Monday, November 12, 2007

bloodless heart of muslims

Oh, people of Burma , pls let Ur blood to run in ur hearts, we have been being selfish for long time.

Let me give one example to compare our society with one company or business organization. We are like staffs in company, to succeed our company goals we have to take our role to play together and take the chance to win. Among ourselves having problems, don't shake or mix with our own organization. For instance, unless we like one of us, we will be thinking how to take down him not only in a period but the rest of his life like doing wrong things instead of right one to overcome ur satisfaction on his suffering. Finally ur conduct will affect the company or organization and then ur profit as well as ur success will getting down and also ur family and the rest . pls think a second before what ever u do, don't forget that everything will be reflected.
Now look at our community (Organization) , what our people (staff) are doing, Oh big shame, we r learning higher education consisting so many theory to adapt in ur lives.

How people are talk about others, in front of them and behind of them is equal is it? And accepting discrimination is totally not good and we have been suffering for years in Burma . What’s difference between us and dictatorship?
" Allah says " Oh man kinds we created you a single pare a male and a female and made you nations and tribes and you may come to know each others"
Referring about Ayat, we come to know that we must satisfy with our status such as tribes and languages etc. I see some people are being not satisfied with our own and being look down other tribes as well. Have u ever thought that u r against above Ayat. Pls remember the way u think will be ur behaviour not depend on ur tribes.
Leaders of tomorrow in Burmese Muslim society, how u will be leaders, now if u don't like to be negotiated each others. We r sent here to be tested by Allah, so r u living for whom?
Pls remember, unless u give, u won't get anything. I mean if we examine ourselves, we can know that we like to blame leaders and country. How u have sacrificed for others. Think and think.
Whatever I have said above will be liked by those who want to be united and finding that is falling. The rest will hate this.
Oh by the way, pls test ur heart ur blood cross through it or not after read this, bcos there is no feeling without blood. (One Burmese saying: ‘u have blood to do’ means r u dare to do that r u feel it is right to do).
For Muslim, we r in Islam.


This msg is for only those who want to examine himself. Not related with all.

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A Short History of the Bible

The stories of the Bible evolved slowly over centuries before the existence of orthodox religions. Many belief cults spread stories and myths probably handed down by oral tradition from generation to generation before people wrote them down. Many of the stories originally came from Egyptian and Sumerian cults. All of these early religions practiced polytheism, including the early Hebrews. Some of the oldest records of the stories that later entered the Old Testament came from thousands of small cylinder seals depicting creation stories, excavated from the Mesopotamia period. These early artifacts and artworks (dated as early as 2500 B.C.E.) established the basis for the Garden of Eden stories a least a thousand years before it impacted Hebrew mythology.

Mesopotamian Eden predates Genesis
An example of a cylinder seal depicting a Garden of Eden story. A man and woman sitting under the seven branched Tree of Life. Note the snake on the right. Akkadian Cylinder Seal, 2330-2150 B.C.E.

Virtually every human civilization in the Middle East, before and through Biblical times, practiced some form of female goddess worship. Archeologists have confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language had initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess. Later the goddesses became more war-like with the influence of the northern invaders who slowly replaced the goddesses with their mountain male war gods. So why doesn't the Bible mention anything about the Goddess? In fact it does, but in disguise from converting the name of the goddesses to masculine terms. Many times "Gods" in the Bible refers to goddesses. Ashtoreth, or Asherah, named of masculine gender, for example, actually refers to Astarte- the Great Goddess. The Old Testament doesn't even have a word for Goddess. The goddesses, sometimes, refers to the Hebrew word "Elohim" (masculine plural form) which later religionists mistranslated into the singular "God." The Bible authors converted the ancient goddess symbols into icons of evil. As such, the snake, serpents, tree of knowledge, horns (of the bull), became associated with Satan. The end result gave women the status of inferiority, a result which we still see to this day.
The Old Testament consists of a body of literature spread over a period from approximately 1450 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E. There exists no original writings of the Old Testament. There does exist, however, hundreds of fragments from copies that became the old testament. These fragments consist of Cuneiform tablets, papyrus paper, leather etchings and the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. The scribes of the old testament wrote in classical Hebrew except for some portions written in Aramaic. The traditional Hebrew scribes wrote the texts with consonants but the Rabbis later added vowels for verbal pronouncing. Of course the Rabbis did their best in choosing the vowels that they thought gave the words their proper meaning and pronouncement. In the second century C.E., or even earlier, the Rabbis compiled a text from manuscripts as had survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and on this basis they established the traditional or Masoretic text, so called from the Hebrew word Massorah. This text incorporated the mistakes of generations of copyists, and in spite of the care bestowed on it, many errors of later copyists also found their way into it. The earliest surviving manuscripts of this text date from the ninth to eleventh centuries C.E. It comes mostly from these texts which religionists have used for the present Old Testament translations.
The New Testament has even fewer surviving texts. Scholars think that not until years after Jesus' alleged death that its authors wrote the Gospels. There exists no evidence that the New Testament came from the purported original apostles or anyone else that had seen the alleged Jesus. Although the oldest surviving Christian texts came from Paul, he had never seen the earthly Jesus. There occurs nothing in Paul's letters that either hints at the existence of the Gospels or even of a need for such memoirs of Jesus Christ. The oldest copy of the New Testament yet found consists of a tiny fragment from the Gospel of John. Scholars dated the little flake of papyrus from the period style of its handwriting to around the first half of the 2nd century C.E. The language of most of the new testament consists of old Greek.
Oldest known snippet from the New Testament
This photo shows a papyrus fragment from the Gospel of John, discovered in Egypt, the oldest known fragment from any part of the New Testament, dated from the first half of the 2nd century C.E.
Script appears on both sides, the front contains verses 31-33 and the back, verses 37-38.
The fragment resides in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.
Interestingly, there existed many competing Christian cults in the early years after Jesus' alleged death. Some sects saw the universe in dualisms of goodness and sin, of light and darkness, God and the Devil. Other Christian sects performed odd rituals, some of which involved the swallowing of semen, thought of as a sacred substance. Many other Christians also wrote mystical stories and by the second century there existed more than a dozen Gospels, along with a whole library of other texts. These include letters of Jesus to foreign kings, letters of Paul to Aristotle, and histories of the disciples. In one of these secret Gospels, it describes Jesus taking naked young men off to secret initiation rites in the Garden of Gethsemene. There lived Christian Gnostics (knowers) who believed that the church itself derived from the Devil to keep man from God and from realizing his true nature. In those first centuries of Christianity orthodoxy did not exist and when an organized orthodox church finally came, it got defined, almost inadvertently, in argument against many of the Gnostic sects.
So the idea of the Bible as a single, sacred unalterable corpus of texts began in heresy and later extended and used by churchmen in their efforts to define orthodoxy. One of the Bible's most influential editors, Irenaeus of Lyon, decided that there should only exist four Gospels like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures - the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, and the eagle of John. In a single stroke, Irenaeus had delineated the sacred book of the Christian church and left out the other Gospels. Irenaeus also wrote what Christianity did not include, and in this way Christianity became an orthodox faith. A work of Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, became the starting point for later inquisitions.
There has existed over a hundred different versions of the Bible, written in most of the languages of the time including Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Some versions left out certain biblical stories and others contained added stories. The completed versions of the old and new testament probably got finished at around 200-300 C.E. although many disputed the authenticity of some books which later ended up as Apocrypha (uncanonical or of questionable authorship). For example, the book of Ecclesiasticus appears in the Catholic Bible but not in Protestant versions.
At around 405 C.E. Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymous) finished translating all the Old and New testament books into Latin (Vulgate Bible) which provided the Roman Catholic church added power. The Vulgate Bible went through several revisions up until the early 1900s!

Codex Palatinus
This shows a small segment of a leaf from the Codex Palatinus (British Library, add. ms. 40107, f.1), an Old Latin version of the gospels from the 4th or 5th century.
The text got written in two columns in uncial script which runs continuously without word breaks. Enlarged capital letters provide the only clue to place marking.
The salvation doctrines of Christianity survived and flourished because they afforded the priesthood considerable power. The priests alone held the keys to salvation and could threaten the unbelievers with eternal punishment. Hence, in the evolution of Christianity in the last two thousand years with priests preying on human fears, the religion has demonstrated extraordinary powers of survival. Even without the priests, the various versions of the Bible have had more influence on the history of the world, in the minds of men than any other literature.
Unfortunately, the beliefs in Scripture produced the most violent actions against man in the history of humanity up to that time. The burning of competing Christian cults (called heretics) by early Christian churches acted as the seeds of violent atrocities against man. There later followed the destruction of Rome by the Christian Goths, and the secret pagan sacrifices consented by the Pope, the Vandals that had the Bible with them as they destroyed imperial North Africa, the crusades in the eleventh century fighting in the lands around the eastern Mediterranean, Palestine and Syria, capturing Jerusalem and setting kingdoms from Anatolia to the Egyptian border. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade plundered Constantinople the most holy city at that time, with Christians fighting Christians. And the slaughters continued (and continues to this day). According to Romer, "More heretics and scholars were burned in the Middle Ages than were ever killed in Carolingian times. For at this time the Inquisition came into its own, and torture, largely unused as an instrument of government since Roman days, was reintroduced."
In the 1380s, John Wycliffe translated the first English Bible which inspired an English religious revolution which caused persecutions against him by the Catholic Church.
In the early 1500's the German heretic, Martin Luther, almost single handedly caused the final split from the Roman Catholic church and created the beginnings of the Protestant revolution. This split still influences violence to this day. He translated the Bible into German which further spread Protestantism. Luther also helped spread anti-Semitism with his preaching and books such as his "The Jews and their lies," all supported through his interpretation of the Bible. One should not forget that Hitler (a Christian and great admirer of Luther) and his holocaust could not have occurred without his influence and the support of Bible believing German Christians.
In the 1530s William Tyndale completed his version of the English Protestant Bible (probably with the aid of Luther) and the first to print the English Bible. He too felt the persecution of the Church and he spent his last days in imprisonment and exile. His enemies finally caught him and burned him at the stake, but because of his celebrity, they strangled him first (what nice guys!).
After Luther's German Bible, others followed suit by translating the Bible into their native languages including Dutch and French. Not until 1611 C.E. did a committee of translators and interpreters complete the most popular Bible of all time, the King James Version.
Today we still have dozens of Bible translation versions, with Bible scholars still arguing over the meaning and proper translations of words and phrases. The following shows just a few of the most popular versions:
King James Version (KJV)
The New King James Version (NKJV)
Modern King James Version [Green's Translation] (MKJV)
Literal Translation Version [Green] (LITV)
International Standard Version (ISV)
The New International Version (NIV)
English Standard Version (ESV)
New English Bible (NEB)
American Standard Version (ASV)
New American Standard Bible (NASB)
Revised Standard Version (RSV)
New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Contemporary English Version (CEV)
Today's English Version (TEV)
The Living Bible (LB)
New Century Version (NC)New Life Version (NLV)
New Living Translation (NLT)
Young's Literal Translation (YLT)
Revised Young's Literal Translation (RYLT)
John Darby's New Translation
Weymouth New Testament Translation
Rotherham's
(One might wonder what will happen to the "new" revisions a few hundred years from now. Nevertheless, the King James Version still remains the most used Bible in the world today and it will probably continue its popularity long into the future.)
No doubt that future versions of Bibles will surface in the future: revisions of previously revised Bibles and newer revisions of new versions. The history of the many versions of the Bible stories, from the ancient Mesopotamian myths to the varied interpretations, interpolations, and versions of the Bible speaks volumes about the reliability of their interpretations and the alleged "truth" they claim the Bible holds, because it shows that the Bible comes not from supernatural agents but rather from human imagination. We have not one shred of evidence for the supernatural influence on human written works (and mostly from unknown authors), but we do have an abundance of evidence for human recorded beliefs and myths. This shows a marked difference between those of scientific works and those deriving from religious minds. For example, Euclid's Elements written around 300 B.C.E. has changed little since its inception. Scientists don't argue and debate about its meaning because they know it doesn't represent an absolute or fixed work. It only provides a step in the understanding of geometry. Most Christian apologists, on the other hand, view the Bible as fixed and absolute, if only they could only just get the interpretation correct. But regardless of how much the want the Bible to reflect their particular beliefs, they can never dislodge the violence and atrocities described and condoned by their God in the stories in the Old Testament. Nor can they dismiss the even more horrific result of the horrors of Hell as amplified by the words of the alleged Jesus in the New Testament where almost everyone on earth ends in eternal fire. In short, Bible belief influences horror, not by the majority but by the few that actually believe in its macabre prophecy and have the power to force their beliefs onto the majority.
We have little reason to think that violence inspired by Bibles and other religious texts will ever cease. One only has to look at the religious wars around the world to see belief's everlasting destructive potential. One only has to look at the Protestant-Catholic uprising in Ireland, the conflicts in the middle east with Jews fighting Moslems & Christians, the Gulf war, Sudan's civil war between Christians and Islamics, the Bosnia conflicts, and the war in Iraq. The desperate acts of fanatical individuals who have killed for their beliefs of Jesus, Mohammed, God or Satan would create a death list unmatched by any other method in history. The "Holy" Bible supports the notion of war and destruction, not only as a prophesy but as a moral necessity. If we wish to become a peaceful species, it may well serve us to understand the forces of belief that keep us in continual conflict and why the Bible has such a stronghold on the minds of people around the world.

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The Dark Bible

Despite the fact that the Bible represents the best selling book of all time and serves as the sacred script for the Judeo-Christian faiths, it also stands as a book, by the majority, believed from ignorance. Strangely, in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church forbade the reading of the Bible by its congregation for fear that the people would misinterpret the texts. Many priests knew of the problematic and dark verses in the Bible. Too much questioning could result in a loss of faith, or so they thought. As a result, only the Church fathers had the right to make interpretations for its people. This gave the early Church power over its people and, at the same time, prevented its populace from ever becoming educated.
One would think that with today's practice of freedom of religion, education, free press and the availability of the Bible to anyone, that the Bible and its history would result in common knowledge. Nothing could stand further from the truth. Most Church fathers today concentrate only on the "good" phrases of the Bible. This of course represents an admirable approach as it serves to teach, stabilize and give meaning and morals to people in a society. However, Christians and Jews rarely hear about the dark side of the Scriptures from their religious leaders. Although most Christians own a Bible, few of them spend the time to actually read and understand what it actually represents. Many Christians find it shocking, even blasphemous for someone to point out that the Bible contains, not only errors, but atrocities that no Christian in good conscious would ever think of acting out. For example, how many Christians and Jews today would feel happy to bash a child's head against the rocks? Any secular question of this nature, of course, would result in revulsion, yet just such phrases occur in the Bible as well obscenities, filth and many horrendous phrases.
It will, perhaps, come from "good" Christians who will object most strongly to what I have put in and left out from the Dark Bible. However you may judge it, I have edited the Dark Bible in this way for several reasons:

Firstly, I wanted to share with people that the Bible does not represent only "high morality" or a means to better one's life; that most of the Bible, in fact, concerns itself with conquest, war, killings, and curses, many times coming from directly from Yahweh (God). By today's standards, many of these Biblical stories describe despicable atrocities.
Secondly, there exists a minority of faithful fundamentalists who take the Bible literally and act out or condone the atrocities in the Bible. People, groups and governments, for centuries, have instigated wars, pogroms, racism, hatred, anti-Semitism, terrorism, and the inferiority of women based on their religious beliefs. I wanted to point out some of the Biblical verses that people of faith have used as justification for their atrocities and also to help people become aware, and beware of the dangers that can result from belief in the Bible.
Thirdly, to make this knowledge easily available, I edited out the admirable phrases of the Bible in order to get to the point. Most people know about these "good" verses, and I should not have to point them out (there exists a plethora of books about the admirable works). I also left out most of the dark phrases of the Bible for if I had included them all, it would literally involve more information, along with the comments, than the Bible itself. I tried to keep this relatively compact. As a result, the Dark Bible represents a small sampling. I encourage the reader to investigate the history of the Bible and why it contains the stories that it does.
From the sampling of the dark passages of the Bible presented in this Dark version, it should become self evident that if one wishes to defend the concept of a "good" and "loving" God, the Bible should serve as the last source to use for supporting evidence.
Moreover, if we wish to know ourselves, it may well serve us to learn the limitations of our language system. The written form has existed for only six thousand years; only a brief instant of time relative to our millions of years of evolution. The Bible represents the Bronze Age beliefs of men at the birth of writing. As in most evolutionary trends, mistakes get made, sometimes fatally. Indeed, our species has become even more violent in relation to strengths of faith in written Scripture. Unfortunately faith relies on hope and ignorance. Only education and critical thinking can allow us the means to correct our mistakes.
With technology advancing every year, our weapons have the capability to destroy whole cities, countries, if not every person on the earth. If people continue to base their actions on ancient Biblical reasoning, any small minority who gains access to the destructive technology may very well carry out holocaust-like proportions on innocent men, women and children. It has happened before and it can easily happen again. Today we still see the destructive acts carried out around the world which originate from deep cultural roots based on religious Scripture. Although belief structures have given rise to ethnic culture, it can also produce life threatening situations to our existence on earth. Understanding our belief-systems and to de-emphasize the sacredness of the Bible may well help to prevent our own destruction.
The Dark Bible uses the King James Version (1611) Bible as its main source because more Christians use this version than any other (although various alternate verses come from other Bible versions with a caption as to its source.). It will help to use this text along with the reading of each verse with the complete chapter from the Bible so as to gain a better understanding of its context, or, simply click on a verse and it will take you to an online Bible where you can peruse the entire context. Many of the comments come paraphrased from established scholarly published work.

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Friday, November 9, 2007

Muslims of Burma and Democratic Movement

Burma is a country that has people of many races, ethnicities and religions. Because of lack of reliable census data the exact number of these various communities is not known. There is no question though that the Buddhist population makes up the vast majority in the country, followed by Muslims, Christians, Hindus and animists. According to non-official estimates by various agencies (including those in the US State Department), the Muslim population in Burma is somewhere between 10 to 20%, including the much-discriminated and suffering Rohingya population of Arakan (Rakhaing), whose nearly half the population is now living in Diaspora as refugees in many parts of our world as a result of Burma's inhuman, discriminatory Citizenship Law of 1982. In spite of many hurdles that they faced, the Muslim population, while second to Buddhist population in Burma, has played positive roles in the critical junctures of the history of Burma -- from independence movement to nation-building. They have compromised many a times their local aspirations to make Burma more inclusive, federal and united under one flag. Unfortunately, a very alarming proportion of these minority Muslims of Burma, with their distinct religious ethos, has been the worst victims of dispossession, identity-loss, discrimination and inhuman treatment. That is simply unacceptable. It is inhuman, barbarous and criminal. In my last three decades of human rights activism, I have never seen a people so much discriminated as the Rohingyas of Burma -- solely because of their religion. The treatment of other Muslims of Burma is not anything to celebrate either. And the sad thing is all such abuses against Muslims are taking place in this age when the rest of humanity is trying to find common grounds to reach out and make a better future for all. A feudal state could be excused for its barbarous acts of the past against other peoples, because those practices were often the norms for the state mechanism -- creating an aura of fear. There was no Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) back then. It was a pre-modern era. But why do we see the worst forms of abuse today in the 21st century against Muslims in Burma, especially when the country ratified the UDHR? What pains me most is to see the utter repulsive hypocrisy that emanates from many Burmese so-called democracy leaders when it comes to an important matter like the citizenship rights of all Muslims of Burma - from one end to another. In this 21st century, some 60 years after Burma's Independence, they have no moral qualms to deny citizenship rights to a people that identifies itself as Rohingya Muslims of Burma. What hypocrisy? Are Rohingya Muslims not Burmese? If their so-called similarity with people in Bangladesh make them aliens in the land of their ancestors, I am sorry to state that one would be hard pressed to find people of one single race, ethnicity, color and creed located and confined to a single state of our time. We have to redefine our understanding of various nations of today and enact laws that will be barbarous and untenable. We have to force all the Hispanics to leave the USA and move to the south - while vast western territories of the current day USA were once their ancestral homes. We have to send the Afro-Americans back to Africa from where they were stolen and enslaved to work and make America beautiful and prosperous. How about the European white immigrants and their families that lived in the USA for the past 500 years? Where do we stop drawing the line of demarcation? How about the native Americans who were the first settlers to what later came to be known as the USA? Should we force them out to Siberia, where they are presumed to have come from? Do we have any moral right to uproot them today because they are a very tiny minority like the "Kala" or "Kula" race of Burma - the ancestors of today's Rohingya people? The Burmese aspiring democracy leaders have to wake up to the reality of our time and shun feudal, racist, xenophobic and intolerant mindset if they are truly serious about the future of Burma. They cannot just sing: we want democracy and human rights, but in their dictionary there is no place for Burmese Muslims, Rohingya and Karen minorities and other smaller groups. That behavior epitomizes hypocrisy. What Burma needs today is confidence building all the various races, ethinicities, religious communities where everyone is treated equally, equitably, justly and fairly. Big brother attitude of a majority community - dictating terms and conditions of statehood -- will not work. The majority must show their sincerity that once the rule of law and democracy is back, under a federal setup, it will not discriminate the minority, and it will revoke all discriminatory laws of the past and compensate for past mistakes. Only when the minority can trust and see a good future for them can they truly become productive forces of the society. Without them it would be like a body without an arm. Burma cannot afford to be limb-less.My suggestion to Muslims of Burma is to realize that they are living in a very crucial juncture of Burmese history. While they are the worst victims of discrimination under the SPDC regime, they are by nature a peaceful people who like to be recognized as equal citizens in a future Burma. They should reach out to other groups and find common grounds to bring about a positive change in Burma. Being on the receiving end of discrimination and dehumanization, they feel the pains of Burma more than any one else. Their collective suffering should unite them together and enable them to educate and motivate others on the necessity of eradicating such abuses from the Burmese society once and for all time. The Muslims of Burma are for restoration of democracy, human rights, equality and liberty where all the people of Burma can feel inclusive about their Federal state. They should support the movements of the Sangha and any group that is genuinely true to higher human values that foster amity and cooperation and not discrimination and intolerance.

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The new wars of religions

In my mind, I think the communism is growing up inside US. I don't know really what is the author but I am sure this is an ideology of communism. The US may lossing the coldwar, so that communist Russia and China are increasinly going to extend their propaganda inside US.

The natual phenomenon is that if there is up, there is aslo down. United State is thinking that she is superior but she left no choice to follow the mensioned ideology of stopping religion for recovering their dignity that they are losing after invade the Iraq and Afgan.

Communism also will be failure and may be up rooted if they try to hit the religionist.

Actually politic is generated on the base of a believe or a trust. Already religionist have a faith to their God and they follow to the instructions after they believe the God. So far, if some one come to hit them against their faith and believe, no soceity will stand against them. Because about eighty percent of the world populations are religionist. How they can able to fight against them and against humanity?

I am sure again the all so-called super power will trun to zero ground soon with their fault ideology. They should respect instead of reject the religions.

Sincerely,

Ko Ko Linn

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Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Self-portrait Of An Emptiness

you don't need the lights in this galaxy
you are a black star
you don't need to be bright among jewelleries
you are a dead pearl
you don't need a cipher to me
you are already a misery
you don't need compass
because your journey is non-direction
you don't need demand
because your desire is non-satisfaction
you don't need a place
because your base is non-centred
you don't even need to be brave
because your enemies have no reason to face
you don't even need to speak in any languages
because every each thing is deaf and dead
you are all i have learnt
but i never passed exam
I'll peel off the skin of your mirror
to make sure that i am not yours!

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Don't wait until tomorrow

Somebody is crying in the dark,
who lost her son is a monk.
Somebody had work up in midnight,
who had suffering for humanright.
Somebody had beatten on the road,
who had been holding a signboard.
Somebody is praying in the jail,
(for given water to monk are muslims)
who had arrested and touture all the day.
They have sacrificed for their country,
but their country had not free.
We have to handover their work
if you dare to give your life.
We have to follow their way,
Which they walk with love and pray.
We will fight to reach our goal,
Don’t wait until tomorrow.

Originated by May Min Set

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Malaysia's PM Says Muslims to Respect Other Faiths

Malaysia's leader urged the country's majority Muslims on Wednesday to respect other religions, an apparent effort to placate minorities and diffuse racial tensions ahead of snap general elections.
"If we want our religion to be respected and understood, let us ... show exemplary behavior by respecting the followers of other religions and their needs," Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said in a speech to the ruling United Malays National Organization party.
"Violence by one side will breed violence from the other," said Abdullah, who led his party to a landslide election victory in 2004. New elections are not due until 2009 but Abdullah is expected to seek a fresh mandate in early 2008.
The ruling National Front coalition, in which UMNO is the dominant player, is expected to retain power it has held for 52 years. But it is unlikely to repeat its last success because of growing anger among the Indian and Chinese minorities over what they see as the erosion of their rights.
Many ordinary Malaysians, including Malays, are also fed up of escalating crime, corruption and inflation, which have exacerbated racial tensions.
"The harmony between the various communities and religions in Malaysia is not an optional luxury—it is a necessity. We have no other choice," said Abdullah, dressed in traditional Malay attire of loose pants, cap and a cummerbund-like cloth around his waist.
The highly conciliatory speech was notable for its context—it was delivered at the annual general assembly of UMNO, when Malay rights and dominance are routinely asserted and reinforced.
UMNO claims to represents the majority Muslim Malays who comprise about 60 percent of Malaysia's 26 million people. Chinese are 25 percent and Indians are 10 percent.
The National Front also includes other parties representing the minority communities in a unique power-sharing arrangement that has ensured a high degree of racial harmony, except for brief but deadly riots in 1969.
However, social strains have become more apparent in recent years, thanks to a series of recent court verdicts favoring Muslims in religious disputes increased the disquiet among minorities.
Abdullah warned "overzealous" religious police against blindly enforcing Islamic rules. "We give assurance that UMNO will not endorse a narrow interpretation of Islam," said Abdullah, a trained Muslim scholar.
The racial tensions have caused cracks in the ruling coalition. Samy Vellu, a government minister who leads the main ethnic Indian party in the National Front, expressed anger on Monday at the recent demolition of a Hindu temple without warning. But he said Wednesday the problem was resolved and praised Abdullah's speech.
"We must be united. With all races united, only then we can rise to become a modern nation." said Samy. "The Muslims have always accepted other religions in this country. But there are certain actions done by certain people."

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New Address of Myanmar Embassy

Myanmar Embassy
8C,Jln Ampang Hilir
55000,KL
Ph: 03-42516355,03-42516455,03-42515595,03-42514455
Fax: 03-42513855

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