KUALA LUMPUR, June 12 — Umno Youth chief Datuk Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki urged the public not to spread or share a homosexual video clip that allegedly features a minister, saying the act is akin to defamation which is a grave sin in Islam.
He added that the penalty in the afterlife would be heavier if the video clip was made intentionally to defame the purported minister.
“My view is that we should stick to the principles in Islam to prevent ourselves from spreading such videos as to not incur Allah’s wrath, which will see our own shames exposed in this and the next world,” he said in a Facebook post last night.
“What is more worrying is if the video is fake. Surely, it will be a big sin, and a heavier punishment from Allah to befall on us,” he added.
Asyraf’s immediate predecessor, Khairy Jamaluddin, also condemned those responsible for the clip, calling it “vile filth” and urged the public to “look away”, saying the politics of character assassination should not be given space or attention.
“Seriously, we are already a nation traumatised by slanders of the past. Do we really want to expose another generation to despicable allegations with the sole intent of destroying someone’s character?” the former minister wrote.
“If you come across sordid news today involving our politics, look away. Vile filth thrives when it’s given attention.”
A series of short videos lasting roughly 1.34-minutes have been making the rounds on social media. The clips show two men, one who resembles a minister in the current administration, in acts of intimacy with one another.
Earlier this morning, a man who called himself Haziq Abdul Aziz appeared in another 30-second video confessing to be one of the two people in the sexual clip.
The confessor shares the same name and resembles the senior private secretary to a deputy minister in the current Pakatan Harapan administration.
Across the political divide, a former secretary to Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman criticised the issue as an attempt to invoke hate by conjuring social stigma on homosexuality.
Numan Afifi, who was said to have been pressured to resign from his post because he was supportive of LGBTQ+ rights, said the politics surrounding the clip was meant to paint homosexuals in a bad light.
“It is so insulting to see these sex scandals being associated with vague mention of corruption. As if you are a corrupted politician, then you must be ‘sexually deviant’ somehow,” he wrote on Twitter.
“Fact is most of suffering of our people — the workers, the Orang Asli, women, LGBTQ folk, people with disability — are caused by straight, self-claimed religious men in power and their cronies who decided upon themselves that they could dictate how others live their lives.”
