A popular Malaysian rapper and film director has been arrested over a music video, which allegedly disrespects Islam, Malaysia’s national news agency said.
Namewee, whose real name is Wee Meng Chee (黃明志), was arrested at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport where he was returning from abroad, the Bernama agency said late on Sunday.
The word “Allah” and sounds of the Islamic call to prayer were said to be used in the four-minute Mandarin music video, titled Oh My God.
The video featured footage of Namewee and other singers, dressed in outfits representing various cultures and religions, performing inside a mosque and a church as well as at Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist temples.
Religious tensions in Malaysia have simmered in recent years, with Muslim moderates and followers of other religions expressing concern at a steady rise of conservative Islamic attitudes.
Earlier this year, cinema posters and a billboard advertisement for a Hong Kong blockbuster film were modified to erase a half-man, half-pig character.
Last month, several groups filed police reports claiming Namewee’s music video had insulted Islam.
In response, he posted a YouTube video explaining that he had no intention of insulting any religion and that the song was written to “promote harmony.”
The original music video is no longer available online, but an edited version without footage of the mosque scenes was uploaded on YouTube over the weekend.
Namewee, who is also popular in Taiwan, is no stranger to controversy and has ruffled political and religious feathers on several occasions over the years.
He first hit the headlines in 2007 when he posted a video that featured him rapping to Malaysia’s national anthem using allegedly seditious lyrics.
In the introduction to the video, which shows a Malaysian flag in the background, Namewee dedicated the song to “all Malaysians, especially the government.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS