... and a pinch of salt to taste.

How 'bout a little change of flavour today?

Recently a video link ended up on my desktop. I thought, oh what the heck, why not. You see, I don't entertain forwarded messages, spam, chain letters and the likes. But this one actually caught my attention. Attached to the video is a series of words that read "Hooliganism in UPM". Oh goody, this'll make my day. Click click.

wanna watch? => the video

A few minutes later, I was completely astounded with what I saw. A bunch of malay students seem to be harassing, albeit not physically, a bunch of chinese students. What the hell is going on here? Popping up into several Malaysian forums are the same video. All with strong message of racism in it. I had to dig a little deeper to actually understand what's going on.

Apparently a group of chinese students representing the so called Gerakan Mahasiswa Maju (GMM) organized a helpdesk in a cafetaria of some sort. GMM is a political body, backed by the opposition party DAP. Under AUKU, you'd have to have a permit to conduct any sort of activity under the political flag on campus grounds. And they don't.

Later, a bunch of Majlis Tertinggi Mahasiswa (MTM) arrived at the scene, apparently tipped off by someone, lead by its president. What supposed to be a mild confrontation became a full fledge verbal war when the GMM accuses MTM of being racist. This followed by an exchange of verbal insults intent to provoke violence.

All the while a few people from GMM have been taken video that we see.

Now here's the catch. The video is pretty choppy at best, and I started wondering what was cut out of the video. Eye witness accounts the GMM people have been throwing verbal insults at the MTM people. All we see in the video is their reaction. And yeah, they do look like a bunch of hooliganistic baloneys, jumping around a bunch of passive chinese students.

This is a sad case. One: provoking racial issues. Two: responding childishly to it.

All the while, this is just a clash of two political ideas, one happened to be malay, the other chinese. There were no racial tendencies here. If a malay driver crashed into a chinese driver, that doesn't make the racists, do they?

I really applaud the ingenuity of GMM distributing this video with intend of provoking racial issues. I heard this video have also popped up in forums based in HongKong and China with the tagline "Oppression of Malaysian Chinese". Nice try. Here's a tip: stop provoking racial tensions. Enough with minorities claiming they are discriminated. Fair enough, the 'hooligans' in UPM is a bunch of morons. That doesn't reflect on the whole race, does it?

I intend to help malays be better. But not at the expense of making other race look bad.