Nurulhidayah Zahid, daughter of Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, for example, compared the community to "monkeys in the forest". "Enough of using religious and humanitarian sentiments. Do good in moderation. Don't let the monkeys in the forest be fed, [while] the children at home die of hunger," she wrote in a post on Threads that includes a picture of Rohingya. A former deputy police chief, Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, likened the influx of Rohingya as a "cancer" requiring urgent action. "[Refugees and migrants] are once again being turned into convenient political scapegoats to divert attention from deeper domestic challenges," says Yap Lay Sheng, a researcher from the human rights group Fortify Rights. "For years, the Malaysian government has sought to present the country internationally as a humane and compassionate Muslim nation. Its treatment of the Rohingya exposes the hollowness of that claim ," says Yap, who is based i...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51