If you think that strange things tend to happen during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, this one will definitely take the cake.
Perhaps it was the World Cup fever, or perhaps the early hours of the match, but the advance of the German football team to the finals of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil saw Malaysian parliamentarian Bung Moktar Radin saluting the Nazi’s long-deceased leader Adolf Hitler.
The Kinabatangan MP tweeted in all caps, “WELL DONE….BRAVO…LONG LIVE HITLER,” at 5:30 am this morning, following Germany’s shocking 7-1 defeat of host nation Brazil. His bizarre tweet drew immediate reaction in Twitterverse, with many expressing anger and puzzlement at Bung’s choice of words.
Well, mostly anger, actually:
If that’s not all, in his subsequent tweets (as seen in the screen shot above), he didn’t seem repentant. In fact, an irate Bung responded to some of the angry replies that were directed at him, going as far as throwing insults like, “Maybe you are like (Penang deputy chief minister II) P Ramasamy, just drank todi.”
Oh boy..sounds like this is going to be another one of those PR disasters. How do you clean this one up, really?
UPDATE:
Who should step in to rescue the whole Hitler Twitter fiasco if not Bung Moktar himself? The Kinabatangan MP defended his tweet and insisted that he had only done so out of admiration for the German football team:
I don’t know what’s wrong with people sometimes. Hitler is part of history and the German team fought like how he did. I think people nowadays should transform their mentality. Whatever I tweet, people hit me. They’re not hitting me because of Hitler, but because I’m Bung Mokhtar.
Bung also insisted that his tweet was “just for fun” and that there was nothing serious behind it. Hmm, well, the football fans definitely took it seriously, we think? Germany’s Ambassador to Malaysia also took it seriously, we think? Because it didn’t take him long to object to Bung Moktar’s salute of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in his praise for the country’s performance in the World Cup, saying the comparison was “unacceptable”.
His Excellency Holger Michael said the embassy “strongly rejects” the reference and said, “While we appreciate the admiration for the German football team, we strongly reject the unacceptable allusion to the fascist regime of Adolf Hitler,” Michael said.
