MCA near death from "white" angpow hex

I’d like to expand on the observation by FMT columnist Stanley Koh on how the mainstream media including “The Star, which is MCA’s mouthpiece”, largely ignored the anger as well as the factual details of Perkasa’s white angpow insult.

Koh is indeed right to highlight The Star in particular, after what has been described in his article standfirst of the fiasco being “likely to haunt MCA right through the next election”.

The Star is to MCA what Utusan Malaysia is to Umno, and as such, it was most derelict in its duty. Not only did the paper fail to exorcise the Perkasa ‘Envelope of Death’ hex, it did not even have the presence of mind to at least bring out the talisman (or crucifix as the case may be, given how the paper’s head honcho wears Christianity on his sleeve) to ward off the backlash against the Chinese BN component.

The day that the story broke, the MCA-owned newspaper carried only one piece on it. That story on Jan 30 was headlined ‘Perkasa runs out of red packets at CNY do’. Recall Koh’s point about how the anger and factual details were downplayed by the establishment media. Was it true that Perkasa ran out of red envelopes due to over-subscription? On the contrary, there were different stories coming out from several different Perkasa spokesmen.

One of them, Perkasa secretary-general Syed Hassan Syed Ali said (I translate verbatim): “Perkasa did not change [the white angpow] to any other colour because we were unaware that white envelopes are ordinarily used for funerals”. His explanation implies that red angpows [excuse the tautology] were never readied in the first place.

In the same breath, Syed Hassan justified why the colour white is not offensive. To him, “white is [signifies] clean, white is pure and white is sincere”. The implication is that even the Chinese angpow has to bow to Perkasa’s supremacist interpretation of colour symbolism, never mind that the occasion is Chinese New Year.

And guess what? I got to know this little piece of news about Syed Hassan’s statement through reading a Malay Terengganu blog that had gotten the story from Malay tabloid Sinar Harian. Do please remember that all this is in the context of The Star merely publishing one story – ‘Perkasa runs out of red packets at CNY do’ (a factually untrue detail) – which could be construed as providing lame excuses for Perkasa.

On the next day (Feb 1), I had expected The Laggard Star to at least do some damage control as Perkasa’s slapdown (from its colour-coded death wishes) was spun by rival DAP, with the party secretary-general Lim Guan Eng accusing Perkasa and MCA outright of being brother “racists” in arms.

Lim had seized on the presence of an MCA branch chairman Dr Collin Tiew at the function to implicate his whole party as colluding with Ibrahim Ali. And what did The Star do? It ran only one story, and even that single copy was sourced from the national news agency. Its own reporters must all have still been on festive holiday. That Bernama story was titled ‘Najib: Perkasa’s ‘white envelope’ angpow nothing to do with govt’.

The prime minister was the one doing the firefighting while MCA remained in a coma and its newspaper napped. By this time, a certain media sympathetic to the MCA’s arch rival DAP had already splashed five stories, all of them directly or indirectly putting MCA under a bad light in the sense that online readers were freely cursing the unholy trinity of Ibrahim- Perkasa-MCA to high heaven.

Note how MCA had been manipulated into the same mental troika along with Ibrahim and Perkasa, and this deliberate outcome manipulated by skilfully massaging public opinion.

Feb 1 – Day 3 of the saga and still no sign that The Star or MCA Senior considered the situation serious enough to wade in despite Najib having already taken the lead. MCA Junior piped up in the form of its Youth wing secretary-general and its Young Professionals Bureau chief each making a short statement.

Now comes the limp biscuit: The Star headlines murmuring ‘Perkasa expresses regret over ‘white’ ang pow incident’ datelined Feb 1, and ‘Perkasa regrets giving out white packets’ (Feb 2), both versions in Star Online. Does Perkasa truly regret the incident?

Remember Hishammuddin Hussein’s apology that wasn’t quite an apology over brandishing the keris, not once (2005), not twice (2006) but thrice (2007) at the Umno general assemblies? The third time not so lucky as the following year’s tsunami swept MCA off the map of Penang, and leaving only a sole party survivor in Perak. The Umno Youth keris had been pointed at the Chinese, and MCA paid dearly for Hishammuddin’s actions.

Fast forward to 2012 and Ibrahim Ali’s subtler but even more menacing gesture, also pointedly targeting the Chinese. But how has MCA handled things thus far? Its paper – which the opposition never tires of telling the public regarding MCA’s stake in it – was willing to play along with Perkasa’s ‘pretended’ regret as it had also done earlier with the far right movement’s “pretended ignorance”.

Not only that, The Star articles published Ibrahim’s claim that “none of the Chinese guests and members of the media who were present that day had alerted Perkasa leaders that it was a taboo”. But hold on a second! When the MCA man Dr Tiew was made to fall on his sword resigning all his party posts, he told a press conference that Ibrahim “did it on purpose” (as the headline went in one of the alternative media). Tiew was quoted as saying: “I did tell Ibrahim that white angpow is not suitable but he did not bother.” So here we have two diametrical accounts, and who to believe – Dr Tiew or Ibrahim?

This wishy-washiness is another black mark against The Star, already not the sharpest tool in the shed in terms of political acumen and opinion leading. If it once infamously blacked out coverage of the Bersih 1.0 rally, it has now clearly whitewashed coverage of this grievous insult to the Chinese community.

Worse, its ostrich head-in-sand posture did no service to the paper’s majority shareholder, i.e. the MCA investment arm but rather further damaged The Star’s own credibility due to its lack of attention to factual accuracy or at least ironing out the discrepancies.

Feb 4 is going into the fifth day of the sorry saga. The Star is still dim in its coverage of the affair compared to the sheer intensity of the opposition-friendly media and the high voltage anger of the Chinese, now directed in equal part at MCA as well. I hold MCA president Dr Chua Soi Lek in much, much higher esteem than Lim Guan Eng for whom I have scant regard. However, on this episode, I have to concede that the latter’s approach trumps as a voter winner.

‘Cut all ties with Perkasa to prove sincerity, Guan Eng tells Najib’, blares the cheerleading media. His deft gambit strikes the right chords with the Chinese electorate. DAP has already pocketed the urban Chinese votes. Now with this, even rural Chinese are looking askance at the MCA’s ineffectualness.

I’m afraid that the evident paucity of crisis management has consigned MCA to languishing like a beached whale (its behemoth party membership is purportedly one million). The fallout from this affair is that Chinese voters not only see MCA as under the thumb of Umno but squashed by Perkasa’s pinky as well. Dr Chua, puhleez lah, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and shed the kid gloves.

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