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At 9.50am, a handful of protesters, led by Kulim Bandar Baharu parliamentarian Zulkifli Noordin from Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), muscled their way to the front of the first-floor auditorium at the Bar Council headquarters in Leboh Pasar Besar here amid an ongoing and lively discussion on the 2006 court case of R. Subashini, whose ethnic Indian husband T. Saravanan had embraced Islam and converted their five-year-old son without her knowledge or consent.

Protesters stop Bar's 'conversion' forum
Andrew Ong | Aug 9, 08 9:41am
About 300 protesters gathered outside the Bar Council headquarters demanding that the lawyers group halt its controversial forum on ‘Conversion to Islam’ this morning.
Protesters disperse by 10.40am
'Babi', 'pengkhianat' and 'balik China'

In a rare display of solidarity, rival Muslim groups today put aside their political differences and joined forces in protest of a controversial forum on the Federal Constitution.

This was echoed by repeated calls of “rempuh (charge)” by the angry crowd.

Amok is derived from the Malay word mengamuk, meaning "to go mad with rage" (uncontrollable rage). In typical cases of running amok, someone, although having shown no previous sign of anger and/or any inclination to resort to violence, will acquire a weapon and in a sudden frenzy will attempt to kill or seriously injure when provoked.

Captain Cook is reported to have first brought notice of the running amok to the English speaking world. However, earlier European, as opposed to English, accounts that mention amok indicates it to be a commonly employed battle tactic. Tome Pires was amongst the first writing that in the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511, that the young nobles of the court of Malacca including the Sultan's son offered to run amok against the Portuguese. Stamford Raffles, some 300 years later and, far more recently, Schrieke (in 1952) and Reid (in 198also report amok to be a widespread military strategy employed by the Peninsula Malay, the Javanese and the Balinese, prior to their colonisation. It seems reasonable to compare martial amok with the berserkgang of the Vikings and the Japanese Kamikaze. These highly structured, planned and organised, heavily ritualised longed practiced strategies, are noted by Europeans in the Malay Archipelago.

The dominant feature that distinguishes the amok of the Malay is the individual's agency - amok as solitary rather than collective. Where a Malay run amok as part of a martial contingent participating in a ritualised practice to restore honour, the solitary amok is carried out by an individual as if spontaneously requiring little more than a perceived insult as a provocation for redress. This type of amok is said to be furiously homicidal, all attributes supposedly elemental to the solitary amok of the Malay.

K Pragalath | Aug 9, 08 6:06pm
All was well during the Bar Council’s forum on religious conversion until a group of protesters entered the venue and disrupted proceedings.MORE

Racial taunts uttered
Two forum sessions held

‘Shouts of “babi”, “pengkhianat” and “balik China” were heard as forum participants trickled out of the venue’ (Malaysiakini )

Reporting on the recent abruptly aborted Bar Council’s forum on ‘Conversion to Islam,’ the Malaysiakini report quoted above noted that approximately 300 protesters had gathered outside the Bar Council’s headquarters where shouts of ‘batal forum’ (cancel the forum) and ‘hancur Bar Council’ (crush the Bar Council) were also heard. So on the advice of the police, the Bar Council called-off the forum.

Score ‘1’ for ‘mob terror’ and ‘0’ for democracy.