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Mahathir vs Jews: Another step
back
By Phar Kim Beng
HONG
KONG - In his address on Thursday to the Organization of
Islamic Conference (OIC) in Putrajaya, an administrative
center of the Malaysian government built on the
outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, the country's prime minister,
Dr Mahathir Mohamad, was again at his acerbic best, or
worst.
To thunderous applause from the gallery,
which included 57 Muslim heads of state plus Russian
President Vladimir Putin and Philippine President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo, Mahathir let fly with a stinging
statement: Jews are ruling the world, and they are doing
so indirectly. Read: they are abetted by the United
States.
How did one of Asia's greatest
statesmen come to such a conclusion? There is no
significant Jewish presence in Malaysia. Nor has
Mahathir lived in the US or Europe for any extended
period of time. Malaysia has never had any relations
with Israel.
To be sure, Mahathir has been
accused of anti-Semitism before. When the Asian
financial crisis was buffeting the region, he accused
currency speculators of being behind the mischief.
Although not all currency speculators were Jewish, their
institutional presence was based in New York, a city
whose financial sector was traditionally known to be
controlled by the Jews; hence the pejorative term "Jew
York".
Indeed, Mahathir singled out George
Soros, owner of the Soros hedge fund, for blame. It was
during an acrimonious exchange with Soros, a
non-practicing Jew, that Mahathir's reputation as
ananti-Semite was sealed in the Western press.
At the height of the Asian financial crisis in
1998, when the Malaysian currency had depreciated by
some 40 percent, Mahathir's criticism of currency
traders was considered inept and in bad form. When
then-US president Bill Clinton's treasury secretary,
Robert Rubin, formerly the head of Goldman and Sachs and
himself a prominent Jewish banker, wrote a hard-hitting
opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune
stating that there was "no one to call at the end of the
line", Mahathir knew his interpretation of events had
been challenged.
Rubin argued that the massive
dislocation witnessed in Indonesia, South Korea,
Malaysia and Thailand was not the result of currency
speculation. Rather, he said, it was due to the
inevitable process of "globalization". The thrust of
Rubin's argument, as opposed to Mahathir's belief, was
that neither Washington nor Wall Street could do
anything about it.
Nevertheless, events later
evolved in favor of Mahathir. By forcing Malaysia to go
on a fixed-exchange-rate system, which he himself
admitted was his "loneliest moment at the top", as no
one agreed with him, the chaos plaguing the Malaysian
financial system was stopped. Within months, Malaysia's
economic health was restored. To this day, the
international community has continued to praise Mahathir
for his bold decision and foresight.
Yet
Mahathir's run-ins with the prominent Jewish presence in
the US did not stop there. When he was engaged in an
intense political tug-of-war with his deputy Anwar
Ibrahim in late 1998, prominent Jewish leaders attached
to the Clinton administration came to Anwar's defense.
William Cohen, who was then the US defense secretary,
tried to rally international opinion against Mahathir.
When vice president Al Gore lent his weight to Cohen's
campaign to free Anwar, Mahathir was visibly piqued,
despite Gore's background as a Methodist, not a Jew.
More recently, Mahathir again accused Jewish
interests in the US and Israel of conspiracy to
instigate another war. By flying deep into Syria to bomb
training sites thought to belong to Islamic Jihad and
Hamas, the Israeli Defense Force, according to Mahathir,
was trying to force the hand of the US to intervene even
more aggressively in Syria and the Middle East. To
Mahathir, this was another strategy planned and deployed
by Israel to compel the US to act in its interest, just
as it had done when the US invaded Iraq.
To be
sure, the impression of Jews as manipulative and devious
people runs deep in Europe. In medieval literature and
elsewhere, including Shakespearean works, Jews were
type-cast as a selfish lot. The character of Shylock, a
Jewish merchant depicted by William Shakespeare, for
instance, had subsequent Jews in Europe and beyond
identified as people with aquiline features who stopped
at nothing to get back what they owed.
Although
oppressed everywhere, even subject to pogroms in Russia,
Jews eventually found protection, first under the
Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, before establishing
themselves in the major cities of the US. It was not
until 1948 that Israel was formed.
During the
Russo-Japan war of 1904-05, it was further believed that
part of the Japanese victory was due to Jewish help.
According to John Perry, a professor in Asian Studies at
the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Jewish bankers
lent the Japanese government a substantial amount of
money to allow it to "buy sufficient arms" to counter
the Russian naval campaigns. The Jewish financiers, who
had by then established themselves in New York, did so
out of spite, it was argued, as Czar Nicholas II had
subjected Jews in Russia to repeated discrimination and
oppression. True or not, after that "Jewish money" was
mythologized as crucial to a country's war effort.
To be sure, the missives of Mahathir should be
seen in personal terms, as the Malaysian government had
never tried to block or act unfairly against Jewish
economic interests in the country, preferring to see
them as foreign direct investments from the West.
Nevertheless, what made Mahathir's statement
highly inappropriate was the fact that it was made in a
setting where the OIC had convened to understand ways to
"improve the knowledge and morality" of the Muslim
world.
The sort of generalizations indulged in
by Mahathir, backed as they were by anecdotes rather
than empirical facts, simply underlines the perception
that the Muslim world has failed to move into the age of
science, reason and rationality. For one of the greatest
Muslim leaders in the contemporary world, himself a
scientist, doctor and trained pilot, to lend credence to
this view by wantonly attacking Jews is unfortunate in
the extreme.
In attacking the Jews so callously,
Mahathir not only failed himself, but also the wider
Muslim world that he represents. As for those who
applauded when Mahathir made the statement, the same
verdict applies.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
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