KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, trying to recapture the hearts and minds of disaffected Muslim Malays, is giving Islamic opponents extra exposure on prime time television in the hope their own words will backfire.
For the past week Malaysians have watched the Islamic opposition's holy men abusing the government -- but it has nothing to do with free speech.
The government film seeks to depict the ulama, Islamic scholars, of Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS) as dividing the cherished ummah, or Muslim community, with intolerance and hate.
"This is part of a campaign to alienate PAS leaders from the public and make people hate our leaders," said Doctor Mohd Hatta Ramli, a member of PAS's strategy-making central committee.
One three-year-old clip in the government-produced film shows PAS President Fadzil Noor calling Mahathir's deputy and chosen successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi a "pig boss".
The insult plays on religious sensitivities in a country where Muslim Malay checkout counter clerks won't even touch pork in a plastic bag, never mind eat a meat forbidden by Islam, but loved by Malaysia's richer Chinese minority.
Another old clip shows PAS deputy leader Hadi Awang branding Muslims who vote for the Mahathir's United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) as "infidels" unfit for heaven.
"It is trying to picture PAS ulama as unworthy, not like ulama who are supposed to be pious. It is trying to say our political ulama is not the real ulama," says Hatta.
Mahathir, regarded as progressive on religious issues, said last year he wouldn't take the insults and hatred anymore, and his campaign gained momentum after the September 11 attacks on the United States raised concern about the politics of Islam.
Shunned earlier for his intolerance of dissent and now invited to the White House next month, Mahathir is being vaunted by Washington as a strong moderate Muslim leader running a country seen as a beacon of stability in the region.
His police are locking up suspected Islamic militants -- 14 more were arrested last week -- while PAS is being discredited on television.
Nik Aziz Nik Mat, the spiritual leader of PAS whose own son was arrested last year, was scathing about Mahathir's support for the U.S. led war on terror, and showed sympathy with Osama bin Laden, Washington's prime suspect for the September 11 attacks.
"How can we say Osama is a terrorist when the U.S. itself is acting like one, with their continuing attacks on the Taliban and killing the people," Nik Aziz told Reuters last week.
COMMUNISTS EARLIER
Washington once saw Anwar Ibrahim as someone to cultivate. The former deputy prime minister was jailed for 15 years for sodomy and abuse of power after challenging Mahathir in 1998.
The State Department still says the trials were flawed, but Anwar is allied to PAS these days, leaving Mahathir in favour.
The Anwar issue cost Mahathir over half the Malay vote in 1999. But PAS, which controls two of Malaysia's 13 state assemblies, is the only obstacle to his coalition keeping its constitutionally key two-thirds majority in polls due by 2004.
Earlier this month, Mahathir told a meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference on terrorism in Kuala Lumpur, how Malaysia put down a Chinese communist insurgency.
He said it was not enough to hunt down fighters, sympathisers had to be won over too.
"We must win the hearts and minds of the people most likely to support or resort to terrorism," he said.
Today those people are his own Muslim Malays, who hitherto have had little history of organised violence.
An agrarian people rocked by rapid industrialisation during Mahathir's 21-year rule, many Malays find guidance from a religious teachers who have become increasingly politicised.
"Politics is very much part of Islam," asserts Hatta, whose party dreams of creating an Islamic state.
Police last year clamped down on PAS's ceramahs, the political, religious lectures at which preachers vilify and ridicule government leaders, to the amusement of poor Malays.
They like jokes about UMNO leaders, whose sharp suits and big cars seem a world away from the kampongs, or villages, where life is still rooted in fishing and farming.
Mahathir shrugs off being typecast as an evil pharaoh, but he is clearly upset that so many young Malays he has built schools and universities for have turned against him.
His affirmative action policies have created a sizable Malay middle class to counter-balance the richer urban Chinese who dominate the private sector, but they still struggle to compete.
The arrest of 62 suspected militants in the past year shows a few, fuelled by religion, may be turning to violence too.