OH NO NO SUMANTHIRAN

It has got Mr. M. A. Sumanthiran, MP’s goat that the External Affairs Minister has ‘got a Western education and benefited from Western scholarship and casts aspersions on Western civilization!’ The reader will be forgiven if it beggars his belief that there are MPs today in our Parliament who can be this callow, this bombastic and this blissfully unaware of the excruciatingly pathetic figures they cut.

Does receiving a ‘Western education’ -- whatever that means -- enjoin people to desist from telling the truth? Perhaps the ‘Western education’ that Sumanthiran received enjoins him to do so, but we Sri Lankans certainly must be proud of the fact that we have an External Affairs Minister who can very often out-English the Englishman in terms of the spoken lingo, and yet pick the gaping flaws in Western civilization even as he speaks that speak, and walks that talk …

It’s eerie that we are occasioned to quote Mahathma Gandhi twice in editorial comments in this space within a span of a month or so, on the same incident, but then again, who bargains for such a quaint anachronism in his own times, such as M. A. Sumanthiran?

Mahathma Gandhi, a lawyer to boot, and speaking and writing impeccably accurate ‘King’s English’ at that time, had an audience with King George V, when negotiations were underway for the terms and conditions of India’s impending independence. Gandhi was barely out of the King’s chamber when he was accosted by members of the British Press Co. who asked him pointedly among other things what he thought of Western civilization. “Western civilization? It would be a good idea,’’ the ‘Western educated’ Gandhi deadpanned.

It is, to put it as understatedly as humanly possible, rather certain that Gandhi will be remembered more for his devastating wit when the history of humanity is written definitively, that M. A. Sumathiran will be remembered for his pompously articulated servility and his appalling dunderheadedness, if M. A. Sumathiran will be remembered at all.(!)

So much for G. L. Peiris being accused of ‘casting aspersions on Western civilization.’ M. A. Sumanthiran has the brass to talk about the External Affairs Minister’s ‘brass’ in speaking of attacks on Buddhist monks in Tamil Nadu when Tamils, Sumanthiran says are being bullied in the north, according to the Leader of the Opposition, no less! Now that’s brass, to talk about Tamils in this country being ‘bullied’ by the same government that freed the Tamils not from being bullied but from being dehumanized, eliminated, dragooned into child soldiering, and being used as human shields by a madman called Velupillai Prabhakaran?

The audacity -- to talk about a Tamil population being bullied by a military which rescued a large mass of Tamils from being decimated by their own self proclaimed sole representative? Mr. Sumanthiran answer us this -- who killed more Tamils, more Tamil leaders and more Tamil men and women, than the Sri Lankan army and the Indian IPKF put together?

And who got rid of this murderer who was terrorizing, as opposed to bullying the Tamil people? The same military that this ingrate now accuses of ‘bullying’ the Tamil people.

This Sumanthiran ingrate is a shame on his Motherland, his country, and his own people. He’d rather be stamped underfoot and squashed to death by V. Prabhakaran than co-exist with the military which goes about its legitimate business after getting rid of this maniac Prabhakaran who is the single most proximate cause -- by far – for all of the suffering of the people Mr. Sumanthiran laments about, while he is not engaged in his day job of licking the boots of the political elite of the ‘civilized West.’

Who is this Sumanthiran who can talk of one supposed incident of intimidation of a Muslim girl wearing the abaya, no doubt by a bunch of demented thugs -- if such a thing happened at all – but was tongue tied when his Great Leader the late V. Prabhakaran Claymore bombed half of the student population in a sleepy village called Kebithigollewa in a single evening?

Who is this Sumanhthiran who was mute when his Great Sun God machete-skewered, mutilated, and murdered young Samanera monks in the sleepy Eastern province towns, just because his marauding thugs could?

Who is bullying whom Sumanthiran? Or is it that with Western education upto the gills, you are even so, reduced to looking at the world perennially from ground level – and hence seeing the reality upside down -- even as you lick the boots of the Western political elite, the same way you licked your own late Sun God’s filthy blood-stained shins, eh, Sumanthiran?