On citizenship and oaths of loyalty

I WAS perplexed by a group of Malay NGOs wanting to question the citizenship some 1.75 million Malaysian citizens because they didn't take an oath of loyalty to the country. So much so, that I needed a while to process just what they are saying - and I'm now rather keen on pointing out some flaws.

The first flaw I can think of is that this move is figuratively punishing the son for the sins of the father - not really a sin, to be frank. The move is actually to disqualify the citizenship of following generations, thus the 1.75 million would be only a small number of those affected.

But more so, it is self evidently racist because they don't even consider deporting those of Indonesian Malaysian heritage who also did not swear such an oath.

Thus, one has to ask - does being Malay Muslim in Malaysia with a heritage borne from Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and even Turkey, straight away makes one loyal to Malaysia? Because that seems rather biased, to be honest.

If we were to raise the question for all these Malay Muslims, myself included, we would probably be disqualifying 2/3 of our citizenry from citizenship.

This idea, is actually one that tries to divide the people even more into the concept race, heritage and religion. It is so far gone from current day global view of politics that it is on equal level as Donald Trump supporters wanting a white America with no mix.

Plus, all these matters are settled and done for by our Founding Fathers, and should no longer be an issue especially now with a Minister saying the youth are preferring to have one nation united under the concept of "Bangsa Malaysia" - a Malaysian race. For some reason, these racial extremist somehow confounded the definition to it only being a full on Malay Muslim race.

More to the point, let us be totally frank - the Malay race is now made up of those with non-Malay heritage. You could look anywhere and find that the current Malay generation are made up of generations of mixed marriages, which is even evident with our prime minister promoting himself as a Bugis warrior.

I'd honestly ask the same for my Chinese, Indian and Indonesian ancestors as well. Heck, if we were to include racial heritage for deportation, I'd wager perhaps more than a third of this country would have to be told to pack up and go, much like how Idi Amin Dada deported all the Indians when he took power.

However, I'd like to point out here a simple fact - this group is wrong when they said that 1.75 million Malaysians did not swear an oath of loyalty, because I would think that they did. And their next generations did, and the generations after that up to now.

Every single Malaysian - be it ethnic Chinese, ethnic Indians, or even mixed heritage - have all sworn an oath of loyalty to King, Country, Constitution, Law and God even if not in such an order.

It's called the Rukunegara, sworn to by every Malaysian citizen who has ever attended a school, a university or even a Merdeka day parade, or has even read the back cover of one of their school's brown exercise books.

Hopefully, it is still sworn on to this day during morning assemblies by national schools, vernacular schools, and perhaps even those maahad tahfiz schools which just got a whopping RM80 mil of federal funding quite recently.

Thus, I see a simple solution to undo this racist, apartheid movement, simply by cornering their members and gathering this so-called 1.75 million Malaysians in front of a commissioner of oaths - I hope these are living Malaysians - to recite the oath published on the back of such an exercise book, and make this movement undone.

If these racists say or question the integrity of such an oath, then they should by all means have to prove it, one by one, individual by individual, of which I'm sure the judges would have better cases to settle.

Quite honestly though, I would like to point out that this dumb and racist sideshow should never have seen the light of day, since it should've been strangled at its birth or aborted during conception. It is a threat to national unity which I personally find dangerous and should have been classified as a crime.

But I leave it to someone else to gather people en masses and file a police report to pursue such a case to compel a police investigation. And maybe that right there is the problem with all of us who are against this group's idea.

We are still looking for that "someone else", rather than look in a mirror and say we should do it ourselves.