Malay anxiety, exclusion, and national unity

September 21,2018

A fragmented Malay society is making ‘Malay unity’ more urgent for those defeated by GE-14.

by Hew Wai Weng

http://www.newmandala.org

On 29 July 2018, about 1,500 people gathered at the historic Padang Kelab Sultan Sulaiman in Kuala Lumpur, rallying to defend the status of ‘Malay Muslim rights’ under the theme of ‘Himpunan Kebangkitan Ummah’ (Ummah Awakening Gathering). The rally was intended to stimulate a siege mentality and anxiety among Malay Muslim, as they are facing multiple ‘threats’ from so-called minorities, ranging from the LBGT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community, Chinese-language education groups, Hindu pressure groups, Shia, and ‘liberal Muslims’ as well.

The habitual hand kissing Dr. Rais Yatim cum Grasshopper ex-UMNO Minister

With UMNO Youth chief and former minister Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki, PAS secretary-general Takiyuddin Hassan, Bersatu member and former veteran minister Rais Yatim (pic,above) as well as representatives from NGOs such as ISMA (Malaysian Muslim Solidarity), ABIM (Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement) and GAPENA (Gabungan Persatuan Penulis Nasional) attending, this rally hoped for broader Malay audiences beyond the conventional Islamist-minded groups. Yet as I observed at the rally, the participants were mainly PAS supporters, and some were mobilised by ISMA. There was no mobilisation of the crowd by UMNO, ABIM, and Malay-language groups such as GAPENA.

While using an Islamic-inflected theme, ‘Himpunan Kebangkitan Ummah’, the key issue was not a religious one at the rally but a language one. It was about rejecting the new Pakatan Harapan (PH) government’s proposed recognition of the United Examination Certificate (UEC), a standardised test for the independent Chinese high school sector in Malaysia. Besides the UEC, the rally also made issues of LGBT visibility and their rights, the polemics surrounding controversial Indian Muslim preacher Zakir Naik, as well as the perceived dominant role of the DAP in the PH government.

To some extent, the UEC is to Malaysian Chinese as the Hudud issue is to Malay Muslims. Many Malaysians Chinese support or at least will not object to the UEC’s recognition, but few have gone through such a system. Malaysian Chinese support for independent Chinese high schools is not just about an endorsement of such school curriculums, just as Malay Muslim support of Hudud laws is not always about agreement to enforce Hudud punishments.

In the past, PAS has used the call for stricter implementation of Islamic laws as a weapon to ‘out-Islamise’ UMNO. Today, the contestation in political Islam is much more complicated with UMNO, PAS and Amanah (to a lesser extent, Keadilan, Bersatu dan Islamic NGOs) competing against each other. The recognition of the UEC has been always raised by DAP to attack MCA for not being able to campaign Chinese issues. Hudud and the UEC entail identity politics over who can best represent the interests of ‘Malay Muslims’ and ‘Chinese communities’.

The strong anti-UEC stand taken by PAS has fed the perception that the Islamist party has become increasingly ‘Malay-oriented’, helping pave ways for the party to work more closely with UMNO. Newly-elected UMNO youth chief Asyraf Wajdi supported PAS leader Hadi Awang’s controversial ‘Hudud Bill’ when he was the Deputy Minister in charge of religious affairs during the Najib era. ISMA, one of the key players in the Ummah rally, is like a combination of UMNO and PAS, campaigning for both Malay supremacy and an Islamist agenda at the same time.

A potential alliance of UMNO-PAS-ISMA is in the making, yet it is uncertain whether such cooperation will be further consolidated, as there are different opinions within each of them, as well as the ongoing hostile relations between UMNO and PAS members.

The speakers at the rally spoke on different issues with different tones, and not all of them are outright racists nor narrow Islamists. Bersatu’s Rais Yatim, the veteran former senior Mahathir minister, as well as representatives from ABIM and GAPENA, focused on the UEC. They were not necessarily supporting PAS, UMNO or ISMA, but they joined the rally to express their disagreement on the UEC.

Indeed, the ABIM leader was the most ‘moderate’ speaker at the day – he did not raise any issue to stir Malay Muslim insecurities. He also reaffirmed his support for vernacular primary schools in Mandarin and Tamil, yet he objected to UEC recognition, seeing such recognition as undermining national language policy and the status of the Malay language. IKRAM, another important Islamic organisation, was absent from the rally – it had given its qualified support for UEC recognition, with a list of conditions. Unlike ISMA, both ABIM and IKRAM (Malaysian IKRAM Association) are PH-friendly Muslim NGOs.

The leaders from PAS and its student wing, GAMIS (Gabungan Mahasiswa Islam Se-Malaysia), besides harping on the UEC, also took up other issues related to the LGBT, Shia, and liberal Muslim communities to attack the new coalition’s leadership. For example, Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq was attacked for being ‘hedonist’ and ‘pro-liberal’, while Education Minister Dr. Maszlee Malik was too ‘apologetic’ and “pro-DAP”. The new Religious Affairs Minister Mujahid Rawa was criticised for “not defending Zakir Naik” and for having “compromised on LGBT issues”. PAS leaders tried through these criticisms to portray a more ‘Islamic’ image compared with Pakatan’s Muslim leaders.

 

ISMA leaders set a more exclusionary tone, in speeches such as “if Pakatan Harapan is dominated by DAP, we will bring down PH (Pakatan Harapan), as how we fought the British colonial power”. Such statements indirectly portrayed Malaysian Chinese as “foreigners” who were trying to take power from the “native” Malays. Most of the attention-grabbing placards with slogans such as ‘Pertahan Identiti Negara’ (Defend the Identity of our State), ‘Islam dan Melayu, Identiti Negara’ (Islam and Malay, Identity of our State) and ‘Malaysia Tanah Melayu’ (Malaysia, Malay Land) were prepared and held up at the rally by ISMA members. Some PAS participants felt uneasy with such ultra-exclusionary messages.

Very few Malay Muslims in Malaysia are outright racists or narrow Islamists. But a significant portion of them view Islam as their core identity (whatever this implied).  And some worry that the increasing usage of the Chinese language might challenge the status of Malay as the national language.

Similarly, some fear that the LGBT community’s allegedly increased visibility might undermine the role of Islam as Malaysia’s official religion. The more Muslims openly support LGBT rights and the more Malays speak Mandarin, the more some Malay Muslims want to more strictly define what constitutes Malayness and Islamness.

In other words, the increasingly political fragmentation and cultural diversification of Malay Muslims have led some of them to create a sense of ‘Malay unity’ by drawing stricter boundaries between what they perceive as ‘Islamic’ and ‘un-Islamic’ and between who they see as ‘Malay’ and ‘non-Malay’.

The makings of religious, sexual and racial others (for example, liberal Muslims, LGBT and Malaysian Chinese) are central for them to consolidate ‘Malay Muslim identity’, and to create a sense of certainty amidst uncertainties. Hence, it is insufficient to analyse Malay anxiety as only a result of political competition or religious conservatism, without looking into the rapid socio-cultural changes experienced by Malay Muslims.

Instead of addressing various socio-economic issues faced by Malay Muslims, some politically-motivated groups stir up Malay anxiety, creating a perception that they are representing ‘Malay Muslims’ and manipulating public opinions for their political interests. Such patterns are similar to “Aksi Bela Islam” (Defending Islam Action) in Indonesia, using the banner of “defending Islam” to mobilise political support. Such political mobilisations have forced both Malaysian and Indonesian governments to contain them.

In Malaysia, some PH leaders are containing its critics by taking a conservative stand, as shown in the government handling of LGBT-related issues. In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo has selected a conservative cleric as his running-mate for next year’s presidential election, to counter Islamist mobilisation of his opponents. Such containments could prevent the more exclusionary parties from taking political power, yet at the same time might sustain the ‘conservative turn’ and potentially alienate some minority groups.

 

All Donald Trump’s Crooks

August 22,2018

By The Editorial Board

For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say.–The Editorial Board–The New York Times

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

From the start of the Russia investigation, President Trump has been working to discredit the work and the integrity of the special counsel, Robert Mueller; praising men who are blatant grifters, cons and crooks; insisting that he’s personally done nothing wrong; and reminding us that he hires only the best people.

On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishing split-screen moment involving two of those people, as Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes “at the direction of” Mr. Trump himself.

Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.

Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a “hoax” or “scam” or “rigged witch hunt.”

The conviction of Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for three months in 2016, was a win for prosecutors even though jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts against him. On the other eight, which included bank fraud, tax fraud and a failure to report a foreign bank account, the jury agreed unanimously that Mr. Manafort was guilty. He is scheduled to go on trial in a separate case next month in Washington, D.C., on charges including money laundering, witness tampering, lying to authorities and failing to register as a foreign agent. Mr. Manafort faces many decades behind bars, although he will probably serve less than that under federal sentencing guidelines.

A few hundred miles to the north, in New York City, Michael “I’m going to mess your life up” Cohen stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bank and tax fraud as well as federal campaign-finance violations involving hush-money payments he made to women who said they’d had sex with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen, who spent years as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and “fix-it guy” (his own words), was under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, to whom Mr. Mueller referred his case. In April, F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room looking for evidence of criminality on a number of fronts. Apparently they found it.

President Donald Trump: no doubt he has good taste –What  a storm she must have been

Mr. Cohen didn’t agree at Tuesday’s hearing to cooperate with prosecutors, but if he eventually chooses to, that could spell even bigger trouble for Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen has been involved in many of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia, including his aborted effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and could shed light on connections between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials involved in the 2016 election interference.

But back to Tuesday’s news. Mr. Manafort was not an original target of the inquiry by Mr. Mueller, who was appointed in May of last year to look into possible ties between the Trump campaign and efforts by Russian government officials to interfere in the election. But Mr. Mueller’s mandate authorized him to investigate any other crimes that arose in the course of his work. It didn’t take long. As soon as he and his lawyers started sniffing around, the stench of Mr. Manafort’s illegality was overpowering.

As a longtime lobbyist and political consultant who worked for multiple Republican candidates and presidents, Mr. Manafort had a habit of lying to banks to get multimillion-dollar loans and hiding his cash in offshore accounts when tax time rolled round. In at least one case, he falsely characterized $1.5 million as a loan to avoid paying taxes on it, then later told banks that the loan had been “forgiven” so he could get another loan.

He also enriched himself by working for some of the world’s most notorious thugs and autocrats, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He helped elect the pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine, a job that earned him millions until Mr. Yanukovych was ousted from power in 2014.

Despite this mercenary history — or perhaps, more disturbingly, because of it — Donald Trump, while running on promises to clean up Washington, hired Mr. Manafort to run his presidential campaign, a job he may well have kept but for news reports that he was receiving and hiding millions of dollars from his work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych.

What does it tell you about Mr. Trump that he would choose to lead his campaign someone like Mr. Manafort, whom even on Tuesday he called a “good man”? It tells you that Mr. Trump is consistent, and consistently contemptuous of honesty and ethics, because he has surrounded himself with people of weak, if not criminal, character throughout his career.

While the president has so far dodged questions about whether he will pardon Mr. Manafort, he’s already shown a willingness to make a mockery of the justice system with his pardons of unrepentant lawbreakers like Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza. Last year, the president’s lawyer dangled the prospect of a pardon to lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. If Mr. Trump were to follow through and grant clemency to Mr. Manafort, it would make his pardon of Mr. Arpaio look like the signing of the Civil Rights Act.

You’re forgiven if you’ve lost track of all the criminality, either charged or admitted, that has burst forth from Mr. Trump’s circles in the last couple years even as Mr. Trump has continued to claim that the investigation is a hoax, a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars. So here’s a brief refresher:

In addition to the prosecution of Mr. Manafort, the special counsel’s office has secured guilty pleas from multiple people, including Mr. Flynn and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign, both of whom lied to federal investigators about their communications with Russian officials.

Others have pleaded guilty to identity fraud and making false statements. Mr. Manafort’s longtime associate Rick Gates also pleaded guilty and testified against his former boss.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller has charged more than a dozen Russian individuals and companies for their roles in a coordinated and deceptive social-media campaign aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and helping Mr. Trump’s. Some Trump campaign officials were unwittingly in contact with some of these defendants.

Mr. Mueller has also charged a dozen Russian military officials with hacking and helping to release emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The hackers first tried to break into Mrs. Clinton’s personal servers on July 27, 2016 — the same day that Mr. Trump publicly called on Russians to do exactly that.

And he has charged Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian associate of Mr. Manafort and a suspected spy, with obstructing justice.

As Mr. Trump rages on about the unfairness of the investigation, remember that Mr. Mueller has been on the job for just 15 months. For comparison, the Watergate investigation ran for more than two years before it brought down a president and sent dozens of people to prison. The Iran contra investigation dragged on for about seven years, as did the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

Also remember we still don’t know anything about the ultimate fate of several other Trump associates who have been under Mr. Mueller’s microscope, including Roger Stone, Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”).

For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22, 2018, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: All the President’s Crooks.

Cambridge Analytica and Our Lives Inside the Surveillance Machine

March 23, 2018

By Adrian Chen

https://www.newyorker.com

 

In 2006, a local pollster in Nepal was kidnapped by Maoist rebels while conducting opinion surveys on behalf of the American political strategist Stan Greenberg. The Maoists, who had been waging a long-running insurgency against the government, did not issue their typical ransom demands—money or weapons in exchange for the prisoner. No, they wanted the polling data that Greenberg’s team had collected, evidently to gauge the political climate in the country for themselves.

Alexander Nix, pictured here in 2016, was recently suspended from his position as the C.E.O. of Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the center of a data-mining scandal involving Facebook.Photograph by Joshua Bright / The Washington Post / Getty

 

The researchers eventually handed it over. In his book “Alpha Dogs,” the British journalist James Harding cites this story as an example of how the business of political campaigning is being remade, across the globe, by a profusion of fine-grained data about voters and their habits. Where the consultants of the nineteen-sixties and seventies obsessed over how to use television to beam ideal images of their clients into voters’ homes, today’s spinmasters hope that big data will allow them to manipulate voters’ deepest hopes and fears. “What’s the currency of the world now?” one of Greenberg’s partners asks Harding. “It’s not gold, it’s data. It’s the information.”

Twelve years later, the fixation on data as the key to political persuasion has exploded into scandal. For the past several days, the Internet has been enveloped in outrage over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, the shadowy firm that supposedly helped Donald Trump win the White House. As with the Maoist rebels, this appears to be a tale of data-lust gone bad. In order to fulfill the promises that Cambridge Analytica made to its clients—it claimed to possess cutting-edge “psychographic profiles” that could judge voters’ personalities better than their own friends could—the company had to harvest huge amounts of information. It did this in an ethically suspicious way, by contracting with Aleksandr Kogan, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, who built an app that collected demographic data on tens of millions of Facebook users, largely without their knowledge. “This was a scam—and a fraud,” Paul Grewal, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, told the Times over the weekend. Kogan has said that he was assured by Cambridge Analytica that the data collection was “perfectly legal and within the limits of the terms of service.

Despite Facebook’s performance of victimization, it has endured a good deal of blowback and blame. Even before the story broke, Trump’s critics frequently railed at the company for contributing to his victory by failing to rein in fake news and Russian propaganda. To them, the Cambridge Analytica story was another example of Facebook’s inability, or unwillingness, to control its platform, which allowed bad actors to exploit people on behalf of authoritarian populism. Democrats have demanded that Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, testify before Congress. Antonio Tajani, the President of the European Parliament, wants to talk to him, too. “Facebook needs to clarify before the representatives of five hundred million Europeans that personal data is not being used to manipulate democracy,” he said. On Wednesday afternoon, after remaining conspicuously silent since Friday night, Zuckerberg pledged to restrict third-party access to Facebook data in an effort to win back user trust. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” he wrote on Facebook.

But, as some have noted, the furor over Cambridge Analytica is complicated by the fact that what the firm did wasn’t unique or all that new. In 2012, Barack Obama’s reëlection campaign used a Facebook app to target users for outreach, giving supporters the option to share their friend lists with the campaign. These efforts, compared with those of Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, were relatively transparent, but users who never gave their consent had their information sucked up anyway. (Facebook has since changed its policies.) As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written, Facebook itself is a giant “surveillance machine”: its business model demands that it gather as much data about its users as possible, then allow advertisers to exploit the information through a system so complex and opaque that misuse is almost guaranteed.

Just because something isn’t new doesn’t mean that it’s not outrageous. It is unquestionably a bad thing that we carry out much of our online lives within a data-mining apparatus that sells influence to the highest bidder. My initial reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, though, was jaded; the feeling came from having seen how often, in the past, major public outcries about online privacy led nowhere. In most cases, after the calls to delete Facebook die down and the sternly worded congressional letters stop being written, things pretty much go back to normal. Too often, privacy scandals boil down to a superficial fix to some specific breach or leak, without addressing how the entire system undermines the possibility of control. What exciting big-data technique will be revealed, six years from now, as a democracy-shattering mind-control tool?

Yet I eventually found reason to be genuinely repulsed by the story. On Monday, the U.K.’s Channel 4 published video footage of an undercover sting operation that it had conducted against Cambridge Analytica. A man working for the channel, posing as a political operative from Sri Lanka, met with the firm’s representatives to discuss hiring them for a campaign. On camera, over three meetings in various swanky hotels around London, C.A.’s employees offer an increasingly sordid account of their methods and capabilities. The most unseemly revelation—and, in the context of the sting, the most ironic—comes when Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s C.E.O., seems to offer to entrap the client’s political rivals with secretly videotaped bribes and rendezvous with sex workers. (Nix was suspended on Tuesday.)

Like much of the best investigative journalism, the Channel 4 video gives viewers the queasy sense of a rock being overturned and sinister things being exposed to the light. It is difficult to watch the video without becoming at least a little suspicious of the entire business of democracy, given how large a role political consultants such as Nix play in it these days. Perhaps it is naïve to be scandalized by the cravenness of political consultants in the age of Paul Manafort, whose global democratic-perversion tour took him from buffing the image of the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in the nineteen-eighties, to running Trump’s campaign, or to fighting a fraud case for allegedly laundering his fees from the Ukrainian kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovych. But there was something shocking about the stark double identity of this posh “Old Etonian,” as all the British papers call Nix, who presented himself as a big-data wizard at marketing events but proposed basic gangsterism to clients in private. And in the same spiffy suit.

Watching the video makes you understand that the ethical difference between outright electoral corruption and psychographics is largely a matter of degree. Both are shortcuts that warp the process into something small and dirty. You don’t need to believe Cambridge Analytica’s own hype about the persuasive power of its methods to worry about how data-obsessed political marketing can undermine democracy. The model of the voter as a bundle of psychological vulnerabilities to be carefully exploited reduces people to mathematical inputs. The big debates about values and policies that campaigns are supposed to facilitate and take part in are replaced by psychographically derived messages targeted to ever-tinier slivers of voters who are deemed by an algorithm to be persuadable. The organization of all of online life by data-mining operations makes this goal seem attainable, while an industry of data scientists and pollsters pitch it as inevitable. Candidates, voters, and pundits, enthralled with the geek’s promise of omniscience, rush to buy in—at least until it’s used by someone they don’t like. Cambridge Analytica is as much a symptom of democracy’s sickness as its cause.

• Adrian Chen joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016.