Accessing porn at a press of a buttonUNLIKE in America, building a perimeter wall around a house is a prerequisite in Malaysia.
This makes us feel safer because we get to decide who is allowed to come inside our compound and who isn’t.
We are building a protective buffer because we know it’s a dangerous world out there.
Evil forces are always waiting for an opportunity to pounce and put our loved ones at risk.
But evil is cunning. They have found a new way in.
The 'gates' that secure the world’s homes are now unlocked with the sudden explosion in handheld internet devices.
It has started an unhealthy trend among the youths in Malaysia to mimic the Western way of life propagated through a billion or so internet sites which are readily available at a click of a button.
In a short time, eroded and gone are the traditional, conservative and morally upright Eastern etiquette, replaced by the more vulgar and immoral Western values.
A study in Australia reported that in 2003 alone, there are 260 million porn sites in the internet, an explosion of 1,800% (twentyfold increase) in just five years.
All sorts of pornography is available on the net /Google ImagesAnd here in Malaysia, police record shows, rape cases in the country continue to rise each year – from 138 cases recorded in 1980 to 3,595 in 2010.
It is estimated that 10 women are raped every day, with many more going unreported. At least half of the victims are said to be children and teenage girls below 16 years old.
The increase in the rape of minors is worrying: from 378 reported cases in 1991, it rose to 859 in July 2012. It was also reported in Parliament that some 6,000 statutory rape cases were reported in the last five years.
Some pornography sites even deliberately target the young by registering website names like Teltubbies.com and Bobthebiulder.com (a deliberate misspelling of the names of children shows Teletubbies and Bob the Builder.)
So it should be perfectly reasonable when our former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamad said recently that he thinks the internet today should be censored.
This, of course, contradicts with the undertaking he made when he was PM, when he said the internet should not be censored in any way.
Mahathir’s call for the government to reconsider the "absolute (Internet) freedom" as provided for under the Communication and Multimedia Act 1998, as well as the Bill of Guarantees of the Multimedia Super Corridor is because of the unfortunate development of internet content today.
"When I said there should be no censorship of the Internet, I really did not realise the power of the Internet. (Which is) the power to create problems and agitate people.
"Before (pornographic) magazines and all that could be banned from coming into our country, now it (the Internet) is so porous that we cannot prevent all this filth from coming into our country," Mahathir reportedly said in an interview with local English daily New Sunday Times.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, however is opposed to censoring the internet, saying that the move would not only be ineffective but would also cause public dissatisfaction.
But as recent as in 2009, Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim said the government was looking to put up Internet filter to stop access to undesirable websites.
Everything is on display for everyone especially children /Google ImagesAt the time the government had called for a tender to develop an Internet filtering system similar to China’s controversial Green Dam project to block “undesirable websites.”
Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim had said that the filter system was to reduce “Malaysian children’s exposure to online pornography.”
“We will attempt to put in this filtering system because the safety of our children from pornography cannot be compromised,” he told a press conference.
Rais said: "A segment of our society has now become culpable of various ills through the Internet: Internet gambling, child pornography, illicit adverts, false reporting, cheating, privacy intrusions and many more."
On the same note, Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) chairman Datuk Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi argued that what constitutes as an offence offline, should also be made illegal online.
"People need to distinguish between censoring (the Internet) and enforcing laws of the land," he said, citing the controversial decision to block 10 file-sharing websites found to have contravened the Copyright Act 1987, as an example.
"If stealing is illegal offline, than downloading of pirated contents is also an offence," he added.
Since 2008, MCMC has blocked 6,640 websites covering pornography, copyright infringement and malicious content.
Criminal analyst Kamal Affandi Hashim, said parents must be more responsible when it comes to providing internet access to their children.
“It’s akin to a knife, it can be used to cut food or injure a person. It is not the knife that is at fault, but the person who is holding the knife.
“Parents take responsibility and filter their children’s access to the internet,” cautioned Kamal.
It’s up to parents to control who they allow to enter their household. They should keep the ‘gates’ of their children’s mind firmly locked from being corrupted by filth.
Only then can our country be kept safe from the evils of the internet.
Malaysian Digest
