KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 18 — Bagan MP Lim Guan Eng questioned the severity of the response to Rex Tan’s actions.
In a statement, Lim, who is also DAP advisor, stated that Tan should not have been subjected to such heavy-handed enforcement, “that will expose the government to criticisms of practicing double standards.”
He noted that Tan has been arrested and remanded for one day under the Section 4(1) of the Sedition Act, Section 505 (c) of the Penal Code and is also being investigated under Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act.
“This selective action against Rex smacks of double-standards when the police utterly failed to act on Pengkalan Chepa MP Ahmad Marzuk Shaary, who last October posted on Facebook an entry titled “Learning from the history of Palestine: Let us not repeat the same mistake,” said Lim.
Ahmad Marzuk had, according to Lim, “implicitly portrayed non-Muslim Bumis as Israelis and Muslims Bumis as Palestinians.”
In contrast, journalist Tan had clarified that he was not comparing the current state of Malaysian Chinese to Palestinians, in his questions to UK politician George Galloway at the public lecture “Gaza Exposes the Complicity of International Actors”.
Lim questioned why the PAS MP had not been taken to task over his Facebook post and saw no repercussions while Tan, despite his apologies, had been arrested and lost his job.
“Ahmad Marzuk did not apologise nor lose his job nor was arrested by the police. This would make it difficult for government supporters to rebut criticisms of double-standards in the treatment of Ahmad Marzuk and Rex Tan,” he said.
