The latest incident would be some Internet user, purportedly a Malaysian, who launched a smear campaign on the Internet by rubbishing the lyrics of the Indonesian National song. A lot of anger is in the air now, as manifested in the writing of the comments above.
Personally, I do not know who to blame for this mess. It would be convenient for me to put the blame solely on the Indonesian media for always putting our country in a bad light whenever a problem arises, but I don’t think that is the right thing to do. It would be like making a scapegoat out of the media for the depth of the trouble we are in now.
(Although I am of the opinion the media are responsible and partially to blame for sometimes reporting totally biased and provocative reports about our country. As such, a lot of people get unnecessarily worked up after reading/watching the news. News like a group of Indonesians in Malaysia indulging themselves into some serious criminal activities would almost certainly be blacked out. It pretty much explains the holier-than-thou attitude among some of them.)
I do not know what went wrong. It has reached to the point where name calling and verbal diarrhoea from both sides have become the order of the day.
Hatred among the netizens of these two countries has translated into a lot of wars of words on the Internet. Website hacking and counter-hacking incidents are on the rise.
Many of the Malaysian students here suddenly found their Indonesian friends venting their anger by saying something nasty on Facebook/Friendster/Twitter about how they would love to “ganyang” our country, or something to that effect. Overnight, friends have turned into foes.
It is a sad thing indeed. I pity these people. Most of them are ill informed about the problems we are facing now, probably getting the so-called “news” from many of the gossip programmes in Indonesia.
The solution to this problem? Again, I do not know. Perhaps both sides should sit down together and learn more about the historical ties between our two countries.
Like, for example, the fact that before the Anglo-Dutch treaty was signed, there was no such a thing as Malaysia and Indonesia (thus explaining the close cultural ties between the countries in this region).
Enough already with the claims and counter-claims.
Perhaps both of us should take some time off and travel to each other’s countries. That way, we will probably realise, “Hey, not all of them are as bad as I thought”.
