DECEMBER 9 — Nurul Izzah didn't deserve the ridiculous over-reaction in the Dewan to her taking a picture with Jacel Kiram.

It was an idiotic thing to do, and as time showed, a disastrous PR (haha) move.

Taking a picture with a delusional member of the Kiram family doesn't make Nurul a traitor and she shouldn't be treated as though she committed treason.

Her folly was ignorance, perhaps due to her own fixation on doing anything she can to secure her father's release. Being a daddy's girl myself, I can relate.

It doesn't, however, detract from PKR's continued missteps in the state. From the drama that was Sabah PKR, to Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim's utterly daft appointment of Azmin Ali as Sabah PKR chief, to Tian Chua's inability to not make idiotic public statements... PKR is a mess.

West Malaysian Opposition supporters here do not seem to understand why making Azmin Ali Sabah PKR head was a wrong move PKR might never recover from.

East Malaysians have had plenty of reason to be wary of “Orang Malaya.” Look at the treatment of Orang Asli in the Peninsula. Stripped of their lands, treated as beneath the other races, never getting any respect... who's to say that if the South China Sea and strict immigration laws were no barrier, that East Malaysian natives would also find themselves suddenly second-class citizens on their own ancestral land.

Making a West Malaysian Malay, who never spent much time in Sabah in the first place, head of PKR Sabah was idiocy. This blatant arrogance, this insidious assumption that Sabah could be treated any differently from a Peninsular state is something that PKR has not been able to shake.

I'm sorry, Nurul, but the average Sabahan doesn't really give two whits about your father. The people who have potential to change the direction of the state are too young to remember or too bitter to care about what he went through.

Must I also remind PKR that Anwar was instrumental in returning Sabah back to the BN fold, persuading local reps to betray their constituents by crossing over to the other side? The Sabahans who do remember have not forgiven those politicians and it is also Anwar who opened the gates for Umno to enter the state.

Karma is cruel, isn't it?

PKR has to understand that it cannot dictate its fixations, its cultural norms onto East Malaysians. At this rate, PKR should probably give up on trying to build a presence in East Malaysia and instead consider building partnerships with promising grassroots movements and parties.

East Malaysians have had decades of having their resources and futures dictated to by people who know nothing about them and do not even try to remedy that.

If there's one bit of free advice I'll give to PKR is this: whoever's advising you on East Malaysia? Fire his or her ass immediately because that person knows nothing at all about how the state works.

Maybe then PKR might finally have some chance in the state, but at the rate the party is racking up gaffes and annoying East Malaysians, I'll give it maybe a few more decades. Perhaps by then PKR will truly be about justice and not about one person.

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.