Malaysia LAH

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Thursday 20 September 2012

Dilema Perang Dingin Blogger Umno?

Dilema Perang Dingin Blogger Umno?

Wednesday 12 September 2012

‘Cop punched me, hurled racist insult’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m60Lsm25kYI&feature=player_embedded
http://malaysia-police-brutality.blogspot.com/2012/04/styleheight-390px-width-640px-namemovie.html

‘Cop punched me, hurled racist insult’

 

 

 

 

Name
 Age
 Date 
 Circumstance of abuse
Aw Yuen Wei
30
12th April 2012
A wireman claimed that he was assaulted by a traffic policeman on Thursday at a roadblock in Kota Kemuning. the policeman was angry at his explanation and started hurling vulgarities at him, even calling him “Cina babi” ( Chinese Pig). Aw then re-entered his van when the policeman punched his right shoulder. Unknown to the officer, Aw’s video recorder was switched on and the entire melee was recorded. 

27 YEARS IN THE SHADOWS: Koon Swan was a victim of Umno's "black hand" - Jui Meng

Wednesday, 12 September 2012 00:53

27 YEARS IN THE SHADOWS: Koon Swan was a victim of Umno's "black hand" - Jui Meng

Written by  Wong Choon Mei, Malaysia Chronicle     


UPDATED Former MCA president Tan Koon Swan was a victim of Umno's "black hand" and the Malaysian Chinese should cheer the recent admission by Singapore's former public prosecutor that Koon Swan had been wrongly charged and jailed because it vindicates the community as a whole.
"Koon Swan was the fastest rising Chinese leader. He held in his hand the hope and aspirations of the entire community. They trusted him implicitly. His youthfulness and dynamism set him a class above the other leaders. This is why he became a target of the Umno elite - for the tremendous hope he brought to the Chinese," PKR vice president Chua Jui Meng told Malaysia Chronicle.
"Like Anwar Ibrahim in 90s, Koon Swan in the 80s represented reform in all sectors - a more equitable economy, society and educational opportunities. He was a brilliant man and for this, Umno chopped him down cruelly. Koon Swan was publicly mutilated, his reputation was smashed to smithereens. Why? Because he did not toe the line set by the Umno bosses and they feared his power and influence over the Chinese."
Accomplices in greed
Indeed, amongst those who follow the political development of the Malaysian Chinese, grousing at the injustice heaped upon Koon Swan is not new. The bitterness was widespread and deep but in the 1980s, former premier Mahathir Mohamad ruled with a fist of iron, freely using the Internal Security Act and Sedition laws to jail political opponents and shut out criticism.
His greatest accomplices were former Finance minister Daim Zainuddin and the mainstream media, which continuously churned out stories to portray the situation that Mahathir deemed most useful to his plans. It did not help that Mahathir refused to grant licenses to independent press organizations, and until the advent of the Internet, news that carried a neutral or pro-Opposition picture did not exist in Malaysia.
Koon Swan was labelled as a vile traitor who not only betrayed his community but also swindled their poor, many of whom lost their life savings when the MCA-linked co-operatives they placed money with crumbled.
"The truth is always stranger than fiction and God moves in mysterious ways. No one expected Glenn Knight to show remorse and to write about all his old cases. And Glenn did not just mention Koon Swan but also other big cases he prosecuted on behalf of his government. Maybe Singapore didn't like a dynamic young leader who can rival the likes of Lee Kuan Yew. It reacted harshly and threw the book at Koon Swan. I was in Singapore with him at that time and we approached a UK law expert who told us Koon Swan had solid grounds to fight the Singapore case but in the end he buckled," said Jui Meng.
"He could not take the pressure. We will never know what else he and his family were threatened with until they tell us, but for sure he was a victim and it was Umno which led the push to crucify and to bury him. This is the history that Malaysian Chinese, especially the young, must know. Koon Swan's record on the Pan-El incident and how he was forced to give up the MCA presidency must be set straight. I am not trying to make him a hero. He had his scandals but he did not betray the Chinese. For years, his jailing has been used a mark of shame to show that Chinese leaders betrayed their people especially the poor. Many in the MCA did do that but not all. Each time, Umno wanted to crow over the Chinese, they would point the finger at Koon Swan and Pan-El. Now, the truth is out loud and clear - it was not him. It was the Umno elite and apart from politics, there was greed. They wanted the money in the MCA and its crown jewel Multi-Purpose Holdings Bhd."
Black mark on the community lifted

Jui Meng, a former MCA vice president and Health Minister, was responding to the uproar raised by Glenn Knight's recently published book "Glenn Knight: The Prosecutor". The former top legal eagle admitted he had wrongly prosecuted Koon Swan in the 1985 Pan El Industries case.
Glenn said he felt pained for putting Koon Swan behind bars on discovering his mistake years later, and he had since apologised to Koon Swan. The admission made the top news in all the major Chinese papers in Malaysia.
Koon Swan was slapped with 15 charges of fraud, cheating, stock market manipulation and abetment of criminal breach of trust (CBT) in the collapse of Pan El. He was sentenced to 18 months jail and fined S$500,000 (RM1.2 million) upon conviction in 1986.
Despite quitting as the MCA president and serving out his Singapore sentence, the Malaysian authorities were not appeased. He was jailed again when he returned and made a bankrupt as well.
"It was the worst humiliation for any man to endure but Koon Swan bore his cross with courage and dignity. He was 10 years too early, but we hope he will speak out now. In 1998, Anwar was in a better position to fight back against guys like Mahathir and Daim. Even still, look at how he suffered, I really take my hat off to Anwar," said Jui Meng.
"Perhaps now, Malaysians can understand how much courage it takes to fight the evil in our political system. When I talk about the the fight between Good and Evil, I can sense some people think I am exaggerating. But make no mistake, the fight is still on and in fact at the very peak. Malaysians must reject Evil in Umno-BN. They must always choose to follow the light and never darkness."
Paving the way for assets to be sold cheaply?
Jui Meng slammed the "vindictiveness" of the Mahathir administration for the second-round of punishment inflicted on Koon Swan. He believes that it was not only to ensure that the disgraced MCA president could never make any political comeback but to pave the way for the takeover and asset-stripping of the MCA companies and properties.
"Multi-Purpose was a huge conglomerate that could affect East Asian markets. It held the Malaysian French Bank, Bandaraya, large tracts of plantations and estates. It also had shipping interests. Yet Ling Liong Sik who took over as the new MCA president had to sell it off for a mere RM500 million. It was easily worth several times more," said Jui Meng.
"Who was behind the purchase? Many have alleged it was Daim because he had Mahathir's ear at that time. In the Umno style of those days, the word was spread to the Malays through the vernacular papers and the grapevine that the Malay community would benefit from Koon Swan's fall. But I think the only people who gained were the Umno elite. Their greed got worse and worse until Daim himself has been accused of taking Umno's assets and keeping these for himself. It is a classic example of the political and economic hegemony the Umno elite has enforced on the rakyat (people)."
Cowed and demoralized
Now 72, Koon Swan made his political debut, winning a parliamentary seat in Raub, Pahang. The following year, he was elected to the party's Central Committee and appointed Chairman of MCA Wilayah Persekutuan State Liaison Committee. In 1982 he clinched a landslide victory in the Damansara parliamentary seat, beating the Opposition in their fortress.
In 1984, he was appointed as vice-president of the MCA. However, he was soon sacked from this post along with 13 other members for urging the party to investigate its member records for the presence of non-existent people, an issue that had sparked off factionalism and crisis within the MCA. Koon Swan and the other 13 were all reinstated two months later with the support of 1,600 MCA members in an extraordinary general meeting.
In November 1985, Koon Swan was voted as president of the MCA, winning 76.9% of the votes cast, the largest majority in the party's history, and the first challenger since 1954 to win national leadership.
Koon Swan was then at the height of his popularity, symbolizing a new breed of Chinese leaders - smart, savvy and people-oriented. The Chinese community was indeed riding high buoyed by the enormous economic clout wielded by the MCA and talented Chinese leaders such as Koon Swan, who tapped and leveraged on the overseas diaspora, using to the fullest advantage powerful business contacts in both Hong Kong and China.
Regarded as a financial wizard Koon Swan also originated the Deposit-Taking Cooperatives or DTCs, which sought to accumulate capital for the Malaysian Chinese through investments. But with the onset of the 1985-86 recession triggered by plunging world oil and palm oil prices plus Koon Swan's own troubles, mismanagement of the DTCs' funds led to a scandal with the central Bank Negara stepping in to freeze the assets of up to 35 DTCs. The total loss was estimated to be RM3.6 billion, and the depositors only recovered 62% of their deposits.
The Pan-El case and its outcome not only changed his fate and the MCA's but also greatly impacted on the Malaysian Chinese community. They were visibly demoralized and cowed by his jailing. Many turned against him and his second wife Penny Chang, blaming them for the hard times sparked by the DTCs' fall and the slide in the economy, which contracted by 1.2% in 1985.
Pardon
Pan El's collapse also caused the Singapore and Malaysian stock markets to halt trading for three days. The high-profile Pan El case resulted in Glenn Knight being awarded the Public Administration Gold Medal.
In the book, the 63-year-old Glenn had written about the many high-profile cases he handled. He said that in 1996, a case similar to Koon Swan's came up for hearing and Singapore Chief Justice Yong Pung How "concluded that I was wrong to charge Tan for the offence".
“It was extremely painful for me to suddenly discover that the Singapore courts had got it wrong. It was a highly significant case that led to enforceable regulations being introduced into Singapore's stockbroking industry. As Koon Swan was the head of the MCA, I put up a paper on his involvement in the Pan-El saga but left it to my superiors to decide his fate as he was out of (Singapore) and in Malaysia. In the end, the government decided that the CAD could prosecute Koon Swan,” Glenn wrote.
“Chief Justice Yong was of the opinion that the section I had charged Koon Swan with was wrong in law for we could not charge a person for stealing from a company because as a director, it was not a breach of the law in that sense. Chief Justice Yong concluded that it was wrong to convict anyone for stealing money if the wrong charge had been used to begin with. The judgment shattered my belief in our legal system. In the United Kingdom, such a landmark judgment would have set aside Koon Swan's conviction but our jurisprudence does not allow for this though technically, Koon Swan could still have been granted a pardon."
Glenn also told of how he apologized to Koon Swan in 2010. He said Koon Swan was very emotional on hearing the matter.
In 1991, Glenn himself was charged with CBT and later jailed in Singapore. He was struck off from practising law in 1994 but was reinstated in the Law Society of Singapore in 2007.
As for Koon Swan, who is currently overseas, he has said he would decline comment until he has read Glenn's book.
Malaysia Chronicle

English as an Islamic language

Thursday, 13 September 2012 09:10

English as an Islamic language         

The "mosque," the English rendition of the Arabic masjid, is commonly defined as "a building used for public worship by Muslims" (Merriam Webster); "a Muslim place of worship" (Oxford English Dictionary); or "a building in which Muslims worship" (Macmillan).
In each of these renditions, the word masjid is translated and explained in terms familiar to the English reader. In other cases, ostensible English equivalents are offered directly: thus iman becomes "belief; kufr, "disbelief; salat, "prayer"; and so on.
All these cases of word-to-word translation presume that the semantic fields of each paired keyword are proximate. In the case of the masjid/mosque pair, however, no pre-existing word could be found in English, and hence even the translated word needs explanation ("a Muslim place of worship").
For most contexts, the underlying presumptions sustaining these renditions (an equivalence model of translation, an originary unity of languages, parallel histories of language) do hold. As soon as one begins asking critical questions, however, the entire edifice starts to crumble. The case of the masjid is instructive.
A "place of worship" was traditionally understood to be a place consecrated to the worship of God, an inviolable place with its own etiquettes and indeed a legal code of conduct. While this may still be true in certain parts of the world, the general category "place of worship" today includes spaces ranging from urban yoga meditation centers to new-age temples, some of them having nothing to do with God. Thus the specific content of the definition of "mosque" is vitiated through generalization.
The need to present Islamic texts in English is, however, not limited to the translations of the Qur'an; it covers the entire spectrum of Islamic sciences. It is this need that calls for a concerted effort to develop English as an "Islamic language," suitable to render key Islamic concepts into English without having to use excessive italicization, transliteration, or explanatory notes. One way to do this is through a massive infusion of Arabic terms into English. This is how other languages were made "Islamic" and how English has already started to become a suitable language for Islamic texts: Hajj, Ramadan, and Jihad, for instance, no longer need italicization.

The problems of Arabic-English translation only intensify when dealing with the technical terms of the Qur'an. The above examples of iman, kufr, and salat do not have neatly parallel semantic fields in English; when translated into "belief," "disbelief," and "prayer," they become generic renderings that do not adequately express the Qur'anic conceptual framework to those who do not already have it in mind. This is neither a new problem, nor something specific to Arabic-English translations. Even the other so-called "Islamic languages" have historically had to cope with the issue of translation of Qur'anic terminology, each in its own way.
The case of Persian is perhaps the most instructive. When Islam came to Persia, there was already a conceptually rich religious structure to the language. Thus when the Persians first started to use the word "khuda" for Allah, they had to dissociate their new Qur'anic concepts of God from their prior beliefs, reconfiguring the semantic map of Persian. It took time and effort, but three generations later no Persian-speaking Muslim had to struggle with discursive schizophrenia: "khuda" was now a patently Islamic word.

This metamorphosis of the Persian language had precedent in Arabic itself: the Qur'an declares that God Himself chose clear Arabic ('arabiyyun mubin) as the language of His final revelation to humanity, and it consecrated the language by dissociating pagan concepts from its vocabulary.
The Islamic tradition thus regards the Qur'anic intervention in the history of Arabic language as conferring upon things their essential reality according to Divine Knowledge, their objective existence in creation, and their legal value among human beings. The Qur'an made full use of the resources of the Arabic language but transformed the language of the pagan Arabs as it reclaimed primordial truths in their own language. Allah was not, now, one deity among others, but the one and only.
Moreover, as Toshihiko Izutsu has convincingly argued, if we compare the Qur'anic vocabulary with pre-Islamic Arabic, we immediately notice that there is "one supreme focus-word, Allah, which presides not only over one particular semantic field within the vocabulary, but over the entire vocabulary comprising all the semantic fields, that is, all the smaller conceptual systems that fall under it."
Given the unsurpassable hiatus between the Divine language of the Qur'an and conventional human discourse, it remains impossible to adopt an equivalence model of translation for rendering the Qur'an in any language. The same applies, to a lesser extent, when rendering isolated Qur'anic terms. If translations of such terms are not to lose their richness in the process, they must simultaneously transform the semantic structures of the receiving language--as was successfully done in the case of languages such as Persian and Old Malay after Islam came to the regions where these languages were spoken. In other cases, new languages developed with already built-in Islamic semantic structures based on Arabic and even Persian, as was the case with Urdu.
What, then, are the prospects for English as an Islamic language? Or are Islam and Muslims forever to remain "foreigners" in this global language? According to a recent survey, 375 million human beings speak English as their first language, an equal number as their second language, and about 750 million as a foreign language.
This massive number (1.5 billion) of English speakers of course includes Muslims as well as non-Muslims. English is the official language of several Muslim countries and is unofficially the preferred language of the educated elite in others. In addition, the presence of large number of Muslims outside their traditional lands has led to a flowering of Islamic literature in English as well as other European languages.
These emerging realities of the twenty-first century have historical roots, and one way of evaluating the use of English for Islamic literature is by surveying English translations of the Qur'an.
The earliest known translation of the Qur'an into English is The Alcoran of Mahomet (1649) by Alexander Ross, who translated it from the French translation L'Alcoran de Mahomet (1647) by Sieur du Ryer. It was, however, George Sale's 1734 translation, Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed, which was to remain the most widely available English translation over the next 200 years (it is still in print!), although it was followed by John Rodwell's The Koran (1861) and Palmer's two-volume translation (1880).

Beginning in the twentieth century, however, Qur'an translations saw a major change in that Muslims themselves started to produce the majority of English renderings of the Divine text. This is not surprising, given the larger context of the twentieth century politics, large-scale migrations, and cross-civilizational currents.
The need to present Islamic texts in English is, however, not limited to the translations of the Qur'an; it covers the entire spectrum of Islamic sciences. It is this need that calls for a concerted effort to develop English as an "Islamic language," suitable to render key Islamic concepts into English without having to use excessive italicization, transliteration, or explanatory notes.
One way to do this is through a massive infusion of Arabic terms into English. This is how other languages were made "Islamic" and how English has already started to become a suitable language for Islamic texts: Hajj, Ramadan, and Jihad, for instance, no longer need italicization, even though not all who read these words understand their correct meaning in the full sense.
The same needs to be done with other key terms that cannot be translated--so that one might simply write "zakat," for instance, initially accompanied by explanatory comments if necessary, but without resorting to awkward renditions that are ultimately inadequate. This effort can be popularized through various media and web-based tools. It may take two or three generations to accomplish the task, but every journey becomes shorter with the first step and the first steps toward this task have already been taken.
A fuller understanding of the Islamic terms thus introduced into the English language will be realized in time, as more people inquire into the original meanings of these terms and as misreadings give way to Muslims representing themselves in English.
The need now is to establish a provisional list of key Islamic terms to be incorporated, initiating a process of creating an "Islamic English" suitable for the growing needs of Muslims and non-Muslims for Islamic texts in the English language. And Allah knows best.
-harakahdaily

http://malaysia-police-brutality.blogspot.com/


Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Death of Mr.Chandran in IPD Dang Wangi


Name
 Age
 Date 
 Circumstance of death
P.Chandran
unknown
10th September 2012
Death in custody. According Police officer ACP Zainuddin Ahmad, Mr.Chandran died because of chest pain but according to post mortem report he died in Hypertension heart disease. According to Mr.Gunalan (brother of Chandran) death body is seriously injured