Malaysia distorted history

By Zakiah Koya, The Sun

History textbooks are biased and littered with errors, claim two authors and academicians. Dr Ranjit Singh Malhi and Ng How Kuen, who writes history textbooks for Chinese schools, say their experience with officialdom does not augur well for the teaching of history in our classrooms.Ranjit, author of secondary school history textbooks since 1990, and adviser to the Ministry of Education (MOE) on history textbooks, said such material were littered with factual errors and distortions. He said that when he pointed out the errors and distortions, a ministry official labelled him “anti-national”.

“Five out of 10 chapters of the Form Four history textbook deal with Islamic history as compared to only one chapter in the earlier textbook. Why 5 chapters on Islam?

Historical distortion:
1) Yap Ah Loy (the third Kapitan China of Kuala Lumpur),who played a major role in the development of Kuala Lumpur as a commercial and tin-mining centre, particularly after the fire of 1881,”was only mentioned in one sentence in Form Two history textbook.
2) “There is also no mention of freedom fighters such as Gurchan Singh (“Lion of Malaya”) and Sybil Karthigesu who resisted the Japanese Occupation of Malaya,” he said. (Gurchan secretly distributed a newspaper during the Japanese occupation while Sybil, who was tortured by the Japanese, and her husband treated wounded guerillas of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army).
3) The most glaring example of bias, he said, was related to the downfall of the Malay Sultanate of Malacca. "The 1996 Form One textbook stated inter alia that a few Indian merchants lent their junks to the Portuguese in their attack on Malacca.
Ranjit claims that there is no historical evidence to support this fact.
This is how the UMNO led BN wants history to be remembered!