Utusan suka main api perkauman, bakar keamanan

The Umno-owned Utusan Malaysia has been found by the Penang High Court today to have defamed Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng in a report headlined 'Kebiadapan Guan Eng’, published on Dec 20 last year and ordered the publisher to pay Lim RM200,000 in damages, and RM25,000 as costs.

Lim had sued the Malay language daily for defamation, based on its report on his speech themed 'A People's Government for the Real Malaysians' that was delivered at the Pakatan Rakyat convention in Kepala Batas on Dec 19 last year.

Reading out his judgment in court, Judicial Commissioner GV Varughese outlined seven paragraphs in which Utusan had “maliciously' defamed Lim, and made him and the DAP look as if they are anti-Malay and anti-Islam and said the writer of the article - Zulkiflee Bakar - had made "sweeping statements" implying that Lim was a racist but Varughese said he had not found any basis in Lim's speech to support the "rash and irresponsible" claim.

Varughese held that Zulkiflee's inference that Lim had directed his Pakatan colleagues to stop fighting for the Malay cause was meant to "excite" the readers to colour the chief minister in a negative light.

As for Lim attacking the Malays in his speech, Varughese said he was not shown any proof that this was so, and that the writer could not assume that there was a reaction to it from the Malay community as there was no evidence that the speech had offended the Malays. If the speech was racist, the first to react would have been the participants of the convention, who were mostly Malays, Varughese reasoned.