There’s a reason he called his video “Trolling Malaysia”, guys.
Globetrotting travel blogger and particularly obnoxious person Emil Kaminski, who engaged Sabah Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Masidi Manjun in a heated online flamewar over the minister’s remarks that 10 foreign tourists who stripped naked on Mount Kinabalu’s summit caused the Sabah earthquake, and has since been the subject of a citizen manhunt, came out with the truth: he was never one of the 10 nudists on the mountain.
Hell, he wasn’t even in Malaysia at the time.
In a follow-up video (titled “Mt Kinabalu – The Naked Truth”, because of course it is) on his YouTube chanbel, Kaminski tries to explain the chain of events that led to his infamy.
Kaminski claims that Masidi’s comments in the immediate aftermath of the Sabah earthquake on June 5 were what drove him to, well, pick a fight with the state minister.
He began his spat with Masidi with a Facebook post dereiding the Kadazan-Dusun beliefs espoused by Masidi as “superstition”, accompanied with photos of his troll ass exposed on the summit of various mountaintops across the globe. Classy.
The DIY travel blogger then compared Masidi’s blaming the 10 foreign climbers who stripped down to their skivvies on the summit of Mt Kinabalu for the earthquake that followed about a week later to blaming the 2011 Japanese tsunami on whaling, and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 to the fact that the Chinese passengers on board the aircraft ate pork.
Pretty obnoxious, but dude has a point.
Where Kaminski graduates into being a next-level jackass is after his initial Facebook post (and YouTube video) went viral.
When Kaminski was throwing shade at Masidi’s comments on the earthquake, the blogger theorised, they also assumed he was one of the 10 foreign climbers who were on top of Mt Kinabalu.
And he just played along with that, because again: this is what trolls do.
He went to great lengths, too. (Well, great in an “extensive Google search” sort of way.) Using an image of bed and breakfast in Tawau he found on Wikipedia, Kaminski let on that he was in town (which he called a “shithole” – gotta love this guy).
Of course, that led to a citizen manhunt by incensed Malaysians hungry for … blood? An apology? A wefie with a foreign a-hole?
Which lies at the crux of the Emil Kaminski saga, really. He was acting out his natural tendencies, which were to (a) generate brand recognition for himself and his Monkeetime backpacker blog, and (b) to call out other people’s disagreeable behaviour. If he could do both of those things by (c) engaging in disagreable behaviour himself, he would count that as a bonus, because if there’s one thing you have to know about the truly obnoxious, it’s that they don’t usually hold themselves to the same standards by which they judge others.
In the end, this wasn’t about a foreign devil disrespecting local beliefs and customs. It almost certainy never was about a crusading blogger defending the joys and culture of mountain climbing, It very quickly devolved into an indictment of how Malaysians lose their composure when being criticised by anyone who isn’t regarded part of local society – or for that matter, outside of the immediate confines of the criticised race/religion/state/locality/street corner.
The question we need to ask ourselves is: how did this egg end up on our face? I would contend that Kaminski just turned himself into an egg with that very first Facebook post and was ready to be done with it. We threw his comments back at ourselves and got ourselves messy.
Kaminski was never a threat in any way to the Malaysian way of life, and his “disrespect” extanded only so far as he (obnoxiously) disagreed with a state minister chose to frame events through cultural belief, rather than physical science.
In the end, Kaminski gained a whole slew of AdSense money and social media followers, at the cost of a few Malaysians (most of whom live in Sabah) not liking him very much. If this article didn’t come out today, you’d be hard pressed to remember his name. Malaysians gained nothing in hunting this man down for speaking truth to power, and indeed lost quite a bit of perspective.
Imagine the time we chucked away hankering over this obnoxious troll that could have been used instead to raise funds for victims of the Sabah quake? Or spent educating visitors to Mt Kinabalu of the sacred place the mountain holds in the history, culture, and hearts of Sabahans and Malaysians, so you know, don’t la bogel on the mountaintop, please?
Emil Kaminski put out The Naked Truth on YouTube because he had an audience ready to buy into his stream of egotistical pontification. But the simple fact is that he wouldn’t be where he is in the Malaysian popular consciousness if we had just acknowledged his grouses, agreed to disagree with him (or agreed outright, it doesn’t matter), and just kept it moving.
We really did make a mountain out of a molehill on this one.
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