If you’ve watched this clip on the DAP website here, you will see a far different Nazri confronting LKS on the former’s insinuation of Chin Peng being the ‘bapa kemerdekaan’ for DAP. We should all take lessons from the short clip: having an insinuation well-delivered with the right strategy will do far more damage to your opponent than your own insinuation. And this is simply from the heated response that obtains from your opponent.
(Not being a Jeff Ooi or some such personality with little birds for info, let’s pepper our amateur analysis with many “ifs” and “maybes”, shall we?)
Nazri kept his calm, and we should all speculate why. I think LKS has blogged about who he, at least, feels is the ‘bapa kemerdekaan’ (Tengku Abdul Rahman). The position’s pretty straightforward, but the events leading up to Nazri’s statement in parliament should be looked at as a primer: when Ronnie Liu issued his statement, Khairy Jamaluddin issued a challenge to LKS to debate the matter with him in parliament.
Lim Kit Siang holding forth in Parliament…
Of course, LKS’s stinging reply was tantamount to a slap in the face, in my opinion: since Khairy isn’t a parliamentarian, he can’t debate the matter in parliament by default. Since then, there have been challenges to the DAP to discuss the matter in parliament. If I’m not mistaken, there has been no real debate leading up to the 19th September 2005 parliamentary session.
And this makes Nazri’s insinuation all the more biting: if you can’t draw out the fox, you’ve got to smoke him out and therefore the insinuation becomes effective in this regard. Ronnie Liu’s statement is a sore spot for LKS, I think: the statement has made it all the more easy for the incumbent to characterize DAP as, at one extreme of opinion, communist. And this will obtain despite the truth or falsehood of the content of Ronnie Liu’s statement. It’ll probably be a matter of time before Nazri makes ’speculative’ assertions about DAP as a communist party.
As a side note, it’s interesting to see how Nazri’s acting now compared to his ‘racist, racist, you are racist’ grandstanding in parliament. Calm, collected, pre-meditated and therefore dangerous. When LKS succeeds in forcing parliament to decide on the spot on Nazri’s insinuation and refusal to retract what he said, the majority in parliament held out for Nazri (of course). Maybe it’s not in the succeeding that’s important ya, but in recording LKS’s objection.
As the short feed ends, Nazri makes an interesting comment, to paraphrase: “Ronnie Liu is a far greater threat to national stability” to which I would like to modify: Ronnie Liu’s statement is a far greater threat to DAP itself.
