulan-kumpulan dominan berjaya mencipta 'kesedaran palsu' (memakai pandangan Marxis) bukan hanya di kalangan kelompok elit tetapi juga massa, termasuk mereka yang cuba menentang keburukan sistem tersebut. Pandangan Edelman ini tidak jauh bezanya dengan Yuri M Lotman dalam 'Dialogue mechanism' (buku Universe of the Mind: A semiotic theory of culture, 1990).

Bagi Lotman, kepintaran memerlukan kepintaran yang lain untuk menghidupkannya. Ertinya, seseorang yang bodoh akan cenderung 'bodoh' jika tidak menumpang (atau membuka diri) kepada kecerdasan wacana tertentu dalam proses wacana.

Massa yang terpengaruh dengan sesuatu wacana dalam pasar idea ini, menurut Bourdieu, tidak menyedarinya. Malah mereka cuba untuk mempelajarinya sebagai modal dalam proses menyertai pasar tersebut. Misalnya, dengan memasuki sistem persekolahan dan universiti.

Seseorang yang tersingkir dari universiti, bukan sahaja gagal menguasai sejumlah bahasa (sebagai modal) tetapi tertinggal dalam persaingan (atau gagal bertutur menurut tuntutan sesuatu 'medan idea') untuk mobiliti sosial. Dengan modal itu, seseorang yang berjaya, boleh menukar modal simbolik (sijil pendidikan) itu kepada modal ekonomi (gaji, misalnya).

Dengan itu, kita menggunakan bahasa-bahasa dominan ini untuk menyampaikan fikiran kita – dengan tidak menyedari bahawa kita terbelit dengan politik wacana yang datang bersamanya. Memang begini, kerana bahasa sifatnya awam, dan jarang sekali percubaan mensubversifkan bahasa berjaya jika struktur kuasa yang sedang bermain dalam masyarakat gagal kita kuasai.

Bahasa, pada Bourdieu, sentiasa ada hubungan kuasa – dan salah, bagi dirinya, pandangan aliran strukturalisme seperti Noam Chomsky atau Ferdinand de Saussure yang cuba melihat bahasa pada isi kandungan (dalaman) bahasa semata-mata. Ahli sosiologi Perancis ini cuba merumuskan 'teori tengah' antara objektivisme (strukturalisme) dengan subjektivisme (aliran pasca-modenisme atau pasca-strukturalisme).

Dalam proses berbahasa itu, kita semua dipengaruhi dan mempengaruhi struktur pasar bahasa (atau, pasar wacana) tersebut. Kita lihat tafsir Bourdieu tentang bahasa: “Language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledge, but also an instrument of power. One seeks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished. Whence the complete definition of competence as right to speak, that is, as right to the legitimate language, the authorized language, the language of authority. Competence implies the power to impose reception.”

Bahasa, bagi sarjana ini sejenis 'keganasan simbolik', bukan sahaja alat komunikasi tetapi juga alat kekuasaan oleh pemakainya dengan proses pembezaan (diskriminasi) dengan kelompok-kelompok lain seperti proses ‘rites of passage’ (misalnya berkhatan, dalam budaya Melayu) dalam banyak budaya.

Dalam bukunya Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu menunjukkan bagaimana bahasa berjaya mempengaruhi jasad seseorang sehingga mencipta semacam 'kegagapan' ke atas seseorang di luar medan bahasa (di luar kelas sosialnya). Medan dan pasar bahasa digunakan dengan maksud yang hampir sama dalam teori Bourdieu.

Akibat tekanan itu, individu melakukan banyak 'pembetulan' sewaktu menggunakan bahasa – misalnya memperbaiki sebutan, ungkapan, tatabahasa dan teori yang 'betul' dengan kehendak pasar (medan) sesuatu kelompok, selalunya dominan. Sungguh menakutkan memikirkan hal ini.
Saya sendiri pernah menjadi 'korban' kepada proses ini – setelah lama tidak menulis kepada akhbar Utusan Malaysia (1996) dan Berita Harian (1992-93). Sewaktu saya cuba menulis kembali kepada mereka, antaranya artikel 'Ruang awam untuk sasterawan' (Mingguan Malaysia, 8 Jun 2003), saya terpaksa mengedit hampir 10 kali (sejenis swasaringan atau self-censorship agar serasi dengan bahasa dan gaya akhbar tersebut!)

Barulah saya sedar bahawa bahasa saya telah beranjak daripada 'bahasa (dan pemikiran) arus perdana' akhbar harian (awal 1990 hingga pra-Gerakan Reformasi) kepada 'bahasa politik baru' (yang cukup bebas dan anjal – juga sarat 'emosi') era laman-laman web Reformasi (1998-2000). Bahasa laman web ini, kemudiannya, menjadi beban pula sehingga saya meninggalkan Malaysiakini (akhir 2001) dan mula menulis untuk kolum ini (pertengahan 2002).

Sewaktu bertugas dengan Malaysiakini (2000), saya pernah mengkritik bentuk-bentuk wacana dan kualiti hujah laman-laman web reformasi, Harakah dan Utusan Malaysia (khususnya 1998-2000) kerana memaparkan sejenis 'budaya dan bahasa politik' yang buruk dan tidak mencerahkan akal.

Gejala sedemikian, saya perhatikan, telah terlalu kuat mempengaruhi pengucapan politik kita hingga saat ini, misalnya lihat Tranungkite.net (milik satu kawasan PAS di Terengganu) dan juga wacana-wacana dalam blog-blog milik individu-individu yang percaya pada idealisme Islam.

Bahasa dominan ini rupa-rupanya menyimpan 'kejahatan', atau 'keganasan simbolik', tersendiri seperti saya alami dalam fasa-fasa tertentu, misalnya lebih 10 tahun dalam gerakan pelajar dakwah (mulai 1983). Bahasa di sini bukan ayat dan karangan tetapi 'wacana', pemikiran atau 'paradigma' kumpulan. Kumpulan-kumpulan sosial (atau 'medan' dalam teori Bourdieu) sentiasa melakukan kejahatan ini, rupa-rupanya!

Tidaklah menghairankan apabila forum dan diskusi kita, termasuk di kalangan aktivis, jarang mahu disertai peserta-pesertanya. Begitu juga surat pembaca untuk penerbitan berbahasa Melayu (yang pernah saya sertai). Rupa-rupanya ada proses 'menggagapkan' orang ramai akibat penggunaan wacana yang tidak demokratik yang sudah terlalu jauh berkembang dalam masyarakat kita.

Pandangan orang ramai dianggap tidak perlu dirujuk dan akibatnya masyarakat mematikan keghairahan bersuara. Jika ada, mereka terperangkap pula dalam bahasa politik kritis (seperti mereka kenali daripada akhbar pembangkang dan ceramah politik). Orang ramai terlalu daif untuk menentang 'bahasa buruk' yang sedia ada dalam budaya politik kita, manakala aktivis politik (termasuk cerdik pandainya) gagal memperkasakan kita semua ke arah memantapkan 'bahasa baru' politik antikerajaan.

Hishamuddin, sebelum ditahan ISA pada April 2001, sering bercakap kepada kami tentang keperluan 'mendemokratikkan wacana' kerana wacana, menurut Michel Foucault, datang bersama kuasa. Tokoh pasca-modenisme ini menyarankan kesetaraan wacana. Tidak hairan, selepas dibebaskan, Hishamuddin menulis menggunakan bahasa 'pop' anak muda – mungkin untuk mendemokrasikan wacana kepada sasaran baru pembacanya itu.

Dalam artikel dua tahun lalu, saya menyebut: “Pembodohan membentuk budaya bersama atau sejenis social conditioning; yakni, rasa tidak perlu berhujah, berbeza pandangan, mempertikaikan sesuatu maklumat yang disogokkan atau mencabar kelaziman serta ‘tradisi’.

“Ia mematikan keghairahan berfikir, serta menumpulkan minda, mula-mula secara kolektif, kemudian secara peribadi. Mula-mula di kalangan pengikut kelompok, kemudian kepada penentangnya dan akhir sekali di kalangan pengikut penentang itu sendiri. Pembangkang kemudiannya mewarisi pembodohan yang tidak disukai itu.”

Saya masih mempertahankan tesis di atas; cuma sekarang saya sedar bahawa pembodohan itu rupa-rupanya diakibatkan oleh dampak buruk bahasa dan wacana politik dan kebudayaan kita.

Tulis saya lagi: “Aktivis dan pemimpin pembangkang juga gagal melihat serta membedah sesuatu yang lebih abstrak daripada tindakan politik, kenyataan pemimpin kerajaan atau perundangan. Soal nilai, budaya atau ‘ikatan seni’ yang mengawal minda, gelagat, minat atau naluri bangsa ini gagal dibedah siasat.

“Jika ada, itu semua teori yang dilontar semula daripada buku-buku; bukan kefahaman mereka yang asli tentang negara ini. Saya tidak fikir mereka faham dan saya tidak nampak mereka sedar bahawa inilah kelemahan asasi mereka dalam perlawanan dengan Barisan Nasional dan institusi-institusinya. Bagi saya, ini semua akibat-akibat nyata ketumpulan minda.

“Malah, ada di kalangan mereka bersikap anti-ilmu; tidak tahu meletakkan hubungan antara ‘teori’, ‘kritik’, ‘konsep’, ‘kajian’, ‘idea’, ‘falsafah’ atau kegiatan ‘intelektual’ dengan gerak kerja perjuangan.

“Sering kita dengar, dengan nada jengkel atau sinis, “awak kritik saja, memang mudah”, “kita tidak perlu intelektual yang pandai berteori” atau “teori banyak-banyak pun tidak guna, yang penting pelaksanaan”. Sedarkah mereka nada seumpama ini lahir akibat pembodohan?”

Keadaan ini diburukkan lagi oleh kegagalan cerdik pandai kita untuk menyediakan wacana tanding antara bahasa-bahasa politik pembangkang (khasnya PAS) dengan kerajaan (khasnya Umno).

Oleh kerana sudah membudaya kerendahan wacana dan pendangkalan hujah dalam bahasa politik kita, maka setiap orang nampaknya ingin keadaan sedia ada ini dikekalkan. Sekiranya ada usaha untuk membuka 'bahasa baru' dalam wacana politik kita, pembuka 'bahasa baru' itu akan 'didesak' oleh khalayak kita agar menurunkan 'bahasa baru' itu dan sesuai dengan kelaziman minda mereka (selama ini).

Lotman, dalam bukunya itu (hal. 143), menyebut: “Dialogue presupposes asymmetry, and asymmetry is to be seen first, in the difference between the semiotic structures (languages) which the participants in the dialogue use; and second, in the alternating directions of the message-flow. [...] But there is another condition necessary for dialogue: namely the concern of both participants for the message and their capacity to overcome the semiotic barriers that must inevitably arises.”

Sedutan artikel saya 'Politik dan kejahatan berbahasa' (Malaysiakini.com, 8 Ogos 2005)

No one can forget what they saw

2007-10-31T12:19:00.000+08:00

Over the past week, at least 75 people, including two journalists, who were arrested during the September protests in Burma have been released from Insein prison, reports Burmese-run news agency Mizzima News.

The IFEX Burma Action Group has called upon the UN to help exiled reporters and publicly investigate the cases of missing, jailed and murdered journalists. Meanwhile, one activist who was recently released speaks out about his detention.

Comedian, poet and opposition activist Zarganar was released on 17 October after spending a harrowing three weeks in jail. He was arrested by an eight-strong "raid and search" team on 25 September for offering alms to protesting monks at Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon.

In an exclusive interview with Mizzima News, Zarganar talks about what life behind bars was like, and why, although the street protests have stopped, the fight against military rule is not yet over. Below is an edited version:

Q: We heard that you were put in a military dog cell. What kind of place is this?

A: A military dog cell is a special cell for prisoners who commit crimes inprison. These criminals are shackled and sent there for further punishment. They are put in isolation and solitary confinement. There are about 30 Alsatians guarding this type of cell, so it is called a military dog cell.

The measurement of the cell is about 8'x10'. You cannot see outside. There is no proper ventilation and sometimes it's too cold. I was made to sleep on a wooden board. I could not have a bath for the first two days. The foodis terrible, as are the living conditions. There is no proper toilet. I had only a dining plate for both urination and excreta. I could use this plate only once for the whole day as it was filled after a single use. I had to spend seven or eight days there. I got pneumonia.

Q: Have you been watched since your release?

A: Yes. They keep watching me from some teashops and snack shops in front of my house. The ward-level PDC members (Peace and Development Council, local level administration of the military junta) told me that they would do so in advance. I don't care about them. Let them stay and watch. I go out as usual.

Q: We heard that the authorities banned 19 writers and artists from writing and performing for offering alms to protesting monks at Shwedagon. How does the ban affect them?

A: I have been banned for nearly two years now. It affects our livelihood. How can we survive without work? We know nothing about other trades. We can't learn how to fire a gun at this age. As for the people, they have to suffer too; they cannot read the works of these writers and cannot see the films of these artists.

Q: Most of the leading students and monks have been arrested. Do you think the movement has ceased?

A: We cannot say the movement has ceased. It is simmering under the ashes. It's just temporary; it cannot be stopped. The movement is simmering in the hearts and souls of the people.

Q: If the recent protests are still simmering, can the movement revive again?

A: The movement will re-emerge in different forms. If the SPDC gives us what we want, there will be no more protests. But if they give us what we do not want, it will reignite the movement. No one can forget what they saw and what they encountered in the recent protests. The movement may not re-emerge in the same form as in the recent protests, sacrificing a lot of lives and damaging a lot of livelihoods.

It is premature for me to say what will be the form of the struggle. But the chance of the protests and movement re-emerging is sure.

>>> Read the full interview here (English only)

Melayu temui nombor '0'?

2007-10-25T21:10:00.000+08:00

PETALING JAYA: 'Kosong', atau 0, bukan sebarang nombor, penemuannya merevolusikan pemikiran matematik dan sains moden.

Nombor ini diperkenalkan di Eropah pada awal abad ke-13 selepas ia dikembangkan di dunia Arab-Islam pada kurun kesembilan.

Tokoh matematik dunia Arab, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, memperkenalnya di Iraq melalui bukunya Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi Hisab al-Jabr wal Muqabbala (tahun 837) setelah lawatannya di India, benua yang dipercayai "menemui" nombor maha penting ini pada tahun 594.

Tamadun Eropah mengambil kosong, atau zero, daripada penemuan dunia Arab, sifr (sifar). Ia dibawa oleh pemikir Itali, Fibonacci, dalam tahun 1202 melalui karya popularnya Liber Abaci.

Perkataan sifar ini juga membentuk perkataan cipher dalam bahasa Inggeris yang membawa masud "tiada apa-apa", "simbol", "kod" atau "mesej rahsia".

Bagaimanapun pensyarah matematik Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Dr Mohammad Alinor Abdul Kadir, mengemukakan satu hipotesis lain -- penciptaan simbol 'kosong' mungkin bermula di alam Melayu selewat-lewatnya pada 580.

>>> Rencana lengkap di Melayu pencipta nombor 'kosong'? (mStar Online, 25 Okt 2007)

Diskusi Sahur 3

2007-09-18T21:45:00.000+08:00

Kepada mereka yang beriman, sama ada Muslim atau bukan Muslim, bersempena dengan sambutan bulan Ramadan al-Mubarak, Komunite Seni Jalan Telawi (KsJT) dengan segala hormatnya mengundang anda semua berdiskusi buku seperti butiran berikut:

Siri 3:

Tarikh: 19 September (Rabu)
Masa: 11 malam - 1 pagi
Tempat: restoran** di Jalan Telawi, Bangsar Baru, KL
Teks diskusi (buku): Hanya Allah Mengenal Tentera-Nya bab 3 (terjemahan karangan M. Khaled A. Fadl), terbitan MEGC.

>>> Teks asal berbahasa Inggeris, And God Knows the Soldiers: The authoritative and authoritarian in Islamic discourses.

Siri 4:

Tarikh: 23 September (Ahad)***
Masa: 11 malam - 1 pagi
Tempat: restoran** di Jalan Telawi, Bangsar Baru, KL
Teks diskusi (buku): Hanya Allah Mengenal Tentera-Nya bab 4 (terjemahan karangan M. Khaled A. Fadl), terbitan MEGC.

>>> Teks asal berbahasa Inggeris, And God Knows the Soldiers: The authoritative and authoritarian in Islamic discourses.

** tentatif: Pelita atau Devi's Corner
*** tentatif (akan disahihkan pada pertemuan Siri 3)

Sila berhubung dengan Anam di neo.alaskari@yahoo.com atau saya di faomar@yahoo.com

Nori

2007-09-14T23:28:00.000+08:00

Tahniah buat Nori atas kelahiran anak sulungnya semalam.

Beberapa bahan menarik di mStar Online beberapa hari ini, kalau mahu membaca santai.

>>> Nori borong semua 10 lukisan politik Hishamuddin Rais
>>> Amir: 100 petikan orang politik yang wajib dibaca
>>> Puisi menjerit di hujung tangan
>>> Jangan jadi tua, anda tidak akan stres!

>>> Akan datang: Wawancara dengan anak gadis Gus Dur, bekas presiden Indonesia. Tunggu kemunculannya di mStar Online.

Rasuah

2007-09-11T21:40:00.000+08:00

Kemas kini (11 Sept):

Susulan berita 'Isu rasuah tidak untungkan pembangkang', saya mewawancara seorang ahli akademik UKM untuk membongkar latar sosial yang menjadikan isu rasuah tidak mendapat sambutan pengundi.

>>> Isu kaum lebih sensasi, rasuah gagal pikat pengundi (bersama Dr Ahmad Nizamudin Sulaiman, pensyarah sains politik)

Selain itu, saya turut membuat liputan forum menarik tentang halangan-halangan pendemokrasian di Malaysia.

>>> Tanpa perpaduan kaum, demokrasi terbantut (mStar Online, 6 Sept)

Asal (1 Sept)

Parti-parti pembangkang masih lemah untuk menimbulkan kesedaran mendalam, moral indignation, tentang keburukan rasuah, skandal kewangan dan penyelewengan kuasa sehingga sebarang isu-isu rasuah gagal diterjemahkan dalam kempen pilihan raya umum, kata dua pengamat politik yang disegani Rustam A. Sani dan Ahmad Lutfi Othman.

>>> Laporan lengkap, lihat mStar Online 'Isu rasuah tidak untungkan pembangkang'