Initially, we could not make heads or tails over media reports that around 300 armed men from the Philippines had landed in Sabah. In fact, it took a number of days before we realized that the men were calling attention anew to the “elephant in the room” in the precarious bilateral relations between Malaysia and the Philippines.
China’s recent pronouncement that it will now board vessels purportedly illegally entering its waters in the disputed West Philippine Sea has at least defined the nature of its claim to these troubled waters. Since three years ago when it opposed the joint submission by Malaysia and Vietnam for an extended continental shelf on an area [...]
An allegedly anti-Islam trailer has reopened the debate on where the limits to freedom of expression should be. While the movie “Innocence of Muslims” that depicts Mohammad as a fraud, a womanizer and a pedophile has had a very limited release, it is the film’s trailer uploaded on YouTube that has caused massive unrest in Islamic societies.
