It is money that makes the world go around. No where is this clear publicly than in the United States, and now Iraq. It is so in other parts of the world, but the world is told it is more important in these two countries. The publicity surrounding the release of Jill Caroll, a Christian Science Monitor reporter, from a Iraqi group, was a piece of good news for the United States in an otherwise bleak Iraq. Both the US government and the Christian Science Monitor was emphatic that no ranson was paid. We are told to believe it, when we know any problem they have is solved by money. Journalists, especially American, are prime candidates for kidnap in Iraq, as it is in Afghanistan, even Pakistan. This is why they stay in their hotel rooms in Iraq, or in the so-called Green Zone, where the US and its allies are coccooned in apparent safety. To show that Iraq is in control, people like the US secretary of state Condileeza Rice and British foreign secretary Jack Straw visit Iraq often to show that all is well.

In southeastern Nigeria, where Christianity is the dominant religion, the Christians and Muslims fight, and 150 people are killed. In many ways Malaysia is in the same boat as Nigeria: Mustlim is the official religion, most of the country are Muslim but parts are not; in Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah are Christian, Protestant in the former and Roman Catholism in the latter. Like in Nigeria, many are animists. It takes but a rumour or word-of-mouth that fans a clash between the religions. In Malaysia, the government has kept the lid on, talk of unity but believes in keeping the races separate. The country is racially divided, and soon religiously too. The people in authority know this. The newspapers are owned by ruling National Party through its component parties or its components. and spread the message but not what that has caused..

CRYING 'FIRE' IN A CROWDED theatre is not acceptabe, It may be freedom of speech or expression, but the responsibilty that goes with it, equally important, prevents it. That is accepted the world over. Similarly, the publication of a cartoon depiciting the Prophet Mohammed in a bad light, when Christianity representing the west is involved in a crusade against the Muslims. The editors can justify this as freedom of speech. But there are in the law books of most Christian nations severe punishmnent for caricaturing Jesus, for instance. That they are not enforced these laws is that the societies have moved ahead and do not impose these laws. The publication of the cartoons in Denmark, and republication in other countries, to anger the Muslims is deliberate. In this extension of the war on terror, the United States have stayed out. What we hear is European reaction. It could also be an attempt to take the advantage of the United States in this war on terror. Europe has played second fiddle to the war on terror, and see no reason why it should allow the United States to represent Christianity.

So ASEAN's lingering death is not reported in local newspapers. Pak Lah is chairman of ASEAN, and his officials make sure he is treated with kid gloves. But any organisation that does not revamp itself in a generation is headed for irrelevancy. It is then used to keep up the divide between the rulers and the ruled. One ASEAN leader had an aide walking close to him carrying the great man's spectacles. It must be kept going, so that journalists will write of how badly it is doing, giving the impression that only the West can keep an Asian grouping going. It is irrelevant now but is of use to Western academics to show that it is but a talking shop. There must be a common ground for an organisation like this to take off. It was wrong for Turkey to join the European Common Market. Whether you like it or not, it is a Christian organisation, and if Turkey is brought in a member, it will become in time as irrelevant as ASEAN is.

THE RIOTS IN FRANCE, of which there is much in television these days, has paralysed not just France and the Western world. I have yet to hear the argument that Muslim youths rioted as digits of the global war on terror against Islam. It may not be, and it could be just the reasons the French have so far given. But one cannot escape from the reason that is not stated. France did send troops to Iraq after the American invasion, as did many other countries, including Germany, to help the coalition forces. The Muslims score a victory in France. It tells the world that any country which helps the coalition forces and have a Muslim population can expect a retaliation. The Muslim youths throughout France had committed havoc in two weeks of rioting. The French government, like the British, have taken harsh measures against them. But will it stop the rioting? When the Muslim youths find it convenient to add the anti-Islam attitude to their list of grievances? The rest of Europe had better watch out. The European Union's rejection of Turkey is a hot potato but wrong for two reasons. One it should not have considered Turkey for membership. The European Union is a Christian grouping. It should have remained so. Turkey has applied for membership of the EU for domestic reasons. It should not have.

So the tragedy that has struck Dato' Aziz is normal if you are on the outside. In the course of finding out what happened, I was told he was a 'mamak', which is not what he would have described him. In Malaysia, Malay means a Muslim as well. Dato' Aziz's ancestors became a Muslim perhaps a century ago. In Singapore he would be known as an Indian Muslim. By identifying himself as a Malay, he thought he rise up the civil service ladder. He did. But because he was an Indian Muslim, he was identified and regarded as an outsider by the Malays in the civil service. The ancestors of some Chinese became Muslims long before Islam came to the Malaysia. But they are kept aside because they are Chinese. That is why PAS has decided to field Chinese and Indian candidates for elections in their control. PAS realises that they cannot isolate Muslims other than Malay. The spin we hear is that PAS is doing that for political reasons. What does the National Front say about the Malays treating the Muslims as "mamak" and worse? In this rush for racial purity, the Malays are making nonsense of race. The Filipino Malay can be a Christian, a Muslim or any religion. It is so for an Indonesian. Lieut.-Gen. Benedict Loudevik Murdani is surely of the Malay race. But a Malay Christian in Malaysia cannot be. The brother of the former rector of the Inslamic University was an Anglican priest. He was driven out of his residence in Petaling Jaya. Another served time in jail under the Internal Security Act. An English Catholic became a Muslim before he married his wife but retained his name. He spent time under the ISA.

What gets through to the world outside is particularly audacious attacks. The bombing of the Palestine hotel last week is one. The insurgents did it, the American-run cabal in Iraq tells us. We are also told that no US troops can be seen on the roads of Baghdad and those in Humvees and other military vehicles are told not to entertain Iraqis within ten feet. The American troops regard the Iraqi as their enemy. But could not the Palestine hotel bombing be the work of Iraqis who would do anything for money. The reporting in becoming more hostile, and the United States would like them to leave. What better way to force them to leave by bombing their residence and work place in Bangkok? I do not buy the theory that is current on television networks and newspapers, not yet, that it is the Iraqi nationalist who did it. Not when the British raided a police station under its command to rescue British troops caught setting off a car bomb, and two US troops were caught for the same reason. This is information war. So, news that is not favourable to the invading force is not revealed or when revealed, is brutally put down. The public the world over is fed with "official" views that all is well. The reality is worse. The Muslim, not only in Iraq, will not hear of any attacks on his religion, as a Christian would not in the United States or Europe or the world over. Each look upon the other as they are. In practical terms, the lowest common belief matters. The war against the adjective is deliberately taken to Iraq but it is actually against Muslims. In this period of racial equalty, the West will not say it, but in practice it is.

Business was declining in the United States in 1930s before the world slump. People were not going to the stores, because they did not have jobs or money. So a group of business men got together and decided the only way to get business was to change the business climate. Some one thought of turning Christmas into what it is today, turning St Nicholas into Santa Claus, and the rest is history. Today, all over the world, the Christmas business season has started. In Malaysia, but for Deepavali and Hari Raya, it starts late. Christmas is not what it is in the Christian religion, to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. December 25 is not the date of his birth. Many sects of Christians, including the Syrian and Eastern rites, celebrate it twelve days after the rest of the world does. But it does not matter. The Christians adopted a pagan ritual as the birth day of Jesus to get the pagans into Christianity.

The problem in Iraq is also globalisation. President Bush and the Western leaders have taken the Christian crusade seriously and promises to drive the Muslim out to the sea. But so has their enemy, Osama bin Laden. So they are in intractible position. Their respective positions are sent throughout the world, and the West does not know either Islam or the messages Osama bin Laden sents to the Muslims. We know that by the Western leaders reassuring the battle is won by elaborate explanations on why Osama bin Laden will lose. But Osama bin Laden's message is simple: Islam is under attack by the hated Christians, and it is the duty of all Muslims to fight it. And the message is distributed by globalisation. If the West thinks the average Muslim is illiterate, so is the average Christian. His explanations of why they are winning is meant for the average Christian or others. But globalisation spreads it around, and the Muslim in the Pacific Island hears of it. The Western system of communication is far superior; it needs it to spread its message, but unwanted messages also go through. In the present battle against Islam, the West fights through proxies throughout the world. And given a twist by the communications giants it controls. The news reporters, many of whom have been found to be their agents, are now in the forefront of that battle. In Iraq, they are targetted by the US military for fear of their reporting what it does not want the outside world to see, hear or read. But the Muslims in power are with the United States, as the Shah of Iran's senior officials were, while those who oppose what is happening in the Middle East are not. As the South Asian eartquake revealed, while President Musharraf and his governemt are with the United States in this war on terror, those in the rural areas destroyed last week had made martyrs of those killed fighting the United States.

Statements from Washington and London suggest that it is the crusades all over again. President Bush has told Palestinians that God told him to invade Iraq. He seems to be finding creative reasons for the mess the United States created in Iraq. But it would not wash. The Muslim, particularly the Sunni, now takes the United States and the West as their enemy. Islam is not what the Christian nations of its supporters, like Malaysian or Pakistani leader, say it is. Islam today is the religion of the street, and with a mind of its own. Otherwise, President Bush would have such opposition in Iraq, with outside Sunni Muslims coming in to fight. The US and its supporters are trying to get Muslim leaders to go on the bandwagon, but the Muslim street in these countries refuse to do so. They try to get Muslim leaders on their side, like in Indonesia, but the president does not want Jemayah Islamiyah banned, as the Western countries would like it to. Enough in the government there are not certain it should be. Islam in Indonesia is much more gentle, but the Indonesian street, although still not as extreme as elsewhere, is becoming more extremist as Bush and his supporters around the world blame Islam and the Muslim for much of their problems. The fact is that President Bush and his supporters have turned Islam into an extremist organisation, and since there are 2 million of its believers, a quarter taking the law into their hands spell danger for President Bush's plan.

The West thinks it can ask Muslim nations, those who support it, to treat Muslims as they have often been treated by these governments. But they forget that these Western nations, like those of old, adopt Islamic methods of punishment. The prisoners at Guantanamo prison and the British ulltra-legal methods are contrary to their legal system, and are adapted from the Islamic brethren. Aft the earlier crusades, from Pope Urban II's in 1089, the Christians learnt from the Moslems, as they have in the latest Crusade as President Bush put it. Though what the Western nations have taken to heart is what they reject. It is Islam's great fault, but now it is the Christian nations' fault as well. No one talks of it, but it is a fact that the Christian nations of the West have taken to heart all the things they criticised in the past. Is the West telling us that education teaches us to be cruel to our fellow men? On the other hand, Muslim nations are blamed for what they do at the West's behalf. I happen to know the background, most of which still confidential, of Malaysia and Indonesia's role in East Timor. It was egged on by the United States, Great Britain and Australia, among others, and the two nations did a creditable job. But the Western nations turned against Malaysia and Indonesia after East Timor had become independent, and it was these countries that were blamed, and discredited. Even by Great Britain, the United States and Australia. We now know why. It was to enable an Australian firm to grab the oil revenues between East Timor and Austria. It was important at that time of Portugal discarding its last two enclaves, Macao and East Timor, of those in Macao, and therefore the Chinese, coming freely to East Timor and going freely into Indonesia. It was the time of the clash between capitalism and communism, and countries were either with the West or with the others. Malaysia and Indonesia acted on the side of the West, and were blamed for being colonialists after the threat was over.

The war cries from Washington and London does not carry weight these days. The occupation of Iraq is a disaster. British carved Iraq out of the Ottoman Empire, and ruled through its cronies, till from the early 1920s until the then British-lodged Prime Minister, Nurul Said Pasha, had run away in a woman's dress, and was flayed alive by the people. The people in Whitehall did not know their history as to why Iraq was structured the way it has been. The British were trying to outdo the French, its colonial rivals then, which had already carved Lebanon and Syria from the Ottoman Empire. While the leadership in Syria was Aluwait, the majority was Sunni Muslim. In Lebanon, a concord was reached by the French in the 1940s, by which the president was Maronite Christian, the chairman of the National Legislative Assembly was Sunni Muslim, and the Prime Minister a Shia Muslim. It was British power play that gave the Sunni Arabs power for reasons that had to do with currying favour with the majority Sunni Muslims in Arabia. The United States, with British help, is now trying to reverse this. Britain does not have the power it once had. None of the British territories in the Middle East joined the Commonwealth of Nations, and there are more nations outside the Commonwealth than in. Those in are led by British educated locals, and today, the Commonwealth is not what it used to be. While the British civil servant was better Arab-educated, the Arab Muslim did not prefer to be British-instructed.

UMNO, in power since 1955 - two years before independence, has had to alter its tactics over the years by PAS and the extreme conservatism of the Malay hinterland. The other races do not matter, though they represent 35 per cent of the population of 20 million. People in Sabah and Sarawak, mostly Christians and animists, suddenly found they were in the minority although they form the majority in that part of Malaysia which is larger than the peninsula. Malaysian military officials have no concept of Sabah and Sarawak as part of Malaysia, as I found in their papers during my years as a lecturer at the Ministry of Defence, and it is UMNO which governs in the state of Sarawak. There was an agreement solemnly signed by the Malayan government and the governments of Sarawak and Sabah before their accession to Malaya to form Malaysia. The fact that only Muslims can be yang di-pertuan negaras in what is largely a Christian and animists rankles. Sarawak and Sabah would secede, if they are allowed to under the constitution. One third of parliament is to have come from Sabah and Sarawak, but that is in the document not in practice.

This has nothing to do with religion or culture. It is part of a reaction to social change, a sort of Malay-Muslim counter-reformation of sorts against the way society around him evolves. We see evidence of this elsewhere: the Hindus fighting for religious purity against a fast evolving and increasingly secular India; the rise of Al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalist creeds that wants to keep the faithful within. This cannot, indeed should not, be dismissed as the work of errant religionists, for it is fueled from its heartland. Underlying it is a genuine fear that all religions, even Christianity, are losing out to "Western values". The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States, which President George W Bush espouses, is in one sense no different than the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Malaysia: both reject Western secular values, and fear their faith would be swamped.

Since UMNO came to Sabah, it has re-ordered the political life to ensure the primacy of Islam in a Christian and pagan land. It came in with intent to conquer and control. But subtlety is not, never was, its strong point. it did this with threats and bluster through local leaders like Dato' Seri Musa.

But when Iraq was invaded as a Christian crusade against Islam, others rose to defend Islam's honour. All it forebodes in Iraq, after next week's election, is a descent into a civil war from which neither Washington nor London could extricate except in defeat. Their actions in Iraq is not so Iraq could survive, but that they should. The Iraqi knows that, and has the numbers to deny that. It is for Washington, the same endgame as in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century and Vietnam mid-century. It cannot even hope for an honorable exit. The first of three elections on 30 January will only ensare it deeper into a quagmire, if it not already has.

The Selangor government has earmarked 112 Hindu temples, some a century old, for destruction. No one from within objected, least of all the MCA and MIC members of the state executive committee. On the contrary, and not surprisingly, the Hindu Sangham, a Hindu religious body, backs it to the hilt. Twenty-five years ago, Hindu temples, Christian churches, other places of non-Muslim worship, Christian graveyards were vandalised in a deliberate campaign, which spluttered to a stop when the guardians of a Hindu temple waylaid the desecrators, killing a few and wounding others. Few of the desecrators were every charged; but those who protected the temples against the vandals were convicted in a long drawn-out trial.

I reflect on this every time I attend an Open House, be it Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist. It is not what it was, it is not what it ought be, what is how degraded it has become. You would not see UMNO politicians in PAS open houses, UMNO leaders in DAP houses, IPF invited to MIC houses, DAP leaders in MCA houses, and vice-versa. When you do see someone who, in our political apartheid, should not be, we are aghast to wonder why. Has he quarrelled with his political masters? Is he about to switch political allegiances? Why? The political, social, cultural, religious divisions tear our country apart as surely as it does Malta, where even the Roman Catholicism of its citizens is asunder by politics. Open Houses in Malaysia do not narrow the divide but widen it.

Vietnam was a proxy war of the Cold War giants, the United States and the Soviet Union. To Washington it was a civilising mission, as in Iraq now, and made mistakes galore to a military end it cannot win. The United States is in Iraq for the geostrategic control of oil and its geopolitical control of the Middle East. In Vietnam, it was to best Moscow and keep South Vietnam firmly in the hands of what was touted then as the free world. If you look deep into it, the underlying raison d'etre for the two wars are based on the belief that nations which do not imbibe the Judea-Christian civilisation, especially if they are not Caucasian by anthropological definition, have no place in this new world.

Grace Phan: Let me quote from the 'International Herald Tribune'. It says, "he has spent time in prison contemplating the division between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian worlds, he is convinced that both sides must change". Can you expand on this please?

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