SOME louts simply prefer to add insult to injury by throwing in the race card to the disgrace suffered by the Malaysian football team who were whitewashed 10-0 by the United Arab Emirates on Thursday. This state of affairs is not unlike the lament from former minister Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz over the weekend about leaders who racialise the country’s problems in order to avoid addressing issues raised by concerned Malaysians. Consider the comments below posted on the Internet and, for real effect, I have refrained from paraphrasing or editing them: “THE only saving face for Malaysia is to quit playing football altogether. The players are just not cut out to play football. Just look at the selection, almost totally of one ethnic group. Perhaps, they should concentrate on sepak takraw. Don’t play football just be’cause others are playing. One must have the courage to admit weaknesses, the 10 BIG EGGS bestowed by UAE is just what I have always expected from a school team.” “BRING back the REAL Malaysian team like in 1972... Dollah Kassim (sic), Mokhtar Dahari, Hassan Sani, James Wong, (Tauke) Soh Chin Aun, Santokh Singh, V. Arumugan (sic) etc... 100 per cent original mixed of multiracial... one of the top teams in Asia. Everything is going down now.... from ringgit to sports!” “LOOK at the composition of players and officials in our Malaysian team. We must have diversity in any organisation. Nevertheless, Malaysia has to reciprocate to their ‘good brothers’ from Middle East for the kind donation.” “DISCRIMINATION begins at primary school levels. Potential good playing kids are discouraged by selecting teachers for reasons best known to themselves. Even special schools despite providing all the facilities for sports and education have not delivered any football prodigies. Sports is defined by fair play and unbiased selection. If not jaguh kampung will return drubbed.” “WE won’t progress in any field without meritocratic values. Whether in business, education or sports, if we don’t emphasise on getting the best candidates for the job, the most we will be is a village champion or jaguh kampung.” The pathetic state of Malaysian football aside, they are undoubtedly racial taunts. I don’t have to dwell on the selection process or the racial breakdown of players in the national league in reply, but it has become a disturbing trend nowadays that when things go wrong, some of us prefer to see things in a racial slant. And when that happens, you get Newton’s Third Law of Reaction, like what is yielding now from events of late — the Chinese-dominated Bersih 4 rally, the mostly-Malay Merdeka Parade and the looming Red Shirts gathering of Malays to counter Bersih 4. So, where are we heading? But what is even more worrying is that efforts to foster greater harmony and unity are met with resistance and acrimony even before they could start. Take the “Bina Bangsa” nation-building module to be introduced in vernacular primary schools and national Chinese and Tamil primary schools. The rejection has come without even knowing the details. The module should be introduced to others, not Chinese schools, they say. Just because it is called Bina Bangsa (building the community), it is seen as a threat and in the face of polarisation, unfairly viewed as an attempt to indoctrinate and Malay-nise the pupils. Which is very disturbing, because the mess that the country is in now stems greatly from having a multistream national school system which is not practised anywhere else in the world. Still, despite what we are going through, the champions of the Chinese school system strongly insist that the language of instruction in schools does not determine national unity and they have been carrying this fight over the years despite thoughts to the contrary. In 1977, they fought for the Merdeka University for school-leavers from Chinese secondary schools. Even the courts rejected the proposal. Not long after that, the Chinese community vehemently protested a directive by the Kuala Lumpur Education Department to all Chinese-type schools to conduct school assemblies and formal functions in Malay. The order had to be later withdrawn. And in 1987, ethnic tension reached critical point when Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, the education minister then, announced the appointment of non-Mandarin-speaking teachers as headmasters and senior assistants in national-type Chinese primary schools. This again caused an uproar as it was seen as an attempt to change the nature of Chinese schools. So much for the obstinacy. And with the latest racial put-down in football, so much for national unity. The freelance writer is an award-winning columnis
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