Racial Slurs Should Be Made A Crime Says Noor Farida

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Cheras police are investigating an influencer for the alleged racial slur after a report was lodged on the incident.PETALING JAYA: A law to criminalise racial remarks should be introduced, says a former top civil servant, following two incidents involving remarks by a social media influencer and a national hockey player.
“I really can’t believe these kinds of things are still happening. We must introduce a law where racist remarks are considered an offence and punishable,” said Noor Farida Mohd Ariffin, a spokesperson of the G25 group of former senior civil servants.
Her comments were made in the wake of remarks linked to a concert at the National Stadium last Saturday.
The influencer is under police investigation, while hockey player Hanis Nadiah Onn has apologised for her remarks.
Farida said if a law criminalising racist remarks was introduced, victims would be able to lodge reports against the offenders.
She said the use of racial slurs by young people indicated that racial tolerance was declining.
A law on race relations has been sought by activist groups over the decades. Last year, a former law minister, Nazri Aziz, had also called for anti-racism laws to serve as an instrument to preserve unity among Malaysians.
Farida said a root cause was the lack of interaction between schoolchildren from different communities, made worse by “too many hours” being devoted to religious studies in national schools, further segregating Muslim and non-Muslim pupils.
“This speaks volumes about the need to reform the education curriculum because the students shouldn’t be separated in the first place,” she said.
Social activist Chandra Muzaffar, also in favour of a law against racial remarks, questioned whether the authorities and society at large made attempts to check racial slurs.
People should call out those who uttered racial remarks, he said. “That way those who use it will realise it is something to be ashamed of and would stop using them,” he said. - FMT

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