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Followup from a post I made in transnational thread about systemic child sexual abuse by a banned islamic cult in Malaysia. This post will actually focus on the concept of disproportionate Noticing, but the background leading to this actually could spawn a whole seperate thread about moral hypocrisy.
Summary: Malaysian police raided orphanages operated by a network of business entities linked to a banned islamic cult in early September. Sexual abuse (actual sexual abuse, not western diminished agency stuff) of 600+ minors aged 1-17 was the cause for the police launching the raids. Civil administrative incompetence, financial corruption and 'other inducements' are contributing factors to the failure of the religious authorities to police their own, to the great suffering of children. Yet not only is western media ignorant of this, what media does exist seems to focus on issues regarding migrant rights and statelessness.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/malaysia-child-abuse-scandal-gisb-children-orphans-foundlings-stateless-rights-4665351
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/malaysia-babies-for-sale-101-east/index.html
CW angles: STOP NOTICING BIGOT Indonesians and filipino illegals sell their children to richer malaysians, whether they are childless chinese looking for a pureblood han (the only good outcome) or criminal gangs looking for kids to maim and pimp out (the most common outcome for brown kids). Sex tourism in southeast asia is not restricted to rich whites coming to spend tourism dollars, there is a flourishing regional demand for child prostitution. A little commented but readily observed reality here is that islamic regions have higher predilection for sex with minors.
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1177268/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Criminal statistics on pedophiliac incest are also Noticed, just as in Europe. To protect the rights of children names are rarely disclosed, but indicative hints (multigenerational households in rental apartments) or cases where the judges exercise discretion to name the convicted largely show the preponderance of muslims as sex offenders.
The aggressive downplaying of the severity of the child sexual abuse to pivot onto high concept issues such as citizenship and rights strikes me as a stark contrast to the discourse surrounding Canadian residential schools or Australian aboriginal rehoming. English language media framing of this issue seems to aggressively downplay the complicity of the Malay authorities and consumers who abetted and consumed the goods produced by the cult. To be extremely clear, the sexual abuses of children was facilitated by a cultified interpretation of Islam that the cult members practiced, which encouraged pedophilia, coercive polygamy and social control strategies. The Islamic morality enforcement authorities did not act on this - it is speculated that the police (who are ostensibly secular but nevertheless staffed by malay muslims) deliberately avoided informing JAKIM about the investigation/raid to prevent JAKIM from interfering or covering up the cults activities. Yet, english language media, especially what little western media covers this, is running its own narrative interference by downplaying the sexual abuses committed by brown muslims. Without a white or white adjacent enemy to aggressively pin all crimes hypothetical or otherwise on, the issue in question becomes philosophical migrant rights issues instead of visceral child sexual abuse.
There are many horrible takeaways about this case, but the most relevant here is the contrast between residential schools mass graves and this GISBH mass sexual abuse. If whites are there, their guilt is automatic and eternal. If browns do bad things, its their culture and whites must support them lest they lose their unique diversity.
I'm not up to date on this specific incident, thank you for sharing. I did fall down a rabbit hole earlier in the year reading about some of the insane and prolific cults/sects/sorcerers that seem to bubble up constantly in both Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite the Koran ostensibly forbidding sorcery (and in so doing also tacitly confirms that sorcery is real), there seems to be an incredible demand for magic and (uncharitably) witchcraft all over not just maritime SE Asia, but the entire Muslim world. The gov't of Qatar had a PSA campaign against magical amulets, the Saudi Religious police have a specialized anti-witchcraft department and actually capture and execute a sorceress every couple of years. Indonesia has a lot of problems with sorcerers scamming people out of most of their money, often impoverishing entire families.
It’s quite common at this level of development, see the occult fascination in the Anglosphere between around 1890 and 1914, new age cults and so on. We’ve just moved past it as we’ve advanced into pomo cynicism; they haven’t.
That time period was a fascinating overlap of old world superstition and the rapid advancement of science and engineering in the 1800s. I've always enjoyed the efforts to use the new, highly accurate tools of measurement to quantify supernatural phenomena. The most famous of these being to ascertain the weight of a soul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment
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How sincere was new age occultism in that era? Was it barnum style showmanship, or did people really believe and act their real life in accordance? The craziest cult practice I encountered personally was a thai woman who said she created real kumanthongs to sell to thai oligarchs. A kumanthong is a stillborn fetus removed from the womans uterus, then preserved by smoking and then wrapped in sanctified talismans. It had magic properties and was said to bring good luck. She was notorious for providing high end escorts in Southeast Asia who did not use condoms, and several guys I know who used her girls wondered if their kids were turned into good luck charms.
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I wouldn’t point to this as a ‘media doesn’t care if there’s no evil whitey to blame’ so much as a ‘news stories about Malaysia are extremely rare’.
That is fair. I debated whether to actually post this in the first place because its relevance is low. Foreign kids being abused sucks, but they're over there and we have problems here so no emotional energy is worth being expended on it
It is the STOP NOTICING BIGOT aspect that caught my attention. It is unsurprising that malay supremacist politicians are saying that to notice the crimes of muslims committed to other muslims is an act of discrimination, and the criminals should be let off. The emergence of western style human rights as a talking point is the surprising aspect, and it remains to be seen how strongly it sticks.
I understand the relative irrelevance of this fact to the salient culture wars waging in the west. I hope that for my own sake the current meta of 'brown losers are oppressed and cannot be censured for crimes' does not take root here.
My understanding is that chinamen in Malaysia are more disadvantaged relative to Malays than whites are to minorities anywhere except South Africa. Is this not true?
Broadly accurate, and the SA comparison is the most relevant one, as SA is looking to replicate Malaysias system of positive discrimination for the underperforming racial majority. The difference is that the Whites who exercised power as a minority racial group - pied noirs, afrikaners in Southern Africa, french and greek populations across Lebanon and Egypt - exercised political power as a racial minority over the local racial majority in addition to their economic dominance. Save for the odd case of Thailand, minority Chinese have never managed to exercise political ower over local majority populations. The economic dominance of Chinese over local majority populations is in spite of political discrimination, though Chinese shamelessness in playing the local political does allow for second order political protections.
The inaccuracy of the comparison between local Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia and White minorities is that save for South Africa, Whites do not exist as a formalized racial class with associated racial privileges/discrimination (note: Latin America is a weird case). Despite malay supremacist claims, Chinese Malaysians are not a transient expat population, but multigenerational residents with almost equal historical presence in Malaysia to the Malays. Like South Africa, the Malays are actually external groups like Austronesian Bugis and Javanese, as opposed to truly indigenous populations like the Orang Asli. This is similar to South Africa, where the Bantu expansions resulted in a Zulu population dominating the original Xhosa. Chinese arrived in permanent numbers to Malaysia within one century of the Bugis expansions, just as Afrikaaners settled South Africa within a few centuries of Zulu expansion (George E Hale may be able to clarify my mistakes here). Without developing a political power base, Chinese have largely been viewed as a replenishing piggy bank for rulers to raid for financing development initiatives, with regular pogroms exercised to keep the Chinese in line (more common in Indonesia and Philippines, but several branches of my family were snuffed by Malays a century ago).
In any case, the who Malay political leaders (especially the Islamist supremacists) have found it expedient to use western theories of intersectionality to advance discrimination against Chinese via economic appropriation now find themselves bound by the public abuses committed by their islamist populations who are beneficiaries and proponents of Malay positive discrimination according to the same principle of intersectionality. The current meta is to not discuss the crimes committed and castigate anyone who calls attention to it as racist for Noticing.
The West, especiallywith the ostensibly post racial white majority populations, have internal political rivals as the proximate enemy to utilize wedge issues as a discussion issue. In most other countries, the racial minorities must be crushed first. Until that happens, crimes committed by your kin must be downplayed.
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