Yes, this is indeed a time of crisis, it is still
astounding how a responsible politician (home minister no less) can not comprehend the foolishness of his words.
Will the immigration officers (who may now lose their jobs over this) have the guts to tell him that it is possible to hold a white-man’s visa, yet appear asian? Perhaps Malaysia has a no-naturalization policy for differently-skinned (whites, browns and blacks) people? That may help explain (but not excuse) things a bit.
Malaysia’s
interior minister said two passengers who used stolen passports to
board a Malaysia Airlines plane that went missing with 239 people aboard
had “Asian facial features”, according to a report.
Fears of a terror attack have surfaced after
it was revealed that at least two passengers boarded the plane with
stolen passports — one from Italy and one from Austria. The passport
owners have been found to be safe.
“I am still puzzled how come (immigration officers) cannot think: an
Italian and Austrian but with Asian facial features,” Home Minister
Zahid Hamidi was quoted as saying late Sunday by Malaysia’s national
news agency Bernama.
“We will conduct an internal probe, particularly on the officers who
were on duty at the KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport)
immigration counter during flight MH370,” Zahid said.
regards
Published by
Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive
