Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Malaysia: Bumiputra Privileges — A Disguised Jizyah — Continue
Wednesday, January 01, 2020
Mamakthir's Corruption
Jihad Watch : It has been just over a year now since the office of the Prime
Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, reversing a previous pledge by
his government to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), declared that it would
not do so, without giving a reason for the decision. Since then, nothing
has changed.
The Convention was opposed by Muslim Malays (almost all ethnic Malays
are Muslim, while the Chinese and Indians in Malaysia are non-Muslim),
who feared it could lead to an end to the “Bumiputra” (Sons of the Soil)
system that has long favored them. The “Bumiputra” system is
essentially affirmative-action on stilts, meant to improve the lot of
the ethnic Malays, who economically do not fare as well as the more
industrious and entrepreneurial Chinese and Indians. Its origin dates
back to 1969, when there were riots by Malays against the more
prosperous Chinese, hundreds of whom were killed when their shops were
burned down.
It was economic resentment at Chinese economic success,
which was also racial resentment, compounded by religious animus at the
Chinese (who were Infidels, and therefore “the most vile of creatures”).
To avoid more such upheavals, the government in 1971 instituted a New
Economic Policy designed to improve the lot of the aggrieved Malays
through the Bumiputra system. It was supposed to be a short-term
measure, to end when the Malay Muslims had made sufficient economic
progress.
But apparently they haven’t yet done so, for the Bumiputra
system of privileges is still in place, and the Muslim Malays have no
intention of getting rid of it now or, one suspects, ever. For
some of them, the economic privileges they enjoy under the Bumiputra
system can be interpreted, and justified, as a kind of “Jizyah” payment
from the Infidel Chinese and Indians that should continue forever.
According to the Bumiputra system, 70% of all civil service positions
in Malaysia are reserved for the Muslim Malays; as of now, 85% of the
civil servants are Malays. Another provision requires that a certain
proportion of the shares of any publicly quoted company be owned by
Malays. This is achieved by making stock available to them at
below-market prices. Further, Bumiputra-owned firms are favored for
various government contracts. Malay home buyers are entitled to a
discount of 5 to 15 percent on new developments. Special professional
schools have been established for the exclusive use of Muslim Malays.
The Muslim Malays are also favored in college admissions, with most
universities in Malaysia required to reserve 70% or more of their places
for bumiputras. As a result, Chinese and Indian students flock instead
to private and foreign universities. Those who leave often stay away. A
World Bank study in 2011 found that about one million Malaysians had by
that stage left the country, which has a total population of 29 million.
Most were ethnic Chinese, and many were highly educated. Some
60% of skilled emigrants cited “social injustice” as an important reason
for leaving Malaysia. The “social injustice” is the privileging of
Muslim Malays. This exodus of talented Chinese and Indians
makes Malaysia a less attractive place to invest in. The Bumiputra
system is thus driving away the most industrious and entrepreneurial
young people, all in order to assure the Muslim Malays that they will be
favored in jobs, in corporate equity, in the awarding of government
contracts, in new housing, and in college admissions. Supporters of the NEP argue that, without such assistance, Malays
will not catch up economically or academically. Critics claim that it
dulls their incentives to excel.
There is evidence of a skills gap
between the Muslim Malays and the Chinese and Indians.. Nearly half the
managers at Malaysian manufacturing firms surveyed by the World Bank
said that the ability of local skilled workers, mostly Malays, to handle
information technology was either “poor” or “very poor.”
In discussions of the Bumiputra system, the Malays are normally
identified simply by their ethnicity: “Malays.” But since all but a
handful of them are Muslims, it is reasonable to identify them as such —
“Malay Muslims” — and to see their resentment at lagging economically
behind the non-Muslim Chinese and Indians as based less on ethnicity,
and more on religion. They feel entitled, as Muslims, to receive this
package of preferences for the “Bumiputra” as a kind of Jizyah from
non-Muslims.
A different discussion needs to take place. It is not that the
Chinese and Indians have ever been favored in Malaysia. They never were,
and certainly are disfavored now, but they continue to outperform the
Malay Muslims. The reason for the lack of economic progress among those
Muslim Malays can be found in aspects of Islam itself. Think of how the
Muslim oil states, the beneficiaries of the largest transfer of wealth
in human history – some twenty-five trillion dollars since 1973 alone —
have fared, or rather, have failed..
They have yet to create modern
economies, but remain almost entirely dependent on their oil and gas
revenues. Furthermore, they rely on vast armies of wage-slaves from the
non-Muslim lands, for their doctors, nurses, teachers, petroleum
engineers, for their technical advisers of every sort, their pilots,
their mechanics, their programmers, their shopkeepers, their drivers,
their cooks, their cleaners, their domestic workers of every sort. It is
to the West that the Arabs who can afford it go for health care, and to
that West they send their children for education.
It is from that West
that they obtain practically everything that they need, for they produce
nothing, they make nothing. In Dubai, there are 250,000 natives and
more than a million non-natives who are the workers who make the
economy, such as it is, go – and much the same scenario, with that
staggering ratio of foreign workers to natives — holds true for Abu
Dhabi and the other emirates, and in Kuwait, in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia.
The Muslim hostility toward innovation, bid’a, extends from
the sphere of religion, to that of the economy. And the ability to
innovate, or to accept the innovations of others,in a world of
start-ups, of a constant dizzying flow of new products, and new ways of
manufacturing, advertising, selling, and delivering both new and old
products, is indispensable. But in Islam, Believers have been taught to
distrust innovation.
Some Muslims, too, have acquired a dislike of work,
as the ex-Muslim Syrian Wafa Sultan has argued, from the 7th century
Arabs whom they read about in the Hadith. These Arabs, and Muhammad
himself, display a razzia-mentality, the mentality of the
desert raiders who in Muhammad’s day lived by looting. Another aspect of
Islam that may limit the economic achievement of Believers is the inshallah-fatalism
that Muslims so often display.
If in the end you may become rich, or
poor, because Allah wills it so, then it makes sense not to try too
hard. Besides, Malay Muslims clearly understand, the Bumiputra system
remains solidly in place, inshallah, to guarantee their quite undeserved, and therefore maddening, economic success.