Muhyiddin ally Annuar Musa slammed for stoking race tensions with disinformation

A Malaysian minister seen as close to prime ministerial contender Muhyiddin Yassin on Wednesday (Nov 23) was forced to amend a Facebook post that commenters said was dangerously fanning racial tensions amid the country’s political deadlock.

Annuar Musa, a member of the Barisan Nasional bloc had shared an undated video, seemingly featuring a Taiwanese political rally with attendees wearing red attire.

Malaysian fact-checking initiative Faqcheck told This Week in Asia the video was of a 2019 rally by then-Taiwanese presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu.

In the accompanying text, Annuar did not specify that the video was shot in Taiwan or offer other details on what it was about. Instead, he wrote obliquely about the need for Muslims to not take “clear enemies of the religion as allies”.

“At our moment of weakness, Allah commands us to no longer be separated and divided,” Annuar wrote. The politician, who is the caretaker information minister, did not offer context to his comments.

Facing a deluge of criticism, he removed the video from the post but retained the text late on Wednesday afternoon.

Annuar, 66, is a member of the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) party but is seen having strong ties with Malay nationalist Muhyiddin who leads Umno’s key rival Bersatu.

Given the context of the country’s ongoing political impasse, some commenters suggested Annuar was seeking to stoke racial feelings among the country’s majority Malays.

The two coalitions vying for power – the conservative Malay-Muslim Perikatan Nasional alliance of Muhyiddin and Anwar Ibrahim’s multi-ethnic Pakatan Harapan alliance – are seen as holding diametrically opposite ideologies.

Perikatan Nasional, which includes the hardline Islamist PAS party, fared strongly in Saturday’s vote on the back of a message that observers say partly leaned into rhetoric that Pakatan Harapan rule would erode the rights of the country’s Malay-Muslims, who make up some 60 per cent of the country’s 32 million people.

Pakatan Harapan’s symbol is its name embossed on a background of crimson red, the same shade as the attire worn by the Taiwanese rally goers in the video shared by Annuar.

“Do you want to wait until there’s a racial riot before you stop?” asked Facebook user Mazlan Muaz. On Twitter, a user of Malay ethnicity asked: “Are you really spreading disinformation as the information minister? I hope he is condemned and prosecuted … there is no room for racism in Malaysia.”

On WhatsApp, forwarded messages incorrectly stated that the video shared by Annuar showed a Pakatan Harapan rally in Penang, a state in northern Peninsular Malaysia where ethnic Chinese residents make up about 40 per cent of the population.

Police have warned citizens against sharing incendiary messages amid the heightened political temperatures in recent days. Short-form video platform TikTok on Thursday said it was on high alert for content that violated its guidelines in Malaysia.

“We continue to be on high alert and will aggressively remove any violative content,” TikTok, which is owned by the China -based firm ByteDance, said in a statement.

Since Saturday’s election, social media users have reported numerous TikTok posts mentioning the May 1969 riot which took place in capital city Kuala Lumpur. In that clash, about 200 people were killed days after opposition parties supported by ethnic Chinese voters made inroads in an election.

TikTok said it had removed videos with riot-related content that violated its community guidelines, saying it had “zero tolerance” for hate speech and violent extremism.

TikTok declined to reveal the number of posts it had deleted or the number of complaints received. It told Reuters it would remove any accounts operated by users under the age of 13 after some parents complained that their children had been exposed to offensive content.