Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2003, pages 28-29

Islam and the Near East in the Far East

 

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Goes Out With a Bang

 

By John Gee

Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad could have used his last major speech before retirement to deliver a few gentle homilies and then bowed out quietly. Instead, he chose to go out with a bang. Speaking before a gathering of the 57-member state Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), he returned to a familiar Mahathir theme: the Muslim countries are lagging behind most of the rest of the world, and need to put aside petty divisions, reject extremism, and work hard to build strong modern societies. Boiled down to its essentials, this is an argument he has advanced many times before, including at OIC meetings and, in January this year, in a lengthy speech he delivered at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.

In part because Mahathir challenges conservative Muslim opinion, his message often gets a mixed reception. In his Al Azhar speech, for example, he criticized those who say to Muslims that “the door of ijtihad [interpretation of Islam] is closed, and they must accept anything that had been interpreted long ago.”

He also took issue with political violence, irritating some listeners mindful of the conflict raging in Palestine: “The most fundamental teaching of Islam is that it means peace,” Mahathir insisted. “We greet each other with the wish for peace. Is it just an empty greeting, which we do not mean, or do we wish for peace because we really want peace?

“If we want peace,” he continued, “then shouldn’t we strive for peace, at least among ourselves as Muslims first, and then with people of other faiths?”

Much of his speech to the OIC meeting in October was in the same vein. This time, however, Mahathir specifically questioned the effectiveness of the use of violence by the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel. Muslims might serve the Palestinian cause best by trying to win over those who were critical or suspicious of them, he argued, and, if a peace treaty was offered, they should react positively, even if it was not altogether fair in their eyes.

“I am aware that all these ideas will not be popular,” he acknowledged. “Those who are angry would want to reject it out of hand. They would even want to silence anyone who takes or supports this line of action. They would want to send more young men and women to make the supreme sacrifice. But where will all these lead to? Certainly not victory.”

The delegates applauded his speech. The following day, it was reported at some length in the Arab and Muslim media, which focussed on these latter remarks and others touching on the need for better government in Muslim countries. These were the issues seen as being of greatest interest and deserving discussion. The few paragraphs of his nine-page speech which would provoke widespread criticism in the West were mentioned in passing, treated as neither particularly insightful nor controversial.

It was those paragraphs, however, that led the European Union to issue a collective rebuke to Mahathir, and President George W. Bush to tell him that his remarks were “wrong and divisive.” State Department spokesman Adam Ereli described the comments as offensive and inflammatory, saying, “We view them with the contempt and derision they deserve.”

A spokesman of the U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center labeled the Malaysian leader a “serial anti-Semite” and called for a boycott of tourism and investment in the Southeast Asian state.

 

The Controversial Comments

Mahathir’s offending remarks began with the implicit unfavorable contrasting of Muslim behavior with that of the Jews. The latter, he said, had “survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking.” Mahathir called upon Muslims “to use our brains as well.” This might have excited only a muted response in the West had he not then gone on to say, “The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”

This was taken to be a reference to the U.S.-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mahathir also claimed that the Jews “invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they may enjoy equal rights with others.

“With these,” he continued, “they have now gained control of the most powerful countries.”

The fierce criticisms from the West that greeted Mahathir’s remarks provoked a defensive reaction in Malaysia and other Muslim countries. Not only was the Malaysian press supportive of him, but the leading opposition organization, PAS (the Islamic Party of Malaysia), lined up behind the prime minister. Mahathir himself refused to back down, telling an interviewer from Thailand’s Bangkok Post, “In my speech I condemned all violence, even the suicide bombings, and I told all Muslims it’s about time we stopped all these things and paused to think and do something that is much more productive.

“That was the whole tone of my speech, but they picked up one sentence where I said that the Jews control the world. Well, the reaction of the world shows they control the world.”

Mahathir had legitimate grounds for complaining about how one small part of his speech was taken out of context, and this was what many who defended him argued. Nevertheless, what he said about “Jewish control,” echoing as it does the mythology typical of European anti-Semitism, remained objectionable. Moreover, it is just plain untrue.

Jews do not constitute a group that is monolithically united in its opinions and objectives; individual Jews play a prominent part in many walks of life in Western countries, but there is no evidence whatsoever that they use whatever influence they might have to achieve goals common to all Jews, whether those be power, status, or even support for Israel—on which there is a significant body of dissenters from the dominant, pro-Israeli government stand. If all the decisive areas of decision-making in “the most powerful countries” are examined, there is not a single one, be it a political party, government, the mass media, the military, or business community, in which Jews exercise overall control.

The propagation of the mythology of “Jewish control” is self-evidently threatening to Jews, encouraging distrust and hostility. However, it also does not serve well the Palestinian cause, the Arab peoples or Muslims.

Each has faced objectionable labeling of a similar kind—particularly, in the recent past, a tendency on the part of some in the West to see all of them as terrorists and “fundamentalists” incapable of living in tolerant co-existence with people of other cultures/ faiths. At least in the Western countries themselves, advocacy of justice for the Palestinian people rests chiefly upon principles such as a belief in the equality of all peoples, irrespective of faith or color; it draws strength from the principle that every single person in the world is entitled to the enjoyment of basic human rights—Palestinians no less than any others.

How is it logically possible to uphold anti-racist, pro-human rights principles in defense of fairness and justice for Palestinians in their homeland, or for Muslims in the U.S., for example, and then proceed as if those principles don’t apply to Jews? A similar question can, of course, be posed to those whose Zionist politics lead them to campaign for equality between Jews and non-Jews in every state in the world—except Israel.

A belief in “Jewish control” of the world allows individuals who embrace it to evade dealing with complicated realities, such as the intricacies of policy debates, past and present, on how the U.S. should behave toward the Middle East, or the very real interest groups that really do seek to shape policy (such as the oil industry, armaments manufacturers, or Christian Zionists, as well as the actual Zionist lobbies of AIPAC, ZOA, etc.). This is ultimately disempowering: it does not encourage Muslims and Arabs to come to grips with real social, economic and political relationships, engage in debate, and seek to promote policy changes.

If some in the Muslim world who leapt to the defense of Mahathir’s comments are in agreement with them, it should also be recognised that many react to what they detect as hypocrisy on the part of Mahathir’s critics. This makes them less inclined to accept his chastisement by Western politicians, media figures and, in particular, apologists for Israeli policy. Has the Simon Wiesenthal Center, for example, called for Israel to be boycotted over the inclusion in its government of parties like Yisrael Beitenu or individuals such as Effi Eitam, who openly advocate the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their country? The center’s anti-racist principles seem highly selective.

George W. Bush’s protests would have been heard with more sympathy if his government had not vetoed every move in the U.N. Security Council to curb Israeli aggression (whether expressed in the expansion of settlements, in its assassination policy, or otherwise) and offered endorsement to Ariel Sharon’s actions to crush Palestinian resistance. It is well-known in Muslim countries that many of the neoconservatives who helped to bring about the Bush administration’s disastrous interventionist policy toward Iraq are Jewish, and this cannot easily be written off as irrelevant to their policy orientation. Individuals such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz are seen to have support for Israel wired into their systems, and to frame their arguments on what is supposedly good for the U.S. accordingly. This is most likely what lies behind Mahathir’s claim about Jews getting “others to fight and die for them.”

Another reason why people in the Muslim world have not rushed to criticize Mahathir has to do with history. The bloody legacy of pogroms going back to the Middle Ages, and the calculated attempt of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews in the Second World War have, with good reason, made most people in Europe and the U.S. sensitive to the issue of anti-Semitism. Such sensitivity has not developed in the Muslim world, for the very simple reason that the Muslim lands did not treat their Jewish inhabitants in such vicious and cruel ways, and therefore their peoples do not feel a sense of guilt on that score. For Western critics to lambast Mahathir as they have done is, in these circumstances, seen as an inappropriately harsh application of perspectives derived from European experience.

Amidst all the controversy a few paragraphs of his speech generated, it is unfortunate that the constructive ideas advanced in it are likely to be overlooked and forgotten.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel, available from the AET Book Club.

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