In a stunning revelation, Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim told a crowd of young professionals that former premier Mahathir Mohamad had given him an option to quit, or face trumped-up charges that would disgrace and force him out of government.
Then the country's Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar had been riding high and was even more popular than his boss in their Umno party and amongst the Malay community.
Datuk Nakhaie Ahmad,this what your
Bastardised Muslim Former prime minister
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad did
Bastardised Muslim Former prime minister
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad did
Anwar was also Finance minister and had impressed global bodies such as World Bank and IMF. This created the first discordant note between the two men, who had actually held each other in high esteem before their falling out.
A little later as the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 wreaked its full havoc on the region, Anwar's reluctance to bail out a firm controlled by one Mahathir's sons was the last straw.
“Mahathir told me - you have wife, a family, it is better if you resign voluntarily, if not charges will be brought against you,” Anwar told a dialogue on Sunday.
Anwar also revealed that Mahathir had offered him some financial compensation if he quit voluntarily. But he chose to stand his ground and fight.
“It was the only time I spoke harshly to him," said Anwar, adding that despite the hardships he and his family suffered, he has forgiven Mahathir.
Najib betrayed Anwar in 1998 and again in 2008
The rest is history. Sad history to be precise.Malaysia has been the worse for wear for that tumultous sacking. It split UMNO down the line and divided the Malay community. While time has blurred the bitterness, the community is still haunted and polarized by Mahathir's unfortunate decision.
After slapping on a curfew, Mahathir then announced to the country that Anwar had been sacked from the government. He did not give reasons that night but speculation had swirled in the months leading to that fateful day in September 1998 that Anwar had allegedly sodomised his wife's driver.
At an emergency UMNO Supreme Council meeting held to endorse the sacking and also to chop Anwar from the party, Mahathir was pelted with eggs and rotten fruit. He was the most unpopular man in the country.
Leaders, like current defense minister Zahid Hamidi, who were close to Anwar were detained amid fears they might swing a revolt against Mahathir. At that time, even current deputy premier Muhyiddin Yassin was an Anwar supporter and the first to visit him at his home on hearing the shock news.
It was Najib Razak, whom Anwar had previously endorsed for the post of UMNO Youth chief, who betrayed him.
Najib agreed to throw his weight behind Mahathir and rally the other Supreme Council members behind the older man. For his support, Mahathir has made sure that Najib became Deputy Prime Minister and now, the Prime Minister.
Feelers in 2004
In 2004, just months after Mahathir finally retired, the Federal Court overturned the fabricated sodomy charges against Anwar. He was freed in 2004 after spending 6 years in jail.
He has told the press many times that after so many years in jail, he wanted to spend time with his family. He also went overseas to get his bad back cured and took up teaching posts at Oxford and a prestigious university in Washington.
But there were surely political considerations as well.
"I'm seen to be a threat. What else? Say I retire tomorrow, do you think they would proceed with all this? Say I retired in 2004 after my release (from prison), that was the only time feelers were sent to me, whether I could re-join Umno. Do you think we would have this now?" Anwar told a news portal recently.
He was referring to the second round of sodomy charges that Najib slapped on him in 2008 and the sex video scandal that mysteriously cropped up two months ago, thanks to three Umno members with close ties to Mahathir and Najib.
Anwar has denied involvement in both cases. In Sodomy II, he has accused Najib and wife Rosmah of hatching the conspiracy so that Najib could secure the premiership. The charges emerged just weeks after Anwar announced his decision to return to active politics and make a comeback to Parliament.
As for the sex video, close-ups have shown distinct differences between Anwar and the man filmed having intercourse with a sex worker.
the aftermath of the 12th General Election, UMNO couldn’t wait to boot out Abdullah Badawi. Najib was promptly installed as the 6thPrime Minister and Najib’s brain child 1Malaysia started to make its rounds.
Malaysians couldn’t make sense of 1Malaysia at the time, and everyone had its own interpretation of the 1Malaysia concept. Still appearing occasionally on TV, a very professional, well-made advertisement expounding the 1Malaysia concept is now greeted with snickers by sceptical Malaysians.
Almost at the same time Perkasa came along, and until today it has not stopped exhibiting the opposite traits of the 1Malaysia concept. Religious clerics like Muslim convert Ridhuan Tee, Nakhaie Ahmad and lately Kazim Elias seem to be oblivious of the concept as they go about preaching the message of hate to the Muslims.
Even Najib's deputy Muhyiddin Yassin seems to be sceptical, attesting that he is Malay first, and then Malaysian.
Why are these people not supportive of 1Malaysia? Their messages of hate have distinct elements of Racism and Religious bigotry. And yet Najib’s Government is ignoring them like the plague. Perhaps Najib doesn't realize that with the expensive campaign to promote 1Malaysia, it was actually starting to stick with Malaysians, and if he had walked the talk on his concept, it would have attracted many Malaysians to support his Government?
But no, he chose to two-time the people. And the rest is now history.
Not champions but hate-criminals
Crawling out from the woodwork is now an alarming stream of mad-men, who are busily trying to outdo each to be the best race-champion for the Malays, the toughest anti-Chinese and anti-Indian basher, the most extremist Islamic zealot, or in short the greatest bully and hate-criminal in town.
The contrast is simply amazing. On one hand, Malaysians clearly see the 1Malaysia concept as a shining beacon of hope for peace and harmony, but on the other hand, a ravaging hate-campaign is being waged to destabilize the nation and demoralize its people.
We must ask ourselves, the question: “do the non-Malay citizens in this country deserve such treatment?” Is Najib’s government taking sides?
Kazim’s latest call to the Malays not to give up a single inch of ground and to warn off the Indians and the Chinese from 'encroaching' on Malay rights is a severe blow to the 1Malaysia concept. Najib's government is seen as impotent to address such blatant disregard for the Rights of all citizens in the country. The non-Malays are perceived as being bullied into submitting to a raw deal.
We recall the incident of a Chinese reporter detained under the ISA, when she accurately reported the seditious comments made by a Penang UMNO leader. The nation was aghast at how such an anomaly could exist in this country. Another Malaysian Chinese artiste, Namewee, was also sucked into this racial quagmire. His silly Videos on Youtube were severely reprimanded by the Government, although to many other Malaysians, there was nothing wrong with them.
Kazim’s statements, if anyone bothers to watch his video, seem rather severe and is an outright humiliation to the non-Malay citizens in this country.
What sort of message will the Perak Palace send
Coming from Ipoh in Perak, Kazim Elias Al Hafiz is the chairman of the Pusat Pendidiakan Al Barakah, a religious educational establishment. Along with Harrusani, the Mufti of Perak, they are seen as men of religious controversies.
Sometime back, Harrusani called for a Fatwa( Religious Ruling) on Cigarette Smoking which were later downplayed by the authorities. Harrusani also made claims that Muslims were being converted and baptized in a Church Ceremony, which again turned out to be a false alarm.
Harussani, who has been called The Mad Mullah of Perak, has also alleged that an untold number of Muslims were being converted to Christianity. In the recent Bibles controversy, he made known his displeasure and “fears” about the Christians winning 'unwarranted' position in the country. Another famous controversy was the Fatwa on the Poco-Poco Dance, which dismayed many Malays in the country.
The Mufti is the head of Islam in a state. Appointed by the Sultan’s Office he is responsible for Islamic matters concerning the State of Perak. While Sultan Azlan Shah and Prince Nazrin of Perak exudes a liberal and moderate outlook, occasionally making public speeches that support a moderate society, it has been silent on Harussani and now Kazim.
All eyes - even those of the non-Muslims - are on whether the Perak Palace will chide Kazim’s unwarranted and extreme outburst. Or will Sultan Azlan follow in the footsteps of his Selangor counterpart and reward them.
In Selangor, former JAIS director Khusrin Munawi was elevated to State Secretary despite his lack of qualification and the fact that there were many other better candidates. But then Khusrin's advantage is that he is an UMNO die-hard, who in the past has created many racial and religious controversies as well as spats.
A fast-dying Malaysian Dream
Recently, Kazim accused the non-Malays of taking advantage of the 'grace' offered by the Malays. He went on to reprimand them for questioning Malay Supremacy, indirectly enslaving the Malays with his brand of seige mentality. He gave vivid although shallow examples of Malay soldiers slugging it out in the jungles defending the country, while the Chinese party away the whole night long and drinking haram alcohol like fishes.
Ignorant characters such as Kazim should be reprimanded and chastised for spreading the message of Hate, intolerance, discrimination and bigotry. There should be no double standards anywhere in Malaysia. It is really unacceptable in this multi-racial and multi-cultural society of ours.
Malaysians should have the right to visit our Non Muslim neighbours to celebrate Christmas, Chinese New Year, Deepavali and Hari Raya without feeling the least peculiar. We must learn to let go our animosity, fear and jealousy of each other and instead learn to embrace each other as equal citizens.
This is what the Malaysian Dream is all about.
How does fear alter memory? A new study reveals that it can literally change our perception, a process that may help researchers better understand post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), other anxiety disorders and possibly conditions like autism.
Researchers have long known that fear doesn't tend to stay restricted to one type of scary experience. For example, the sound of a backfiring car may make a combat veteran dive for cover, even though he knows he's no longer on the battlefield and even though the sound he heard is different from actual gunfire.
Or a childhood run-in with a vicious German shepherd could translate into a fear of all dogs, even tiny Chihuahuas.
(More on TIME.com: What Annoys You? An Examination of the Little Things That Drive Us Bananas)
The new research, published in Nature Neuroscience, sought to explore this "generalization" of fear and its connection with learning. Emotional experience typically improves learning — that's why you remember your first love better than first grade.
But in the case of fear, the brain seems to say "better safe than sorry." Rather than fine-tuning the connections you make while under the influence of emotion, fear instead reduces your ability to discriminate between potential threats, impairing learning about them.
In the study, led by Rony Paz and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, 25 participants were exposed to either a pleasant or repellant scent in conjunction with a musical tone. The group that was exposed to the pleasant smell rapidly learned which tone signaled the smell and which ones didn't — and also to distinguish between the predictive tone and similar tones that were slightly higher or lower.
While this group improved their ability to identify the target tone by about 25%, the group that smelled the nasty stuff saw their performance on the task fall by about the same amount. And the more the participants disliked the scent, the worse their performance was. A similar effect was found when the tones were paired with other sounds (like the unpleasant noise of metal scraping against metal). The effect was still measurable a day later.
(More on TIME.com: Why Pot Smokers Are Paranoid)
Interestingly, an earlier study found that in some situations, fear makes sensory discrimination better. The authors write:
[I]t seems reasonable that some stimuli should be better discriminated following aversive learning, such as the smell of a cat versus that of a lion, whereas others are better off not discriminated, such as the roar of one lion versus that of another.
Either way, this research suggests that fear changes not only our reactions to experiences, but also our perceptions of the world itself. It suggests that people with PTSD may literally unable to distinguish perceptually between threatening and non-threatening situations; the same may be true in other anxiety disorders. Some theories of autism also suggest that people with the disorder are more likely than non-autistic people to generalize fear and to learn to fear situations more rapidly.
(More on TIME.com: Psychiatrist Phillip Resnick on Why Parents Kill Their Own Kids)
Understanding how to reduce the generalization of fear, either with behavioral therapies or medications, may help treat people with these various disorders, and possibly allow them to see (and hear) the world as a less threatening place. For others, who knows — it may help us get better at tuning out politicians and scare-mongering media and prevent them from dulling our senses.
On Jan. 27, Julie Powers, 50, a mother of two in Tampa, drove her 13-year-old son, Beau, home from soccer practice and allegedly shot him in the head "for talking back" to her. Then she went upstairs and shot Calyx, her 16-year-old daughter dead as she sat at her computer doing her homework, according to an arrest affidavit. At the time, her husband was serving in Qatar as an army colonel. Powers said her kids were "mouthy."
But what kind of parent would possibly murder her own children for mouthing off? TIME spoke with Dr. Phillip Resnick, director of forensic psychiatry at Case Western and a leading expert on parents who kill their children. He testified for the defense in the case of Andrea Yates, who was convicted in 2002 of drowning her five children in the bathtub. The murder conviction was later overturned and she was found to be not guilty by reason of insanity — as Resnick had argued. (More on Time.com: Five Ways to Stop Stressing)
Over the course of his 40-year career, Resnick has worked on 40 to 60 cases involving parents who killed their children. Although he cannot offer a mental diagnosis or legal opinion in the Powers' case, he can discuss the motivations of parents who kill and what we know about them. About 250 to 300 children are murdered by their parents each year.
Does this seem to be a typical case of a mother who kills her children?
It's aytpical. Younger children are much more likely to be killed than teenagers. If a child is killed for being "mouthy," the remark that came out here, that's more likely to lead to fatal battering. [Usually, in such cases,] a 3-to-5-year-old is thrown against a wall in an overzealous attempt at discipline and dies — as opposed to [a parent] planning to kill and shooting them with a gun.
You have identified five main circumstances in which parents kill their children.
The first is "altruistic." The classic case is the mother who plans to take her own life and believes that the children are better off in heaven with her. Number Two is the case in which the parent is acutely psychotic. The third type is fatal battering [as described above]. The fourth is [to get rid of] an unwanted baby, for example an infant born out of wedlock. The final category is spousal revenge, [in which a parent kills the children to hurt the partner], typically after infidelity.
What we know so far about the Florida woman doesn't fit easily into any of these categories. If the children were much younger, it could be maltreatment, but at this age, that does not fit how it usually works. My guess is that eventually we will have a much better picture. It might be very severe depression. It might be [that she thought they were] possessed by a demon. A lot more will come out than just this idea that you kill a kid because he's mouthy.
I've read that mothers who kill their older children are likely to be married and employed, which was the case here and seems kind of strange to me.
Mothers with preschool children are less likely to be employed [than those with teenagers, so it could just reflect the population]. A single mother is more likely to be overwhelmed because there's no one to help, but that's with younger children. The newspaper said [that classmates and teachers described the children as] polite and good students. It is not an example of delinquent kids who are out of control and the mother doesn't know what to do with them. (More on Time.com: Health Check-Up: Kids and Mental Health)
I've also read that murders of older children are more likely to be extremely violent.
Actually, the degree of violence depends very much on the child. A 3-year-old you can easily strangle or overdose. Teens are not going to cooperate in being killed so the use of a knife or gun is more necessary. In some cases of fathers who kill teenagers there has been a real standoff and hostility, but for mothers that's not the usual pattern. I would not say the method of death expresses rage — it's just what's needed to take the life of older children.
Any speculation about what might have happened here?
[Again,] my hunch is that a lot more is going to come out than this early statement, which sounds outrageous. Either we will find out that she was either depressed or psychotic, or something else is cooking.
As I understand it, there was a note left that said she planned to kill herself after killing the children, so the question becomes: was the primary issue that she was going to take her own life and then decided to take the children's lives, or did she decide to take the children's lives first and couldn't go on after that?
Fathers are more likely to wipe out the whole family. In 95% of those cases, the fathers are the killer. The father may feel, I can't support my family, I'm responsible for them, I'll take all of them out with me. Whereas [murders by a] mother with this age children are "altruistic — they murder out of love, not out of hate — and they genuine believe that they are doing the children a favor. [But if that was the case here,] you would not expect the remark that they were "mouthy." If she did do it for that reason, you'd expect her to put a better face on it. (More on Time.com: Perspective on the Parenting Debate: Rich Parents Don't Matter?)
In one case I had, a woman killed a 3-year-old and herself. The note said, 'Bury us in one box, we belong together.' In that type, it's kind of an extended self [the mother sees the child as part of her]. It's not necessarily negative; the mother may well think of young children as extensions of herself and feel that her children would be lost without her. [She thinks that] even if the husband remarried, they'd have a mean stepmother and so the children would be better off with her in heaven.
I would not say there are religious motivations, but with religious people, the nature of the psychosis may encompass religious themes. Andrea Yates came to believe that her children were engaged in such bad behavior that they were going to end up in hell. She believed that she was doing them a favor by killing them before the age of accountability so that they could enter heaven.
But if you don't believe in heaven or hell, you wouldn't kill for those reasons...
Yes, a strong belief in the hereafter may have an influence.
Is there any way to prevent these types of crimes?
It's a complicated question. There are broad issues, such as easier access to mental health care, which is a problem right now with state cutbacks becoming severe. Another thing is awareness. If a woman is very depressed and she has young children and makes a suicide attempt, there is 1-in-20 chance that she will try to take the kid with her. Specific inquiries about thoughts of harm toward children should occur in any evaluation of a seriously depressed [mother]. (More on Time.com: Jared Loughner: Fear-Mongering and the Mentally Ill)
Have you had any cases similar to this one?
There was the case of 10-year-old [and a younger child, whose mother attempted to kill them both.] The mother was found legally insane. She was psychotic. She was severely depressed and then had this sudden belief that this is what she had to do. She did it with a knife, very suddenly, and then called the police after she stayed overnight with her dead child. There was no effort to flee. It wasn't like, I'm going to kill the children and take off and have a good life. She was a physician and she was married to a physician. One of the children survived the knifing.
Are these parents mostly sent to mental institutions because they use the insanity defense — or do they go to prison?
The vast majority of parents who kill their children go to prison rather than mental institutions. I just saw an article written by the FBI: for women who kill their children and are not found insane, the mean length of their prison sentence is 17 years; in women who kill newborns, the mean length is 9 years. However, out of all homicide [perpetrators], none have a higher incidence of being found insane than mothers who kill their children.
Killing newborns is much more common than killing older children.
As far as death by homicide goes, you're more likely to be killed on the day you are born than on any other day of your life.
Are these mothers dangerous to people other than their own children?
They are not a general danger to the community. There are infanticide laws in 22 countries, including England, Canada and Australia — instead of women being charged with murder, [if the child is] under 1 year old, they are charged with infanticide. In the U.K., the vast majority get probation rather than prison. The recidivism rate is very low. The risk of suicide is substantial, however. (More on Time.com: Arizona Shooting: Are Gaps in Mental Health Care Coverage to Blame?)
Is the bad economy likely to lead to more of these cases?
Suicide does increase some when there are more people losing their jobs, so there might be little an increase in familicide where the father is unemployed. As far as mothers go, if she's the sole support, I don't know if that will increase.
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