Beware those who made the slopes slippery

If you have read Chong Chee Kin’s article titled Beware the slippery slope, you would’ve been inspired. It is a brilliant piece of journalistic writing to cover beyond all facts and insight which would leave a delectable stain on your mind. My title however is rather odd and I am not a crime reporter from the world ranked 155th Straits Times. Perhaps it is time for you to know why it is ranked so dismally low. Chong Chee Kin’s brilliant piece will provide the final piece to the puzzle. By the end of this post, the meaning of the title will become quite self-explanatory.

In the article, we were given an explicit detail of how two crooks escaped from custody while doing time in Elmira Correctional Facility in New York and another from State Correctional Institution at Albion, California. In the course of the report, we learned how Timothy Vail and Malcolm Kysor managed to make the escape. To draw comparisons in the reader’s mind, we were also transported back to the time where Mas Selamat lulled his minders and possibly planned his escape and executed it with the help of no one but toilet paper. The final conclusion is that others have made the same mistake so what’s the big deal.

Aren’t we a happy lot? Certainly for the average Joe Moe who wakes up every morning, sees the morning show where two people speak in funny accents while he is having prata served by our good ol’ prataman, buys the papers and reads it while on the morning train although he is sandwiched by Poh Kok Seng, Ahmad Rejab bin Jantan and Allapansamy son of Thirukumaran and countless other bleary-eyed blokes. He goes about his day telling people about the news (It’s in the papers! he triumphantly announces) and goes home to watch the nine o’clock news diligently (honey, change the channel- it’s the news. You know I can’t miss the news) and then perhaps bonk his wife before going to bed. Joe Moe is a shining example of an indoctrinated persona and product of the mainstream media which is not independent.

With a little thinking we can also arrive at the conclusion that quite obviously Mas Selamat was not a common thief or crook like the above-mentioned escapees. He is an alleged terrorist, hell-bent on destruction and terror, detained without trial along with other jihadists in a maximum security facility not even a rat can infiltrate. The comparisons were somewhat meek. The ones that stood guard in Whitley Road were not your average prison guards like those American buggers. They were Gurkhas and the insidious ISD. They are the elite superhuman security forces who can jump through an infinitesimal window, scale a wall and leap over double fences within an earth-shattering record of 49 seconds.

And then you have the Internet which is truly a wonderful place. It is nothing short of a miracle. Here we can challenge truths in sheer check and uncover un-truths. A simple thing called Google can reveal the information easily. All we need is to extract the facts and the excess of information can be discarded. We also learnt that how the Strait Times report conveniently left out the facts that Timmy Vail was recaptured within a day and Mr. Kysor nabbed on on the following saturday in a park. What about our dear man Mas Selamat? You know the answer. Sixty-four effing days. Chong Chee Kin failed to report how swiftly the convicts were recaptured. Mind you, the Americans did not deploy their infantrymen, community grassroots folks or even the fire engine but with excellent police work. Their close-circuit cameras were not being upgraded- they have backup tapes in case they missed anything.