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This post is about our humanity.
It’s another one of those long public holiday weekends in Malaysia – we have many, and I was reading this article written by Ciara Linnane / Market Watch and found it quite comprehensive in grabbing all of the relevant quotes from the Nike/Kaepernick campaign. A great place to start if you’d like to get into the heat of a Twitter trending topic #kneelwithkaepernick.
The Guardian jumps onto the bandwagon and reports this by compiling a few media inserts from various channels. I find it so interesting how a big media house like The Guardian generates news by just reproducing snippets of news sourced from the internet. See below:
Amnesty International bestows Kaepernick Ambassador of Conscience Award
Recently, Kaepernick’s just been awarded the highest order from Amnesty International for his protest to racial and social injustice. Here’s a brief summary and video by Sports Illustrated.
Over in Malaysia, #kneelwithkaepernick isn’t as hot because…
Our religious police have conducted caning sentences for people who are queer, sex workers and Muslims caught drinking in public. Muslim men who marry teenage girls continue to live their lives in normalcy. There is a dual-law system in Malaysia – criminal and civil laws and Syariah laws that only apply to Muslims and usually used to govern “personal law matters, for example marriage, inheritance, and apostasy“. On a personal front, I find the caning sentences shocking, sickening and unacceptable in today’s modern society. Despite it being their first offense, the 22 and 32-year-old women who were caught compromised in a car were sentenced to six strokes of caning each, in a room with 100 witnesses. I offer my respect and support to the people who have been outspoken and made public statements against this act.
Here we are, in the year 2018, thinking we women of Malaysia are progressive, spearheading the entrepreneurial and technology forefront, only to be pulled back centuries to a time when flagellation was a patriarchal society’s means of elders showing their authority and power. Are we in Medieval Europe? No. We’re 18-months from Malaysia 2020.
Then there’s the indigenous group of people from Peninsular Malaysia called the ‘Temiar’ – some 30,000 left in existence according to Wikipedia. The Temiar blockade in Gua Musang, Kelantan – Malaysia’s Northernmost state, has been very much a local news headline. As guardians of the last remaining tropical rainforests, the Temiars won in court over land rights after spending months mapping their ancestry land using GPS yet have lost in their fight to ward off Musang King durian planters hungry to reap fruits for export. I met documentary-producer Jules Rahman Ong, and watched his eye-opening documentary produced for Channel News Asia.
Making a statement
It’s ironic isn’t it that as a human race, we have so many differences yet we have more similarities. So if we could all kneel, why aren’t we? I have always fought for the underdogs, but this time I’m starting to feel the underdog is me. My fight will be for fairness for all regardless of gender, sexuality or race, status or religious beliefs. Every human is after all equal in the eyes of God (and if you’re Atheist, put a period after equal).