As it is, Halloween celebrations in Malaysia faced great controversy recently as Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (ISMA) alleged that the celebrations are organised by non-Muslims worldwide to shake the faith of Muslims and turn them godless. As such, the National Fatwa Council released an edict to say that Muslims are prohibited from celebrating the Halloween festival.
What’s worse is that now, our Malaysia Airlines’ Flight MH370 tragedy, which which took the lives of 239 passengers in March, was turned into a Halloween joke by certain insensitive quarters, resulting in the ire of netizens.
According to The Star Online, a search for #flightmh370 on Instagram and Twitter showed at least 6 individuals who made Halloween costumes related to the tragedy.
One Instagram user with the handle nystone01 uploaded a picture of 3 zombie-like individuals in cheongsams, while showing off their cabin crew identification cards, bearing the Malaysian Airlines logo. The picture was accompanied with a hashtags such as “somethingwong” (which takes the mickey out of the stereotyped Chinese pronunciation of “something wrong”), “Malaysianairlines”, and “flightmh370”:
An Instagram user, Maylimchinai, commented on the image and said that it was disrespectful and wrote, “Our country is still hurting from the missing flight, but you seem to think it is okay to make fun and publicise it to the world.” She later took a screen shot of the image and shared it on Facebook, in turn getting the attention of more Malaysians who seemed disappointed by the act.
nystone01 has since deleted her Instagram account as at time of writing, the URL leads to a “Page Not Found” error.
That having said, there were many other such inconsiderate individuals who took our MAS tragedy to their advantage and disrespectfully dressed up in the same #flightmh370 theme. They even made it into Buzzfeed for their “brilliant costume ideas”.
It was also found that the individuals who posted these pictures were not Malaysians:
Our take? This isn’t a case of too soon. This is a case of “should have never happened”.
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