KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 5 — The Malays can be easily manipulated to betray their race and religion, Umno-controlled newspaper Utusan Malaysia said today as it continued criticising them for joining a New Year’s eve rally.

Awang Selamat, the collective pseudonym of the papers’ editors, also suggested that the Malays were being ungrateful to the government by attending the protest against the hike in the cost of living.

“Malays are easily manipulated including to the extent of betraying their own religion and race. To hope for strategic thinking, it’s far.

“As the former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said, Malays forget easily and Awang wants to add — do not know how to be thankful,” it wrote in the paper’s weekend edition Mingguan Malaysia.

Earlier in the opinion piece, Awang Selamat nodded in agreement to Gerakan youth chief Tan Keng Liang’s comments in Twitter, where the latter said that the majority of those arrested in street demonstrations are Malays and expressed his sadness over the alleged manipulation of the Malay youths.

“Awang only smiled. Keng Liang is 100 per cent correct. Non-Malay youths fight with knowledge and desire to improve themselves, many Malay youths especially the undergraduates with unimpressive academic records, fight with emotion that has been dicaturkan (charted) by others,” it said.

Awang Selamat also shot down the rally, which it labelled as an “illegal assembly” to overthrow the government, as being unsuccessful and lacking public support.

“Hopefully, it is taken as a lesson by all. Demonstrations as a weapon will not succeed in Malaysia which has a mature democracy,” the paper said.

Thousands flooded Dataran Merdeka on December 31 last year at the rally, which was dubbed “Turun” by its organisers to protest against the price hikes for various goods and services, joining tens of thousands of other New Year’s Eve revellers.

The rally was planned by the student movement amid the various increases in the prices of goods and services, some of which took place a few months ago, such as cuts to fuel subsidy and removal of price support for sugar, while other hikes are scheduled for next year, including electricity tariffs, assessment tax for KL properties, public transport charges and toll rates for major highways.

But in the days leading up to the rally, the police have been on high alert after claims circulated online of a demonstration to “topple” the government, and also of an alleged plot to detonate bombs during the New Year’s Eve countdown at Dataran Merdeka. The authorities have since linked the claims to the planned protest.

The “Turun” rally organisers have since then clarified that their rally is not linked to a separate protest to topple the government.