Practical overview on reactions to Mahathir's speech (further condmnations from Canada, Australia, for example) through The Economist
Malaysia news page.
This
BBC story on it has an alarming side and a side putting it in context, both important.
Alarming:
Quote:But the reaction from among the delegates and journalists was very telling.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he had not interpreted the remarks as being anti-Semitic, while Yemen's Foreign Minister Abubakar al-Qirbi said: "I don't think they were anti-Semitic at all. I think he was basically stating the fact to the Muslim world."
One Malaysian Chinese reporter with an international news agency rushed to Dr Mahathir's aid. "He's my Prime Minister," she said. "Of course I'll defend him."
"But surely you don't believe all this about an international Jewish conspiracy?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "It's true. Everyone knows it is."
An Iranian journalist privately took the same line.
"Of course the Jews rule the world," he said. "Look at America. They control all the companies. The politicians need their money for elections so they support Israel."
These were not the marginal neo-Nazis spilling their views over the internet, these were intelligent professionals. They agree with what Dr Mahathir said.
Such views go unchallenged and are common currency in much of the Muslim world.
Contextualising:
Quote:There is no understanding here of the taboo that surrounds anti-Jewish views in the West.
There is no comprehension that Westerners' views of themselves changed forever when British and American soldiers stumbled among the skeletal forms of those who had survived the Nazi death camps and discovered the mass graves of the millions who died.
The Muslim world does not live with this guilt, does not pay much heed to the distinction Western critics of the Israeli state make between it and the Jews.
For them Israel, Jews, they are all the same - they see them as people who stole Arab land in 1947 and who have compounded their crimes ever since. [..]
In Malaysia's racially diverse society crude racial stereotypes abound - the Malays are lazy, the Chinese greedy, the Indians drunk.
All are as bankrupt as any racial stereotype, but all are used casually by a nation of people who nevertheless rub along together pretty successfully.
So there was surprise that Dr Mahathir's remarks should attract so much condemnation in the West.
The second part obviously doesnt make the first part any less wrong or even any less dangerous.
What it does do is profer an alternative explanation to the "hating muslims" one. Outside Europe and North-America, people have ...
- neither gone through the intensive fifty-year process of coming to terms with the guilt of the Holocaust - which they had part nor parcel in and thus remains far from their bed like Pol Pots genocide is far from ours
- nor gone through the intensive self-training in political correctness (in the best sense of the term) when it comes to bandying about racial/ethnic stereotypes etc.
Which leaves them, when it comes to Jews:
- a collective obsession over Israel/Palestine (that can be partly - though only partly - explained by Jerusalem's status as a Muslim holy city);
- an overwhelming ignorance of the Jewish community's history in their own countries;
- and the very same stereortypes and prejudices that used to be so vibrant in the West before WW2 (and probably actually originated here*)
*that'd be an interesting topic, btw - are the anti-semitic prejudices that now abound in the Muslim world autochtonous or modernistic, 20th century import from Europe?
(For those feeling oversensitive: that question is not a hint at some "its all the West's fault" ploy, but a reference to how many notions and representations on national and ethnic collective identities that are currently held around the world originate in the birth of modernistic nationalism in 18th/19th century Europe.)
