In accusing the DAP of attempting to turn Malaysia into a “second Singapore” a PAS activist moves dangerously close to promoting inter communal strife, apparently solely to advance the interests of Islamist activists. Singapore is inhabited in majority by people of Chinese extraction. Malaysia by adherents of Islam. But in neither country should religious considerations govern domestic policy or politics.

What PAS, deliberately, ignore is the divide between religious belief and practical politics. The first is, or should be, a matter of personal individual belief. The second a conscious decision as to which political grouping is most likely to promote honest government in the public interest, rather than narrow sectarian interests based solely on which religious community an individual happens to have been born into.

In other words Malaysians are. like everyone else on earth, living in the twenty first century and cannot be constrained by seventh century religious doctrines formulated in a world that has long gone. Roman Catholics have their own religious beliefs but no longer preach that “heretics” deserve death nor that their own religious community is entitled to priority of any kind. The sooner that the Muslim community reach a similar understanding the better it will be for Malaysians of all religious beliefs. Malaysians do not murder their political opponents or carpet bomb those who do not share their views or acknowledge their political supremacy. Time to be civilised and to consign religious fanatics of all varieties to the isolation they deserve.