I’m taking a page out of Daring Fireball here and I’m going to name Dato’ Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor as the jackass of the week. In fact, I believe his following comments qualify him for jackass of the month – no one’s going to top this easily.
National Chinese daily Sin Chew Daily reported Dato’ as saying:
“All bloggers are liars, they cheat people using all kinds of methods. From my understanding, out of 10,000 unemployed bloggers, 8,000 are women.”
He said that bloggers spread rumours, disrupt social harmony and many bloggers are slanderous and are cheating people with their blogs.
“All bloggers are not in favour of national unity. Our country has been successful because we are very tolerant with each other, if not, there will be civil war, the Malays will kill the Chinese, the Chinese will take revenge and kill the Malays, and the Indian will kill everyone.”
He urged the rakyat not to simply trust bloggers, and gamble our future away because the achievement we gain in the 50 years of independence is not an easy task.
Via Tony Pua, thanks for the heads up Jinny.
He’s obviously clueless about blogging and the claims he makes are completely unfounded. He probably never heard of bloggers until the NST decided to sue 2 prominent bloggers in Malaysia. His 2nd encounter with them must have been when an Indonesian journalist posted some unflattering things about Visit Malaysia year on her blog.
Meanwhile, June Tan, a Masters student doing her thesis on blogging and democracy in Malaysia compares her research findings with Tengku Adnan. Her findings are totally different.
Based on the above I would suggest that the only lying, slanderous person here is Tengku Adnan. He tells us not to gamble our future away by trusting bloggers. Would he rather have us gamble our future by trusting a loose cannon like him in the government?
Well, all I can say is that he’s one in many. These people ought to keep up with technology, and the current state of affairs, but they chose to live in denial.