OBSCENE EXCUSES
by Amir Taheri
NEW YORK POST
October 21, 2003
October 21, 2003 -- THIS was to be his political swan song, and he had spent weeks composing it. Yet when Dr. Mahathir Mohamed, who will retire as Malaysia's prime minister next month, addressed the 10th Islamic summit last week, he offered a reheated hodgepodge of the bizarre fare that he has dished out over a 40-year career.
Many have seen Mahathir's speech as an insult to Jews. A closer reading would show that he was insulting Muslims and Christians more than Jews.
Here is part of what Mahathir said: "The Europeans killed six million out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy." This means that all Europeans, not just Nazis, were involved in the Holocaust. It also means that the Europeans are not intelligent enough to prevent a small Jewish community from ruling them.
Mahathir presents the Jews as "a people who think" - unlike Christians and Muslims, whom he regards as too dumb to use their heads. He says the "thinking people" have managed to get "others to fight and die for them. He adds: "Israelis and Jews control most of the economy and the media in the world."
As the world enjoys a level of prosperity not dreamed of even a generation ago, plus unprecedented access to information, Mahathir's claim, if true, would amount to a compliment to "Israelis and Jews."
He says Jews "invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others." In other words, the idea that all human beings have inalienable rights, and that people should be free to choose their governments, are "Jewish tricks."
Christians? At his party's conference last June, he claimed that "European culture" had become "a menace for mankind." "The Europeans are determined to impose a global culture that includes the practice of free sex, especially sodomy. Marriage between male and male, female and female are officially recognized by them. They no longer regard incest as a sin."
If the goal of Jews is to impose human rights and democracy throughout the world, the goal of Christians is to spread sodomy and incest.
Yet Muslims were the main target of Mahathir's vitriol. Inflating their number to 1.3 billion, he lamented that they fail to "deal with" a few million Jews, whatever that means. He claimed that Muslims, though holding assets worth $3 trillion, play virtually no role in global decision-making.
Because Mahathir did not say why Muslims were powerless, one must assume that he believes Muslims lack the "intelligence" of the Jews.
Mahathir received a standing ovation from the leaders of the 57 countries present at the Muslim summit. They did not notice that the doctor was insulting Muslims.
The good doctor was offering a new version of the old delusion that what has gone wrong with Muslims is the fault of others. In the 1950s and 1960s, Muslim leftists blamed everything on Western Imperialism. From the 1970s, the Islamists chose the left as their punching bag. The finger of blame has been pointed at colonialists, multinationals, missionaries, Communists, liberals, religious and/or ethnic minorities, middle classes and even poor Orientalists.
By blaming others, Mahathir and his predecessors in this game absolve Muslim leaders of responsibility. They also divest Muslims of their humanity, turning them into witless pawns in a game played by others.
With his speech, Mahathir did great harm to the cause of those who believe that, as an existential reality, Islam needs to be subjected to serious critical reexamination.
Mahathir's "us-and-them" dialectics belongs to a tribal mentality that has no place in the modern world. He forgets that the Iran-Iraq war, in which a million people died, was not an "us-and-them" conflict. Nor was it "the other" who tried to wipe Kuwait off the map in 1990.
Are Jews raiding Algerian villages at night to massacre entire families, including babies?
Are Jews murdering thousands of Muslim women each year in the name of "honor-killing"?
Are Jews throwing acid at girls who do not wear the hijab?
Is it "the other" who has arranged for Muslim countries to have almost half of all political prisoners in the world?
And who is carrying out those thousands of executions, sometimes by chopping people's heads in public or stoning them to death?
Are Jews preventing Muslims from choosing their governments in free elections? Are they arranging those elections in which government candidates always win with 99.99 percent of the votes?
Are Jews controlling the economies of the Muslim nations - or should we look to our own ruling elites, whose greed knows no bound? People often talk of the need for the separation of mosque and state in Muslim countries. A more urgent need is the separation of business from government.
Mahathir says Jews have persuaded others to fight and die for them. Who does he mean by "others"? If he means the West, let us not forget that Americans and Europeans fought and died to save the Muslim peoples of Bosnia and Kosovo from extermination. Not a single Muslim state provided any help.
Yet who was getting a hero's welcome at the Muslim summit? The Russian President Vladimir Putin, who publicly takes pride in having flushed Chechen Muslims "down the toilet."
During years of war, Putin's army has killed more than 100,000 Chechens and turned a further 300,000 into refugees. That is almost half the Chechen population. Yet Russia was admitted as associate member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, where Putin received a hero's welcome. Yet the same group refuses to admit India - which has more Muslims than all the Arab countries combined.
Mahathir presented Palestine as a religious conflict. He did not apply the same logic to Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao, Burma, Cyprus and East Turkestan, among the many places where Muslims are in conflict with non-Muslims.
The logic of Mahathir's position is that Muslim Cypriots, Chechens and the rest are not as worthy as Palestinians. And yet the number of Muslims killed in those conflicts is many times higher than the total victims of all Arab-Israeli wars.
The question is not what others have done to us in the past, but what we are doing to ourselves right now . And what we are doing to ourselves includes the pack of lies and prejudices that Mahathir is presenting as a world vision fit for Muslims in the 21st century. |
