Mahathir's Pack of Lies

National Post
by Amir Taheri

This was to be his political swan song, and he had spent weeks 
composing it.

And yet, when Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who will retire as 
Malaysia's Prime Minister next month, addressed the 10th Islamic 
summit in Kuala Lumpur last week, he offered a re-heated 
hotchpotch of the bizarre fare he has dished out over a 40-year 
career.

The speech was structured around Mahathir's view of history as a 
series of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies.

The part of the speech that received most attention consists of 
a few sentences in which Mahathir reiterated his theory that the 
modern world is made and controlled by Jews.

He first developed that theory sometime around 1990. He gave 
this writer, and four other journalists, an exposé of it during 
a dinner at a restaurant in Davos, Switzerland, in 1998. When I 
met him in London last July, however, he seemed to have modified 
his position somewhat, insisting that what he had said about 
Jews was a reflection of what "religious scholars feel in 
Malaysia."

Not surprisingly, many people 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."

What does this mean?

It means that all Europeans, not just Nazis, were involved in 
the Holocaust. It also means that the Europeans, being mass-
murderers, 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 who he regards as too dumb to use their 
heads.

He says that the "thinking people" have also 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."

The Malaysian leader gives Jews credit for having created the 
modern world single-handedly.

He says that 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."

Mahathir levels grave charges against Christians. In a speech 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."

He is harder on what he calls "the Anglo-Saxons." He says they 
"invent false allegations to go to war to kill children, old 
people and sick people."

So much for the West's boast about its Greco-Roman heritage.

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.

What about Muslims?

They were the main target of Mahathir's vitriolic verbiage.

Inflating the number of Muslims 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 three-
trillion dollars, 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, in fact, insulting Muslims, and lined up to 
praise him for what Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher called 
"a very, very wise analysis."

By claiming that the Jews were ruling the world, the good doctor 
was offering a new version of the old delusion that what has 
gone wrong with Muslims is the fault of others.

By presenting Christians as sodomites and lesbians engaged in 
incest, he flatters the vanity of Muslims who, hushing family 
secrets, can boast about their pious lifestyle.

Mahathir is not the first to play this game. 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, 
multinational companies, 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 re-examination.

Mahathir's "us-and-them" dialectics belong to a tribal mentality 
that has no place in the modern world.

His assumption that all Jews and all Muslims and all Christians 
think exactly alike and have exactly the same interests and 
aspirations belongs to the discredited "essentialist" school of 
sociology in which "the alter-ego" is typecast as the antithesis 
of the self.

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 "honour-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 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% 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.

Mahathir presented Palestine as a religious conflict.

Yet 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, Kashmiris, Burmans, Mindanaoans and East Turkestanis 
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.