The true source of Malaysia's antisemitism
from Jihad Watch by The Anti-Jihadist
A followup to this story. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center analyzes recent political unrest in Malaysia, and the resulting Malaysian government media's efforts to blame it all on the Jews. This naturally begs the question: why would a country in southeast Asia with nary a Jewish citizen and with no synagogues in its territory display such virulent Jew hatred? Rabbi Cooper's well-intentioned but ultimately misleading analysis blames this salient Malaysian characteristic on the notorious Malaysian anti-Semite and former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. From "In Malaysia, When in Doubt, Blame the Jews", The Huffington Post, 22 July 2011:
On July 9, 20,000 Malaysians gathered in Kuala Lumpur to demand more transparency in electoral laws in connection with next year's national elections.
Police unleashed tear gas and chemical-laced water on the demonstrators and temporarily detained nearly 1,700 of them. According to reports, authorities also detained six opposition activists without trial and accused them of trying to use the rally to spread communism. Police said they found T-shirts and other materials linked to communist figures.
Apparently, these measures didn't suffice for some of Malaysia's nervous ruling elite. The editors of Utusan Malaysia, owned by Prime Minister Najib Razak's United Malays National Organization ruling party (UMNO), defaulted to a time-tested maneuver: When in doubt, blame the Jews!
The Jews? Most citizens of the overwhelmingly Asian economic giant have never and will likely never meet a Jew in their lifetime. And yet the folks at Utusan Malaysia, which is influential among Muslims in rural areas who rely on government-linked media to shape their worldview, are apparently confident warnings about a "Jewish plot" would resonate in a land without Jews.
To understand why, you need only look at the track record of the man who dominated his nation for a quarter of a century, Malaysia's fourth prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad.
Mahathir was credited with engineering Malaysia's rapid modernization and spectacular economic growth. He was a dominant political figure, winning five consecutive general elections. He also used his political clout and controversial laws to detain activists and political opponents.
And Mahathir is an anti-Semite.
Back in 1970, in his treatise on Malay identity, "The Malay Dilemma," he wrote: "The Jews are not only hooked-nosed ... but understand money instinctively. ... Jewish stinginess and financial wizardry gained them the economic control of Europe and provoked antisemitism which waxed and waned throughout Europe through the ages."
In August 1984, a visit by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra was canceled when his Information Minister demanded that music by composer Ernst Bloch be deleted from the program. His crime? He was a Jew and the selection chosen was based on Hebrew melodies.
In 1986, Mahathir charged "Zionists" and Jews with attempting to destabilize the country through allegedly Jewish-controlled media. He subsequently banned The Asia Wall Street Journal for three months describing the publication as "Jewish owned." In the 1990s, Mahathir used the Malaysian news agency, Bernama, to accuse Australian Jewry of conspiring to topple him.
Mahathir, who made Islam a central component of Malaysian identity, made this chilling charge in 1997: "We are Moslems, and the Jews are not happy to see Moslems progress."
Perhaps that would help explain the resounding ovation which greeted his screed at a Islamic Leadership Conference in 2003: "The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million ... but today, the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
And just last year the elder statesman of anti-Semites said this at a conference: "Jews had always been a problem in European countries. They had been confined in ghettos and periodically massacred. But they still remained and still thrived and held whole governments to ransom. ... Even after their massacre by the Nazis in Germany, they survived to be a source of even greater problems to the world."
All this may help explain why Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are on prominent display at the Malaysian capital's International Airport.
Placing the blame solely on Mahathir is technically accurate but falls short of being a complete analysis. Such incomplete thinking is similar to the many mainstream media efforts that assign blame for jihadist terrorism on Al Qaeda or on its founder, Osama bin Laden. As Osama and the organization he founded did not invent Jihadist terrorism, neither did Malaysia's Mahathir conjure Islamic-style antisemitism on his own. Where would, where could Mahathir get such ideas?
Such teachings originate from a place no reader or writer at 'HuffPo' would be intellectually honest enough to admit existing -- the Quran, which not only has few kinds words for Jews, but has depths of antisemitism that rival anything that might be sold at Malaysian airports. Verse 5:82 is typical of Quranic teachings on Jews, and states, "You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be] the Jews..."
Hating Jews is not a 'bug' of Islam, but a defining feature of that belief system. So while antisemites such as Mahathir may come and go, Islamic antisemitism, as codified in the Quran, is eternal. |
