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Jewish World Review Oct. 27, 2003 / 1 Mar-Cheshvan, 5764 Should America blame itself for the Muslim world's hatred? By Jonathan Tobin
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
Even in a world where anti-Semitism is becoming increasingly accepted,
occasionally someone can say something that shocks even the French.
The speech of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad at a meeting of a
conference of Islamic countries last week contained so much blatant anti-Jewish
bigotry that French President Jacques Chirac felt compelled to condemn it.
To the applause of his fellow Muslim world leaders, Mahathir informed the
world that it was being run "by the Jews." The Malaysian spiced this rather
routine litany of anti-Semitic invective by going on to state that the Jews
"invented … human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be
wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others."
To his credit, President Bush made a point of personally refuting Mahathir's
screed.
It would be nice to think that Mahathir's speech was just the ravings of a
nutty Malaysian. That appeared to be the spin the administration wanted to put
on the affair. Even as she condemned Mahathir's words, National Security
Advisor Condoleeza Rice tempered that by saying, "I don't think they are emblematic
of the Muslim world."
WHAT 'MODERATES' THINK
And those were just the comments from the "moderates." Far from being
unusual, this type of Jew-hatred has become typical in an Arab and Muslim world that
has become the global producer of anti-Semitism. Jews and Americans have
become the boogeymen of the Muslim imagination, filling heads with ready-made
excuses for the failure of Muslim civilization to keep up with the West.
This drivel has been hammered into the minds of young Muslims around the
world in schools paid for by America's Saudi "allies."
But, predictably, for some Americans the answer lies not in confronting the
dementia that passes for wisdom in the Muslim world, but for America to change
its policies. It didn't take long for such a suggestion to appear on the Op-Ed
page of The New York Times. The author was Times columnist Paul Krugman, the
Princeton economist who usually confines himself to rabidly partisan attacks
on Bush's domestic policies.
But on Oct. 21, Krugman told his readers that the Malaysian leader isn't
really such a bad guy.
In a piece titled "Listening to Mahathir," Krugman said that the bulk of the
speech was an accurate depiction of Muslim problems. If he indulged in
Jew-baiting, we should, Krugman said, understand he was just throwing his
constituents "rhetorical red meat" as part of a "delicate balancing act aimed at
domestic politics."
In other words, Mahathir was no different from, say, a politician in the
American South in the 1950s who had "progressive" views, but who ranted about the
threat to white America from blacks in order to stay in office. Except, of
course, that Krugman and the rest of 2003 America no longer believes that such
balancing acts are either justified or defensible.
BLAME IT ON US — AND ISRAEL
Krugman's view is in line with the views of a State Department panel that
recently toured the world trying to find out why Muslims don't like us. That
panel — packed with anti-Israel academics — came back to tell us that America's
bad image in the Muslim world was largely our own fault. They think that we
should increase our efforts to make nice with Arabs and Muslims, and even rethink
our foreign policy.
And that always comes back to the same canard floated by Krugman — that
support for Israel is at the heart of hostility to the West, and that if only W
ashington would cut the Israelis loose, then Muslims wouldn't hate us or crash
hijacked airliners into skyscrapers to get our attention.
This sort of nonsense has been resisted by sensible elements of the Bush
administration, which has focused on fighting terror, not rationalizing it. But
that has also been accompanied by a willful blindness to the miasma of hate that
pervades the Muslim world. Most statements coming out of Washington on this
issue, like Rice's, are something between a prayer and a hope that if we ignore
the problem, maybe it will just go away.
Instead, maybe we should be telling Muslims that, contrary to Mahathir, they
aren't being "humiliated" and "oppressed" by Israel. They are being
humiliated and oppressed by their own leaders, and a culture that is hostile to those
concepts of "human rights" that they claim the Jews invented to swindle them.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. Let him know what you think by clicking here. In June, Mr. Tobin won first places honors in the American Jewish Press Association's Louis Rapaport Award for Excellence in Commentary as well as the Philadelphia Press Association's Media Award for top weekly columnist. Both competitions were for articles written in the year 2002.
© 2003, Jonathan Tobin | ||||||||||
