Ban on raising banners, chanting takbir at freedom for Palestine rally not govt's stand

Home Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail said the ban is at the discretion of the organisers who are responsible for ensuring peace and public order.

"In Parliament I emphasised, that when I stand for the government's position and I convey with responsibility, our recognition to them (Palestine)... but the question is whether Benjamin Netanyahu can be criticized, our position is clear, the fact that we recognize the struggle of the Palestinian people, by itself we deny our support ( to Israel).

"But if in a gathering with 300, 400 people, an organization may imposed, the dos and the don'ts based on the facts of the incident at that time and it does not fully reflect the government's stance today," he said during Minister's Question Time in the Dewan Rakyat today.

He said this in response to a supplementary question by Wan Ahmad Fayhsal Wan Ahmad Kamal (PN-Machang) who wanted to know if there was a new law to take down banners that denounced the Israeli leader.

Elaborating further, Saifuddin said the Peaceful Assembly Act 2012 required the organisers to be responsible to ensure they and others in the assembly did not commit acts and did not issue statements that tended to develop bad feelings or hostility among the public.

He said the recent meeting between Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as well as Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia King Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud also showed Malaysia's efforts to jointly save the Palestinian people.

"The main issue is solidarity with the Palestinian people who are recognised by sympathetic countries as a sovereign country but there is no homeland either in Gaza or the West Bank where the land is a colonised land.

"The main issue now is that the lives of two million people are at risk, the Israeli army is already at the border and the main issue is how to get the people out of the besieged Gaza land and this is what the prime minister did when he met Erdogan, King Salman and became a coordinator on behalf of Asean," he said.

Answering Wan Ahmad Fayhsal's original question as to whether the government has issued guidelines on what should not be said in a peaceful demonstration, Saifuddin said existing acts such as the Penal Code, the Sedition Act 1948 and the Communications and Multimedia Act are sufficient in managing a public gathering.