KUALA LUMPUR, June 7 — Criticised for his pro-Malay stance, controversial Chinese-Muslim convert Ridhuan Tee Abdullah insists that he is still very much a Chinese.
The Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin lecturer has been scorned by detractors for being “more Malay than the Malays”, more so after his public resignation as a lifetime member of MCA last month over the Barisan Nasional (BN) Chinese party’s opposition to hudud law.
“I’ve said it before, I am Chinese and I was born Chinese, Allah made me Chinese. I will always be Chinese,” he told ProjekMMO, Malay Mail Online’s sister publication in Bahasa Malaysia, when met at the KL Alternative Bookfest recently.
He scoffed at being tagged “more Malay than the Malays”, saying that he was defending the government’s agenda to promote the Malay language and Islam so the country’s biggest demographic group would not lag behind the other races.
“I fight for the government’s agenda. The Malay language and Islam are national agendas, I fight for them. Don’t try to oppose it,” he said.
Tee said his gripe with his own race was their focus on safeguarding their own rights to the point they neglect the “national agenda”.
“These people are too embroiled in fighting for their race, their language and their schools that they’ve forgotten that the national agenda should also be strengthened,” he said.
As example, he cited Chinese Malaysians fighting to maintain vernacular schools at the cost of students unable to speak Bahasa Malaysia, the national language.
Tee regularly uses the Hokkien term “ultra kiasu” on those critical of government policy in his twice-weekly columns in Malay daily Sinar Harian, especially the ethnic Chinese and frequently, the secular DAP party.
In an opinion piece for the daily paper last March, he labelled those who “rejected the national agenda and the constitution” as “ultra kiasu”.
“The ultra kiasu, which are those who have rejected the national agenda and the constitution, can be found everywhere, not just in DAP, but also in other parties, including in BN component parties,” he wrote.
“It doesn’t matter if they are Malay, Chinese, Indian or of another race,” he added in the column.
