Lee Kuan Yew's previous remarks on malays and
muslims:
"If,
for instance, you put in a Malay officer who's very religious and
who has family ties in Malaysia in charge of a machine gun unit,
that's a very tricky business. We've got to know his
background... I'm saying these things
because they are real, and if I don't think that, and I think even
if today the Prime Minister doesn't think carefully about this, we
could have a tragedy." - SM Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, September
19, 1999 on Malays in the Singapore Armed Forces
"Of
course there are Chinese millionaires in big cars and big houses.
Is it the answer to make a few Malay millionaires with big cars and
big houses? How does telling a Malay bus driver that he should
support the party of his Malay director (UMNO) and the Chinese bus
conductor to join another party of his Chinese director (MCA) - how
does that improve the standards of the Malay bus driver and the
Chinese bus conductor who are both workers in the same
company?
If
we delude people into believing that they are poor because there
are no Malay rights or because opposition members oppose Malay
rights, where are we going to end up? You let
people in the kampongs believe that they are poor because we don't
speak Malay, because the government does not write in Malay, so he
expects a miracle to take place in 1967 (the year Malay would
become the national and sole official language in
Malaysia).
The
moment we all start speaking Malay, he is going to have an uplift
in the standard of living, and if doesn't happen, what happens
then? Meanwhile,
whenever there is a failure of economic, social and educational
policies, you come back and say, oh, these wicked Chinese, Indian
and others opposing Malay rights. They don't oppose Malay
rights.
They,
the Malay, have the right as Malaysian citizens to go up to the
level of training and education that the more competitive
societies, the non-Malay society, has produced. That is what must
be done, isn't it? Not to feed them with this obscurantist doctrine
that all they have got to do is to get Malay rights for the few
special Malays and their problem has been resolved." — Lee Kuan Yew
in the Parliament
of Malaysia, 1965
"According
to history, Malays began to migrate to Malaysia in noticeable
numbers only about 700 years ago. Of the 39 percent Malays in
Malaysia today, about one-third are comparatively new immigrants
like the secretary-general of UMNO, Dato' Syed
Ja'afar Albar, who came to Malaya from Indonesia just before
the war at the age of more than thirty.
Therefore
it is wrong and illogical for a particular racial group to think
that they are more justified to be called Malaysians and that the
others can become Malaysian only through their favour." — Lee Kuan
Yew (in 1964 or 1965), — Ye, Lin-Sheng (2003). The Chinese
Dilemma, p. 43. East West Publishing
"How
does the Malay in the kampong find his way out into this modernised
civil society? By becoming servants of the 0.3 per cent who would
have the money to hire them to clean their shoe, open their
motorcar doors?" — Lee Kuan Yew in the Parliament
of Malaysia, 1965
