At Karen Armstrong's public forum held this morning at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, I met and bersalam with, among other fellow citizens and friends, ex-PM Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad who looked fit and healthy even after being hospitalised recently.
posted by James Wong Wing-On at 4:16 PM
5 Comments:
Greetings James,
That's a priceless photo you have with Dr. Mahathir. One for the album.
Come to think of it, Dr. Mahathir was in some ways more liberal with control on imported books. I have some books in my library from the 1990's which I'm aware are no longer available in local bookshops. I guess partly because the current sleepy guy has absolutely no control over his little Napoleons running wild.
The number of people in this country who will buy and read serious English language books on History, Religion or Current Affairs is not really large, and they are mostly reasonably well-educated people. Is it really such a threat to the country's security to allow these books in ?
it's the religious department people setting the agenda now and the great tragedy is that they don't make themselves publicly accountable.
On this issue, there are TWO governments in Malaysia: (1)the Internal Security Ministry which bans Karen Armstrong's books and (2) The Foreign Ministry which invites Karen Armstrong to Malaysia to deliver public lectures on ideas that are contained in the banned books.
One party is the PR fella assigned to do some superficial window dressing to improve the firm's image.
The other guy is the grim-looking controller who really calls the shots. Go figure out who's who.
However, I still wish to ersonally thank the organisers of forum, especially IDFR, for the excellent job done and the arrangments made for me to attend the talk.
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