1 million hits for Dr M's blog in just 30 days

Friday May 30, 2008 MYT 4:16:01 PM
By FLORENCE A. SAMY
thestar.com.my

PETALING JAYA: Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's blog, www.chedet.com has hit over one million hits in just 30 days.

The former premier started his blog on May 1 to pen his thoughts and opinions, which has also included criticisms of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

His blog named Dr Mahathir Mohamad had over 985,000 visitors on Thursday, a figure that has jumped to 1,015,766 at 12.50pm Friday. Also listed on his blog are event updates and related newspaper articles.

Congratulatory comments poured in for Dr Mahathir for the one million hit with some calling him "an official millionaire now."

Recently, Dr Mahathir posted his frustrations with Umno and claimed he was not treated as a member before he resigned. He also claimed that Umno was heading down the path of destruction if the current leadership and mentality did not change.

In his latest posting Friday, Dr Mahathir talked about his meetings in Tokyo and England on war criminalisation and appealed to Malaysians to support this campaign.

"It is ridiculous to regard murder as a crime punishable with the most extreme penalty yet the deliberate killings of thousands of people, mostly innocent men, women and children are regarded as proper and legal.

"There is a contradiction here which does not fit in with human values in a civilised world. War is not a way to settle conflicts between nations," he said in his blog.

He said trillions of dollars were being spent on developing and producing more lethal weapons of mass destruction and some poor countries were forced to buy them so as not to be less well-equipped than their neighbours.

"These weapons are often not used at all. Malaysia has been drawn into this game," he said, referring to the billion-ringgit submarine purchase.

Malaysia, he said, needed a defence force to preserve its independence and not an arms race.

"War is not a solution for our foreign policy agenda. A stiff backbone is far more important. Unfortunately at the moment we don’t have that," he quipped.

In appealing to Malaysians to support the campaign on war criminalisation, Dr Mahathir said there was no guarantee that war will not happen here in the future if it was still regarded as a way to settle conflicts between nations.