Spare us the godswallop (Malaysiakini)

Dean Johns

Dec 1, 10 11:24am

Judging by what I've heard of her, PKR president Dr Wan Azizah Wan   Ismail is as good and godly a human being as Allah ever put breath into. But I wish she'd spare us the kind of codswallop she sincerely but I think unwisely spouted in her speech to the PKR party when she praised her husband Anwar Ibrahim as a “great man who has been awarded by God to all of us to be our leader”.

For a start, it's a bit presumptuous to speak on God's behalf when you couldn't possible have the slightest idea of the Almighty's thoughts, intentions, ideas or ideals.

Like clerics and their flocks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and similar earthly paradises who imagine that God demands the death penalty for those accused of adultery, blasphemy, apostasy or whatever else they deem terminally sinful.

Or potentates like the Pope (right), who claims to be God's earthly mouthpiece in making such preposterous pronouncements as his recent one that the use of condoms is now okay for male prostitutes to use to protect their clients against HIV infection, but still against divine law for the prevention of unwanted conception.

And a second and even more compelling reason for never presuming to invoke the name of God in a political or any other profane context is that so many others do it, often in support or justification of immoral, malicious and vicious activities.

For example, for centuries in Europe, generations of monarchs ruled by so-called “divine right”, claiming with the collusion of “aristocratic” cronies and Christian clerics to be destined, appointed and anointed by God to lord it over their populations of hapless peasants and serfs.

“Nobiscum deus”, Latin for “God with us”, was the claim of both the Byzantine and late Roman empires, neither of them paragons of virtue. And in more recent times, “Gott mit uns”, or in obvious English translation “God with us”, was the motto of both the German Kaiser's army in World War 1, and Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht in World War 2.

Acting 'for the glory of God'

Then there's the contemporary fact that Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and many other murderous organisations of similar ilk claim to be acting for the glory of God, and imagine that if their members die in action they're assured of berths in heaven.

And ranged against them are the massive forces of the US, which confidently considers itself to be 'God's own country', and whose former President, George W Bush (left), is on record as declaring that God advised him to invade Iraq.

God apparently has great faith in the US currency, too, as it bears the legend “In God we trust”, thus explaining perhaps why it's often referred to as 'the almighty dollar'. Though whether God had any hand in the sub-prime mortgage scandals and ensuing financial meltdown is a question that hasn't apparently yet occurred to America's fundamentalist true-believers.

Admittedly the North Korean regime doesn't attempt to pin its paranoid persecution of its own people or its poisonous posturing towards its neighbours on God, but that's only because successive members of the Kim dynasty appear to believe that they are God.

Unlike the supreme rulers of Iran and other theocracies, who apparently realise they're not actually divine, but presume to play God by threatening to finish the job that the “Gott mit uns” Nazis tried but finally failed to do on the Jews.

But we don't have to go global to find examples of the dubious company Wan Azizah puts herself in by publicly politicising God's name.

In Malaysia, as everybody knows, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak was moved to swear to God on the Quran that he never met or had any dealings with the Mongolian 'model', Altantuya Shaariibuu, who was gruesomely murdered following her alleged involvement with the Scorpene submarine purchase by the Defence Ministry for which Najib was responsible at the time.

Which has me wondering, how could the self-same God who Wan Azizah assures us “awarded” Malaysians Anwar Ibrahim to be their leader believe a word that Najib tells him, let alone tolerate half a century of corrupt and criminal rule by Umno/Barisan Nasional?

Despite its sanctimonious claims to be the champions of Malays and thus Muslims, this gang of crooks would be a disgrace to any race or religion.

Systematically stealing untold billions in cash, land, timber, shares and whatever else it can get its claws on, and covering up its crimes by corrupting the country's judiciary, co-opting the nation's media and civil services, and condoning the criminalisation of the police to the point that countless killings in custody and fake 'shoot-outs' continue to occur and go unpunished.

Ungodly idols of power and profit

As I've mentioned before, however many times a day Malaysia's Umnoputras claim to pray, they seem to have no qualms whatever about preying on the populace. And whatever lengths they go to in their efforts to make it appear that they respect the Prophet, all they really worship are the ungodly idols of power and profit.

In fact they appear to have interpreted the old saying “God helps those who help themselves,” not as a proverbial encouragement to honest enterprise, but as a sign from above that they should help themselves to whatever they can get away with.

In a situation as profane as this, it seems highly counter-productive for Wan Azizah to drag God into the conversation. Especially in support of her husband right at the very moment that a parade of witnesses are busy perjuring themselves in front of the self-same God to frame him on a second trumped-up sodomy charge.

Of course Wan Azizah has a God-given right to think and say whatever she likes. But with so many people out there taking God's name in vain for their own nefarious purposes, it would be a pity if she risked looking like one of them.

Not that it's very likely, I grant you, that she'd ever be mistaken for those like Perkasa, who are walloping her for calling for an end to ketuanan Melayu, when in truth all the cods they talk about race and religion is just a cover for the fact that they're all about ketuanan money and that, as with their Umno sponsors, their only God is gold.

P.S. Malaysians will remember a certain someone who was the country's Works Minister in the 1980s when he conveniently blamed all the mishaps in the country to 'Act of God'! Er.. for those clueless on the identity of this glorified thug, it is Samy Vello (duh). FG