“Feel Of Fear”: Dr Mahathir’s Seven Sentences That Split Malaysia

Dr Mahathir posted seven sentences about living in fear — and Malaysians spent the next 24 hours reminding him that he was the one who made them feel that way.

In Brief

Dr Mahathir's seven-sentence Facebook post on fear and rule of law sparked instant, divided reactions, gaining thousands of engagements within 24 hours.
Responses split along generational lines, with older Malaysians citing his own authoritarian legacy, while younger readers engaged with the post's present-day message.

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On Monday (15 June), former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad published a post on his verified Facebook page titled “Feel of Fear.”

It was seven sentences long.

It got 2,000 likes, 351 comments, and 186 shares in under 24 hours.

No names, no specific incidents, no government body cited.

Just this: that Malaysians live in fear, that the law is being used as a weapon rather than a shield, that serious crimes go uninvestigated while innocent people face prosecution, and that the country “seems no longer under the rule of law.”

“It is frightening,” he wrote.

The Reaction Was Instant — And Divided

For many Malaysians, the irony was too loud to ignore.

Dr Mahathir served as prime minister for 22 years during his first tenure — a period that included Operasi Lalang in 1987, when his government arrested 106 individuals without trial under the Internal Security Act (ISA).

Among those detained were opposition politicians Tan Sri Lim Kit Siang, the late Datuk Seri Karpal Singh, and Lim Guan Eng, as well as civil society activists and trade unionists.

On the same day as the arrests, the government revoked the publishing permits of three major newspapers: The Star, Sin Chew Jit Poh, and Watan — all shut down under the Printing Presses and Publications Act, which Dr Mahathir had amended to give the Home Minister unchecked power to revoke press licenses without judicial review.

The Star and Sin Chew Jit Poh resumed publication six months later.

Watan never recovered and closed permanently in 1996.

A History That Wouldn’t Stay Quiet

Eleven years later, following the sacking of his deputy Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in 1998, Dr Mahathir’s government arrested Anwar — who was physically assaulted in custody, leading to the infamous black eye — and detained several of his associates under the ISA.

In 2000, the opposition newspaper Harakah had its publication frequency cut from twice a week to twice a month.

Key Reformasi leaders including Tian Chua, Datuk Mohamad Ezam Mohd Nor, and Hishammuddin Rais were detained without trial in 2001 for organising demonstrations.

At 100 years old, the second-oldest living former state leader in the world has consistently maintained that the detention orders were executed on the advice and operational authority of the police; the comments on his post reflected that history.

“Reminiscing your Ops Lalang era? Most of what is happening right now is in a sense influenced by you and your ways,” wrote one commenter. “It was worst during your time,” wrote another. “Ironically, that’s how a lot of us felt during your first stint as prime minister,” said a third.

A separate group of commenters read the post differently — as a legitimate warning about the present, not a reflection on the past.

“Tun is right, we feel unsafe,” one wrote. “Undang-undang tajam di bawah, tumpul di atas” — the law is sharp at the bottom, blunt at the top — observed another, in a phrase that resonated widely.

Seven Sentences, Two Malaysias

The post named no one, and that was likely the point.

By keeping the language broad, it allowed readers across the political spectrum to fill in their own targets — whether that was the current administration, the police, the courts, or figures from Malaysia’s recent political turbulence.

It is a format Dr Mahathir has used before — short, declarative, and unattributable — leaving a comments section that became, in effect, a mirror of where Malaysians stand on their own history.

Perhaps the sharpest divide in the comments was not political, but generational.

Malaysians who came of age in the 1980s and 90s responded with pointed references to ISA detentions, newspaper closures, and a judiciary stripped of its independence.

Those with less personal memory of that era engaged with the post’s substance — the fear, the impunity, the sense that accountability had broken down.

Both groups were reacting to the same seven sentences, but they were reading entirely different posts.