Sacriliege. Desecration. Just another day in the life of Malaysia.

A lot of what's going on in Malaysia slips by me these days. It's hard to keep tabs on the country when you don't live in it. One that I would have completely missed, if not for a chance email I got from a friend, was the 'investigative' piece written by Al-Islam magazine.

Two 'intrepid' reporters from the magazine were tipped off that Muslims were being surreptitiously converted into Catholicism by churches in the country and saw it as their duty to go undercover to find out if it was true.

As a journalist with pretensions to being an investigator myself, I can understand their excitement in getting the tip-off. After all, I too would be similarly excited if I were to get onto a story that was so obviously sensational and so obviously up my alley.

So, these two men went to a church one fine Sunday and decided to find out if the allegations were true. They discovered it wasn't. Their curiousity satisfied, they should have done the right thing and left.

They didn't. Instead, they stayed on and during the Mass, joined the Catholic congregation in accepting the Holy Eucharist.

After that, they left, spat out the sacred wafer and took pictures of it, probably not even realising the gravity of the sacriliege they had committed.

What they did insulted, infuriated and hurt Catholics around the country. The government's predictable lack of a response only made matters worse.

Emails began flying around (I got one of them). Police reports were lodged. Angry missives were sent to the magazine (once again, I was one of the writers). Blogs and letters, including input from people like Martin Jalleh (who wrote a fantastic open letter which was picked up by many outlets), Khairy Jamaluddin (the cockroach probably wanted to score points), and Lim Kit Siang (also never one to pass up the opportunity to score brownie points), were plastered all over the web.

And ultimately, nothing has happened.

Some time back, Herald - the Catholic weekly got into a court battle with the government over the use of the word Allah. They were threatened with closure if they didn't rescind the usage of the word.

Cast your minds back to an incident that took place sometime before that, when the Danish publication drew a caricature of Prophet Muhammad. The furore that greeted that piece was awesome. Even in Malaysia, there were calls for public apologies, threats to boycott Danish products, etc.

Yet, when the shoe is on the other foot, these same people, these defenders of the faith, are nowhere to be seen or heard.

The lack of respect, the lack of grace and the lack of understanding shown to other races and religions in Malaysia is becoming worse by the day. From having to deal with catcalls of 'immigrant' and 'squatter' to playing on uneven fields during court cases to now having our most sacred religious rites - Catholics believe that that little wafer is literally the transfigured Body of Christ - desecrated and defiled.

Our Muslim brothers in Malaysia are in an enviable position. They have the full machinery of the government, an Islamist opposition party and the institution of the Sultanate to protect and speak out for them.

What do we non-Muslims have? Only the leaders of our churches, temples and tokongs. That's it. I suppose that makes us easy meat - sitting ducks for all would be crusaders to target.

It's precisely these kinds of things that make Najib's high-falutin' 1Malaysia campaign come across as just a lot of wind being released from the rectum of another political gasbag. All this talk of unity and togetherness, my dear P.M., rings shallow when you don't walk the talk.

I can bet that if the situation were reversed, that if, say, a journalist for the Herald were to go undercover into a mosque, he would be locked up under the ISA faster than you can say Al-Islam. I bet that the paper would have been shut down unceremoniously in the blink of an eye. I bet politicians would have jumped up and down spewing all the rhetoric that they could come up with. I bet that the more fanatical of our Muslim friends and politicians would have taken to the streets, swearing the bathe the keris in blood. After all, they've threatened to do so for far less before.

And what do we do? We gather in our churches and pray for things to become better. We write our letters and wait, mouths open, for responses that never come. We lodge our police reports and get fobbed off with fine words and empty promises. We turn the other cheek, while at the same time, keep getting slapped over and over and over again.

~ I'm not concerned with you liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being ~ Jackie Robinson.