Ibrahim Ali’s Bible-burning remark was not seditious, the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) said. He gets away scot-free and it’s official.
Under pressure to explain why no action had been taken on the Malay-rights activist, the AGC released a statement yesterday saying that Ibrahim’s speech, in which he called for all Malay-language Bibles to be burned, ‘does not fall within the definition of seditious tendency’.
According to the AGC, he ‘had no intention to create religious disharmony when he called for the burning of Bibles with the word “Allah’, The Star Online reported.
What he was doing instead was merely ‘defending the sanctity of Islam that is clearly defined in laws’, the statement said.
“It is clear that his intentions were to defend the sanctity of Islam. This can be seen in his speech.”
“Ibrahim’s statement does not fall within the definition of a statement with a seditious tendency under the Sedition Act 1948.
“The courts have decided that a statement can only be said to have a seditious tendency when it is looked at in its totality and cannot be separated from the context in which it was made.”
“When studied in its total context, his statement does not have a seditious tendency.”
“The act of distributing free Bibles openly outside SMK Jelutong could threaten the faith of Muslim students that lack an understanding of their religion if they read the Bibles, especially if they contained Jawi script,” said the AGC.
The AGC revealed that it had decided on Dec 3 and Dec 17 not to take further action on police reports against Ibrahim.
Pix: Malay Mail Online
