Leadership Quote by Abu Bakar Bashir

The line isn’t trying to persuade so much as to prosecute. Bashir sets up a courtroom contrast - “could not even accept” versus “talk about respect and honour” - designed to make the OIC look not merely ineffective but morally fraudulent. The move is simple and sharp: strip an institution of legitimacy by framing its public language as theater.

The specific intent is factional pressure. By invoking Mahathir’s “proposal” (a stand-in for bold, confrontational politics in the Muslim world), Bashir is signaling that real leadership means action the OIC won’t touch. “Even accept” is doing a lot of work: it suggests the proposal wasn’t radical but baseline, the minimum test of seriousness. If they fail that test, their speeches about dignity become, in his telling, insult added to injury.

The subtext is a familiar activist indictment of multilateral bodies: they speak the grammar of principles while practicing the habits of risk-aversion. “Respect and honour” are presented as hollow brand words, invoked to maintain status, not to defend people. Bashir’s contempt also functions as recruitment rhetoric. If official leaders are cowards or hypocrites, the implied alternative is a harder edge of politics - one that refuses diplomacy’s pace and compromises.

Context matters because the OIC often operates as a consensus club: its power comes from keeping disparate states in the same room, which usually means avoiding proposals that force members to choose sides. Bashir weaponizes that structural limitation as a moral failure, turning bureaucracy into betrayal.