KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 8 — Gerakbudaya, one of the organising committee for the forum "Should we rewrite our history textbooks?", has accused a local daily of inaccurate coverage on the subject.
Gerakbudaya representative Imran Rashid, who was also the moderator of the forum, said Utusan Malaysia ran inaccurate reports on the forum for three days consecutively, and questioned the paper's intention for misinterpreting the forum's content as if it was promoting communism.
"We refute this misrepresentation of the forum's content which has served only to stir-up anti-communist sentiments against the panelists, Fahmi Reza and Fadiah Nadwa Fikri.
"We are questioning the motives behind Utusan's reporting,” he said during a press conference today.
Imran said a journalist from the paper was present throughout the forum and listened to the speakers’ presentations.
“Utusan's reporting focused heavily on the topic of communism and they released only some portion of a video from the Q&A session,” he said.
Moving forward, Imran said the organising committee would like to reaffirm the need for a deeper understanding on why a revision of the country's history textbooks is needed, especially in reference to the independence struggle.
During the previous forum, Fahmi had pointed out that in the current Form 3 textbook, 10 pages are given to the role of Umno in the struggle for independence, whilst only one small paragraph mentions the Communist Party of Malaya (PKM).
He said it is important in the aftermath of GE14 for political bias to be removed from the ‘Sejarah’ curriculum and that it be made more inclusive and critical to allow students to reflect on alternative and widely forgotten narratives of the struggle for Malayan independence.
