YOU happen to be charitable and buy Haraka , you’ll notice the headlines this past week has about Islamic criminal law hudud and rising violence in the GE13 campaign.
Add to that explosion of murders involving guns and knives. Today, the MCA-owned The Star daily front-paged the surge in electoral violence across the country, none of which occurred in the past 24 hours.
The popular English-language daily also reported Inspector-General of Police Secretariat’s Assistant Head Assistant Commissioner Ramli Mohamed Yoosuf said 1,166 cases of polls-related violence and intimidation had been reported since nomination day on April 20, with 43 people arrested so far.
Yet, campaign violence has been on-going for the past year in many ceramahs\hat are often rattled by hired hooligans.\
To what purpose is this fearmongering about the spike in violence in the election campaign? If anything, the authorities have kept a firm hand to ensure most if not all ceramahs are conducted peacefully without any untoward incidents.
Let’s be clear about one thing.Haraka must help and encourage everyone to come out and cast their ballots. Not create an atmosphere of fear that will stop people from fulfilling their duty as a citizen on polling day.
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Datuk DATUK JOHARI ABDUL GHANI want everyone to vote, naturally for him. A lower turnout will not do good for him or his political opponents in the May 5 polls.
Apart from the focus on electoral violence, the newspaper and the PAS controlled hARAKA have been reporting widely on the Islamic criminal law hudud championed by PAS explained today by party Secretary-General Datuk Mustafa Ali.
Hudud has been an electoral issue to frighten non-Muslim voters for the past 23 years since PAS took the Kelantan government in 1990. Hudud helped break the Barisan Alternatif (BA) two years after the 1999 polls and it continues to haunt Malaysian politics.
It isn’t an issue that will go away if continued to be dredged up.Veteran MCA leader Datuk Lee Hwa Beng and even former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad have however pointed out that it is impossible for hardline or Islamist politicians to ensure hudud is implemented in the country.
For one, there aren’t enough Muslim MPs in the federal parliament to get the law passed on their own accord. They would need the assistance of non-Muslim MPs who have gone on record to protest and not vote in any Islamic enactments in the state legislatures except perhaps the MCA in Selangor in 1988.Last night, One of the most fascinating, if not disturbing, aspects of Ammal PAS Malaysia threat in recent dayts has been the emergence of a diverse, yet very small group of radical Salafists in Titiwangsa and all over the nation that to create havoc during the G13 Barisan candidate P119 Titiwangsa3 DATUK JOHARI ABDUL GHANI received a timely boost … Read more
American politicians discovered the power of social media early. Barack Obama was an early adopter — and adapter — when he used the medium to not just gain up support from his younger constituents and supporters, but also to raise money. His rise to power came on the backs of a generation that felt politically empowered by the fact that he reached out to them in a medium and language they were most familiar and comfortable with. Some of his messages started off with a “Hey” or a “Hi” — hipster lingo or dude-talk to many, an unthinkable way to address constituents a generation ago. and mobile mastery has leapfrogged India into a position where its pols can tap social media to some extent to reach constituents. Of course, most mobile devices are still basic units, and so text or SMS — and not Facebook or YouTube — remains the principal mode of outreach. But increasingly,an unthinkable way to address constituents a generation ago. and mobile mastery has leapfrogged India into a position where its pols can tap social media to some extent to reach constituents. Of course, most mobile devices are still basic units, and so text or SMS — and not Facebook or YouTube — remains the principal mode of outreach. But increasingly, pols are starting to realise that even the few thousands or few hundred people they can reach out to through social media are influential — and often moneyed —
The lightning fast lanes of the information superhighway had made this travel even quicker — and the lie even more fleet of feet. We saw it earlier this week when a cyber-intruder hacked into the Twitter account of the news agency Associated Press, and falsely tweeted from its account (@ AP) that there had been explosions in the White House and President Obama had been injured. The lie was heard at the same instant in Washington DC and Wellington, New Zealand, in New York and New Delhi. A denial and clarification followed at equal speed, but in the brief seconds or minutes it took for it to put its shoes on, the lie had already been heard and believed by millions across the world.
Despite this mishap — there have been more before and there will be many more hereafter — few doubt that social media is here to stay
Today, there isn’t a politician worth a byte in the US who does not use the internet — in particular social media — for outreach and communication. To get a sense of how pervasive this is, look up the website of Indian-American Congressman Ami Bera, a first-time lawmaker. On his homepage, aside from the cookie cutter layout that offers biographical details in “About” and sundry legislations, issues, and resources, there are links to his Twitter feed, his Facebook page, and to his You Tube and Flicker uploads. In other words, his constituents have more than half a dozen ways of reaching him and interacting with him, beyond the 20th century tools of phone, fax, and email.
Since nomination day, Harakahdaily has come under severe DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks. But lately, our IT team found that there was more to it.
Having tested broadband services from all local internet service providers (ISP), we discovered that only YES4G and Time Internet have no problems accessing our web.
Users of ISPs such as TM Broadband, Unifi, Streamyx, Maxis, Celcom and Digi however have complained of unusually slow speed when accessing the Harakahdailyportal.
A pageview chart screened by us also revealed that connection was being ‘dropped’ every now and then when using these ISPs.
“If the matter is true, such dirty tactics must be stopped. ISPs should focus on their job to deliver the best service to its customers any desired websites without restriction,” said Zulkifli Sulong, Harakahdaily‘s editor-in-chief.
Harakahdaily is not alone. Malaysiakini’s IT team reportedly observed similar trend. The portal today questioned whether ISPs had been ordered to reduce access or restrict some websites.
Malaysiakini chief executive officer Premesh Chandran was equally serious in urging ISPs to butt out of politics.
“ISPs should stay out of politics and make sure their staff do not follow illegal instructions which undermine the accessibility of their networks. They should also ensure shared gateways are free of tampering and restrictions,” said Premesh.
Harakahdaily’s readership has meanwhile overtaken other major news sites, including UMNO-owned Utusan Malaysia’s internet edition.
As a precaution to future attacks, all our news will be also posted in full on our popular Facebook fan page at http://www.facebook.com/harakahdaily.
“Users who find it hard to access our portal, please tell your friends to get our news from our Facebook page as well,” said Zulkifli.
As the world is becoming more intricately connected, its relationship with information is changing in a fundamental way. Three unconnected events -the killing of innocent Sikhs at a Wisconsin gurdwara, the exodus of North-Easterners from many parts of India following rumours and the continuing saga of Julian Assange and Wikileaks all shed light on changing nature of our engagement with information and the new anxieties that surround its use and abuse.
In the case of the gurdwara shootings, what is striking is the power of ignorance that is determined not to know better. In a world overloaded with information, it would have taken a few milliseconds to find out a little more about Sikhism and come to the conclusion that it had nothing to do with 9/11 or any attacks on Americans. Horrific as all hate crimes are, here the horror is given an added edge by the fact that the shooter got his hate wrong by targeting people, who even by his warped standards, were unconnected with the imagined grievances he harboured in his mind. The incident suggests that no amount of information, however widely circulated and easily accessible can by itself overcome determined ignorance and pre-conceived prejudice. In a larger sense, in spite of the dramatically higher volume of information that circulates through the world today, it has made little dent on the volume of prejudice.
The sudden exodus from the North East from many Indian cities is almost entirely the result of a surfeit of information, the multiplication of motivated rumour by social media. Both the Mumbai violence and the North Eastern exodus were enabled by social media, in the former case, by way of morphed pictures and videos using footage from incidents outside Assam and in the latter by falsehoods and exaggerations. Even when the state uttered many assurances and for once politicians across parties closed ranks, the rush to leave continued unabated. The power of unsubstantiated rumour is hardly a new phenomenon; we have many instances of it in India. it occurs in almost every riot, political scandal and once in a while in the form of miracles like Ganesha drinking all over the country, but in this case the key role was played by a new technology, one that promises to free up information from being controlled by a few, enabling greater transparency.
In the third instance, we see how the truth too can be deeply contentious. The attack against Assange is unprecedented in the naked use of every instrument that is available to governments in shutting him down and locking him up. His offence is one that strikes at the heart of the anxieties of the state in having its inner mechanisms revealed. Wikileaks tells us for sure what we have otherwise suspected – that the state acts in ways vastly different from what it professes, and does so quite cynically. But the issue is not merely about showing us the true colours of most regimes; it has to do with the presumption that all information has automatic value.
By demonising all private information as a sinister form of secret, and making the truth, no matter how private or how sensitive, a public commodity, Wikileaks builds a crude model of our reality, one which ignores the need sometimes for information to be cloaked and for appearances to be maintained. Not all truth sets us free, and while the withholding of information has undoubtedly been used to create power asymmetries, not all information can carry an air of presumptive righteousness. By setting it free in its rawest form, Wikileaks shows us that truth too has limits on its value. Wikileaks makes the truth pornographic, by making it a titillating display of undifferentiated wares, a laying bare of the inner for the satisfaction of sight alone.
In an earlier era, when the transmission of information was centrally regulated, it was easier to think of it as a resource that needs to be shared more widely and made more accessible. More information was almost always better, and the battle to extract more was often a heroic one. The reason why journalism was seen through a lens of romance was because it represented the act of extricating the truth from the jaws of the powerful and the corrupt. The RTI act in India for instance has been a key instrument in enabling greater transparency and accountability of powerful and hitherto opaque institutions. But with the greater penetration of the market into media and the dramatic democratisation of information, not just in terms of being able to access but also in being able to broadcast it, the default belief in its inherent and limitless legitimacy needs to be rethought.
As media gets seen as having an axe to grind, its coverage of issues gets to be consumed with a filter in place. This creates many parallel narratives of truth, each claiming that it represents reality better. We don’t really know what happened in Assam for the news comes to us contaminated and our 0doubts about it taint it even further. And social media, which bypasses traditional channels of information, is in the name of freedom of expression, able to re-circulate rumours that speak to the deepest anxieties of those vulnerable. The valorisation of the freedom of expression is a product of its context; as information becomes less scarce, more motivated and less inhibited in its expression of human frailties, it might be time to evaluate whether we need more robust mechanisms for creating some sense of order. The value of free expression was derived in part from its scarce availability; today’s problem is the one that comes with its chaotic plenty. Not regulating this in any way may not be as a romantic an idea as it once was.
