Kedah Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Azizan Abdul Razak scoffed at Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin today for putting himself forward as a possible candidate to debate with Mohamad Sabu over the Bukit Kepong tragedy, saying the former could not match up to the PAS deputy president.
Instead, Azizan agreed with Mohamad that he should take on Umno deputy president Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin for the challenge.
“Who is Khairy? Merely an Umno Youth chief, allow those on the same level to debate,” he was quoted as saying in Bernama Online.
Azizan then likened a Khairy-Mohamad debate to a football match between world champions Brazil and Kedah’s team in Tokai, a small village in the northern state.
The PAS mentri besar also chided the media for purportedly failing to give Mohamad a chance to explain who Mat Indera, a Malay communist leader who led the guerrilla assault against the Bukit Kepong police station manned by policemen under the British administration, is.
Mohamad had purportedly told a ceramah recently that those who attacked the Bukit Kepong police station during the pre-independence communist insurgency and killed 25 people, were “freedom fighters”.
The maverick politician has since been accused of being a communist sympathiser by Umno leaders and been sniped at daily in Umno-owned newspaper Utusan Malaysia despite denying that he had used the word “communism” during his speech.
But Umno appears determined to use Mohamad’s statement to woo support from the Malay electorate, among whom communism remains a bogeyman, and the party recently announced plans to launch a nationwide roadshow to attack the Islamic leader.
In retaliation, PAS issued a challenge to Umno calling for a debate on the incident, which Khairy later accepted through a posting on micro-blogging site Twitter.
“Done. Got invitation to rumble w/ Sabu. I’ll be there,” Khairy wrote.
A copy of the invitation sighted by The Malaysian Insider said that the debate will be held at the Balai Islam in Kota Baru at the end of the month.
But Mohamad said he preferred to debate with Muhyiddin as his equivalent in Umno, while PAS party leaders have suggested that Khairy could debate with PAS Youth chief Nasrudin Hassan instead.
