Vandals splashed a church with paint and burglars ransacked a law firm defending Christians in their fight to use the word “Allah,” adding to religious tensions in Muslim-majority Malaysia, police and officials said yesterday.
The Church of St Elizabeth in southern Johor state was splashed with red paint before dawn, district police chief Osman Mohamed Sebot said. It was the 10th church attacked or vandalized since Friday night in Muslim-majority Malaysia, where people of different faiths have generally lived without conflict.
Meanwhile, the offices of the law firm representing the Herald was broken into and ransacked, lawyers said yesterday.
Lawyer S. Selvarajah said that staff arrived at work in the morning to find several locks and steel grill doors to enter the 2nd and 3rd floor offices cut, drawers ransacked and papers strewn on the floor.
He said his partner’s laptop was missing. A mobile phone service provider’s shop and tuition center on the first floor were not broken into, he said.
“Only our office has been targeted,” he said. “It looks like it is an intimidation tactic ... We anticipated something will happen. We are definitely upset about this,” he said.
The incident adds to the tension building up since the church attacks began on Friday night. Eight churches have been firebombed by unknown attackers.
Two other churches were splashed with paint, and another place of worship — a Sikh temple — was pelted with stones, apparently because Sikhs use the word “Allah” in their scriptures.
The attacks followed a High Court ruling on Dec. 31, allowing a Catholic publication, the Herald, to use “Allah” as a translation for God in its Bahasa Melayu language edition. The ruling, which overturned a government ban on the word, upset many Muslims in Malaysia.
Bahasa is the language of the Malay Muslims, who comprise about 60 percent of the country’s 28 million population. It is also spoken by indigenous people of Sabah and Sarawak states on Borneo, who form more than 70 percent of Malaysia’s 2.5 million Christians.
The government, which has appealed against the High Court ruling, says “Allah” is exclusive to Islam and its use by Christians would mislead Muslims. The Christians say they have been using the word for decades, and it is the only word they have for God in their language.
The government has condemned the attacks on the churches and has vowed to uphold the freedom of religion guaranteed to minorities by the Constitution.
The ban is over the use of “Allah” only in published material and not in everyday speech by the country’s various minorities.
Selvarajah said police and staff could not enter the third-floor office, in Kuala Lumpur’s Petaling Jaya suburb, because the door was jammed. He said a camera in the building staircase was sprayed but he could not say with what.
Petaling Jaya police chief Arjunaidi Mohamed confirmed the break-in, saying police were investigating. He said it should not immediately be linked to recent church attacks.
“It has nothing to do with the churches,” he said.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS