Utusan’s revival of the discredited fairy tale of DAP-funded Red Bean Army of 3,000 cybertroopers is a desperate bid by UMNO cyber mercenaries not to be excluded from the UMNO cyberwar funding running into hundreds of millions of ringgit

Yesterday, in the first part of my commentary on Awang Selamat’s column “Pihak berkuasa kita!” in Mingguan Malaysia of Sunday, 2nd March 2014, I said my first immediate thought on reading the column was that it was a classic case of “Thief shouting thief”.

This is because the column by Awang Selamat, the collective pen name of the Utusan editors, not only reeked of hypocrisy but clearly had the ignoble objective of distracting attention from their incessant incitement of racial and religious hatred through lies and falsehoods with “immunity and impunity” to pit race against race and religion against religion in Malaysia.

Awang revived the allegation that the DAP is funding the so-called Red Bean Army (RBA) of 3,000 cybertroopers with a budget of RM100 million to RM1 billion in the past six years and attacked the authorities for practising double standards in giving the DAP and the RBA “the grand licence to do extreme provocation” especially through the Red Bean Army of 3,000 cybertroopers “insulting the Malays, Islam, security forces, civil servants and the country”.

The question I want to raise today is why the Utusan editors have suddenly revived the discredited the fairy tale of DAP-funded Red Bean Army (RBA) of 3,000 cybertroopers when it had dropped the subject like a ton of hot bricks for the past six months?

The last time Utusan Malaysia editors went into an overdrive on the fairly tale about the DAP funding the Red Bean Army of 3,000 cybertroopers with a budget of RM100 million to RM1 billion in the past six years to attack and defame Barisan Nasional leaders were in May and June last year, when they even alleged that the RBA had two operational centres, one in Hotel Concorde in Kuala Lumpur and the other based in Komtar in Penang.

As I said at the time, these were all modern fairy tales completely without one iota of truth in them.

According to the Utusan fairy tales, the modus operandi of the DAP-funded Red Bean Army cybertroopers is to attack any politician, businessman or entertainer who are seen as pro-BN via facebook, tweet, YouTube in order to arouse racial hatred of Chinese voters against them.

As I said on June 27, 2013, “until a few days ago when I came across the Utusan Malaysia series of write-ups on the so-called ‘Red Bean Army’, I have not heard of the term before”. I stand by what I said in June last year.

When Utusan continued with its barrage of lies and falsehoods on the DAP-funded RBA, which caused me to call Utusan as a “lies-paper” and not “newspaper”, I led a team of DAP MPs which included Bandar Kuching MP Chong Chieng Jen, Petaling Jaya Utara MP Tony Pua and Bukit Bintang MP Fong Kui Loon, accompanied by the media, to make a 10 pm-visit to Concorde Hotel on July 4 last year.

We found Concorde Hotel – which was supposed to be one the two operational centres of the billion-ringgit Red Bean Army – crawling with UMNO leaders and operatives but no Red Bean Army. We found something even more shocking – that the exorbitant ice-kachang in Concorde Hotel had no red beans at all!

As a result, the Utusan’s fairy tale of DAP-funded RBA became a national standing joke and it died a natural death for next six months – and even Utusan Malaysia dared not touch the subject – until it was revived by Utusan Malaysia a few days ago, culminating in Awang’s “Thief shouting thief” column yesterday.

What is the cause of the Utusan’s desperate revival of the utterly-discredited fairly tale of the DAP-funded RBA of 3,000 cybertroopers with a budget of RM108 million to RM1 billion in the past six years?

I said in July last year that the reason for the “fatal obsession” to the fairy tale of the DAP-funded RBA is related to a secret agenda reaching high into UMNO corridors of power to justify an allocation of RM350 million in the next five years to fight the fictitious and non-existent DAP-funded RBA.

The latest Utusan revival of the RBA fairy-tale is again caused by lucre or money –as it is clearly a desperate bid by UMNO mercenaries not to be excluded from the UMNO cyberwar funding running into hundreds of millions of ringgit.

UMNO cyber mercenaries, including those who have received a lucrative stream of payments as puppets of the Utusan RBA fairy-tale, are now fighting a last-ditch battle not to be excluded from the UMNO cyber slush funds, as they are regarded as too obsolete to fight the UMNO cyberwar by a new group of IT-savvy “geniuses”.

There is now a new Umno/BN cyberwar battle plan, which will be spearheaded by a group of young IT-savvy “generals” who will provide the information and prepare the offensive and defensive tactics of the new Umno/BN cyberwar.

In this new scheme of things, there will be little room and role for the erstwhile UMNO mercenaries, particularly those who have waxed rich beating the fictitious DAP-funded RBA war-drums, and this is the backdrop as to why Utusan editors, who have always regarded themselves as the patron of the Umno cyber-mercenaries, is fighting a desperate last-ditch battle to remain relevant in the Umno/BN cyber battle plans by reviving the discredited DAP-funded RBA fairy tale.

I don’t think it is easy to find in the field of journalism all over the world another case like Utusan Malaysia which had fallen so low from its pinnacle as a once highly-respected newspaper of truth, honesty and principles to become a “lies-paper” purveying falsehoods, deceit and chicanery.

No self-respecting Malaysian journalist can feel any pride in what Utusan is doing in the name of journalism today.