A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (120 page)

That October, I felt that the whole world was looking at us, at that meeting of the OIC. Over one billion Muslims were placing their hopes in us to lead and to guide them in restoring the honour of Islam and the Muslims. How can it be the Will of Allah that we stand by and do nothing about this, for doesn’t it say in
Surah Ar-Ra’d
, verse 11, that “He will not change the fate of a community until the community has tried to change itself”? As host of the OIC Summit, it was crucial for me to remind Muslims not to let the 
ummah
 down. In doing so, I had to make comparisons with other, more advanced communities and this was what the international audience picked up to  demonise me.

Anyone who reads my OIC speech in its entirety will see that it is actually very balanced and fair. I may have been harsh with the Jews for the wrongs they have done, but I also praised them as role models. Despite their hardships, they acquired a wide range of skills and many became very rich and powerful financiers, politicians, scientists and businessmen. Similarly, I pointed out that many Muslims have done well the world over in terms of finance, politics and economics, but I condemned the Muslims for constantly fighting among themselves and for wilfully refusing to acquire the skills that would allow them to be competitive. I urged young Muslims to stop participating in suicide attacks and criticised those who believed that Islam was against science and progress. I wanted them to use their heads so that the Muslim community could recover its dignity and restore Islam’s greatness.

To convince them, I made the following statement: “The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” The Jews claim they were almost exterminated by the Holocaust. They were nearly defeated both physically and spiritually and yet they came back even stronger. Once a nationless people, today they rule Israel with an iron hand and wield influence and authority in countries like the US.

This was an important comparison to make and both history and current affairs bear evidence to what I said. I was shocked when I visited Palestine in 2005 and saw that the whole country was occupied by Israel. There were roads there that Palestinians were not allowed to use and places in their own country they could not go to. It is patently clear why Arab anger is so terrible. It drives them to horrific acts, including turning their bodies into weapons by strapping on bombs. Terrible as this is, you cannot dismiss what they do as madness. They have been living in inhuman conditions for over 60 years, and they have to go to extremes to reclaim the land which belongs to them. I do not think they will ever succeed by doing what they have been doing and I find this recourse neither morally appropriate nor politically effective, but desperate people do desperate things. To state this is not to be an apologist for violence, it is to plead for human insight and understanding.

All this has added to the low self-esteem among Muslims, which I mentioned in the OIC speech: “There is still a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right. They believe that things can only get worse. The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. They will forever be poor, backward and weak.”

I have always believed that creating Israel was a mistake. Even before the end of World War II, the Europeans had wanted to remove the Jews from their continent, considering places like South America and Uganda as potential homes for them. They did not want to surrender any of their own land but were happy to make available land that was not theirs. At that time, the number of Jews in Palestine was very small, so the Europeans decided to divide the country and apportion part of it to become the state of Israel. Naturally, the Arabs were furious. How would Americans have responded if half of Texas were taken away by a third party and given to the Mexicans? In the case of Palestine, the land was not only divided, but the long-resident Arabs were also expelled to make room for Israel, without any compensation. The few Arabs who have remained in Israel are treated worse than second-class citizens. If ever there was a racist country, it is Israel. Its citizenship is based on race, not on residence or loyalty.

Israel’s strategy is to out-terrorise the Palestinians by officially committing worse acts of terrorism. As they do this, the world remains silent—out of guilt for the Holocaust. The West created the state of Israel and so they must justify their decision by supporting it come what may. Those who argue that Israel cannot simply be wished away should note that it occupies more land than was originally allocated by the United Nations in 1947. Israel must also accept the return of the Arabs they drove out—it is their land after all. But the Zionists are wary of letting the Arabs back in, fearing that if they return their numbers may grow quickly.

Given all these facts, it was not wrong of me to want to shake the Muslims out of their apathy and disunity. These were the reasons why, after more than 50 years of fighting in Palestine, the Muslims have not achieved any results. The situation has, in fact, gotten worse and I needed to remind members why the OIC was created. The principles of the Conference, according to its charter, are to sustain Islamic social and economic values and promote unity among member states. It also emphasises the importance of culture, science and technology. Malaysia has always taken its OIC role seriously since Tunku Abdul Rahman was appointed the Conference’s first Secretary-General from its founding in May 1971 to 1973.

As the voice of the Muslim community, the OIC is very weak because its members can never agree on anything among themselves. The OIC works on the basis of consensus, but this can never be achieved. So it can never decide or act on anything. I thought that Malaysia might help find ways to make the group more effective. That, regrettably, did not happen. I quietly suggested abandoning the idea of consensus and suggested instead that a few member countries, a coalition of the like-minded, respond to developments without committing the whole OIC. You can get five countries to agree on something, but not 50, and certainly not 50 fractious Muslim countries. The principle of majority rule often works, but in the OIC getting even a majority is impossible. It is a gathering of minorities, many of them a minority of one. Some OIC leaders thought abandoning consensus was a good idea, but nobody has taken it up. Besides, it would require a consensus to give up consensus. This is the “infinite regress” of Muslim disunity.

Very few of the goals stated in the charter have been achieved and nowhere is the absence of unity so glaring than on the issue of Palestine. As far as I could see, Muslims had done little or nothing to help themselves and I did not shy away from asking tough questions in my speech: “But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Can we only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people?” The constant bickering and endless infighting within the 
ummah
 only worsened their situation, and that is why I told them their prayers were not likely to be answered. This is a harsher judgment than the one I had passed on the Jews. Yet for this, I was never given due credit by the Jews and their apologists.

The condemnation of my speech was swift, with one Israeli official saying that my speech fuelled “further hatred and misunderstanding”. A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry told CNN: “It comes as no surprise that in a summit like this, there is a search for the lowest common denominator among the members, which is Israeli bashing.” A Bush administration official declared that my “hate-filled” remarks further cemented my legacy of “outrageous and misguided public statements”. The then Australian Prime Minister John Howard called it offensive: “Let me make it clear—any invocation of rivalry between Jews and Muslims is very unhelpful,” he said in a public address over radio. In Brussels, European Union leaders accused me of spreading falsehoods and sowing ethnic and religious divisions: “His unacceptable comments hinder all our efforts to further inter-ethnic and religious harmony and have no place in a decent world, ” the EU leaders said in a statement.

Obviously, none of these people read the whole speech; if they did, they must have decided to pick only a few quotes and take them completely out of context. They had no idea that in May 1987, the Malaysian Government invited a group of Israeli schoolchildren to visit our country because we wanted to show them that Muslims here harboured no hatred towards them. Yitzhak Rabin was the Prime Minister of Israel then and he was less of a hawk than some of his predecessors, which made the visit possible. In 1997, despite objections from PAS, we allowed Israel’s cricket team to play here in the second tier of the World Cricket Tournament. Again, the idea was to demonstrate to the world that Muslims, far from the stereotype, were not irrational.

But none of this stopped people from branding me anti-Jewish. It does not bother me much, however, because I know that if it were true, I would not have Jewish friends. I am not against Jews or Israelis, but I am against what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians. Somehow though, it is impossible for me to say anything about this without being accused of being anti-Semitic. The world is strangely inconsistent this way. I cannot fathom why it is permissible to condemn all Muslims as terrorists but not to criticise some Jews for what they do. Even suggesting that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was less than six million can get you into serious trouble. In 2006, the British revisionist historian David Irving, was jailed in Austria for almost a year for questioning this figure when he was in the UK. I often wonder how the world would regard a Muslim country that jailed anyone who said that Muslims are terrorists or that the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings are evil. This is the way things are: while some statements can be made with impunity, others can be stigmatised or even criminalised wherever they are uttered. It all depends on the power of those who uphold or reject such statements. All the talk about freedom of speech is just meaningless rhetoric.

As much as I have serious objections to what they have done, I also admire the Jews for their resilience. In the years immediately after World War II, they could not be admitted into Harvard University, either as students or staff. But these days many of the professors there are Jews. There was once a US Government restriction on financial institutions being run by Jews, and they overcame that too, by providing financial services that no one else could. Their numbers are small but their cultural and political influence is great, as they own most national and international media outlets. They also dominate the financial institutions and the policy-making think-tanks.

The Muslims, by contrast, give up easily and lack focus. However, the reports that came out after my speech conveniently ignored what I had said against them, even though I had been as tough in my criticism of them—for their ignorance and folly—as I had been of the Jews for their ruthless shrewdness. Several European leaders wanted to draft a resolution to denounce my statement as false and offensive. I can prove that everything I said was factually correct. I waited for them to do so as I already knew what I would say in reply. These were the same leaders who spoke so self-righteously about human rights and freedom of speech. People are free to read my speech any way they like, but the fact remains that I took pains to be fair. I am ready to criticise Muslims so it would be less than balanced if I did not also criticise the Jews. I was exercising my right of free speech.

The outrage generated by my OIC speech did not abate for some time. At the APEC Summit in Bangkok soon after, a number of media reports said that President George W. Bush had pulled me aside to rebuke me for what I said. What actually happened was quite different. In what seemed like an apologetic tone, he tried to explain to me the domestic politics involving Jews and Muslims in his country. I remember telling Hasmah that he sounded contrite for his harsh remarks about me. But Bush’s spin doctors told the Press that he had verbally slapped me for my statement that the United States served as a proxy of the Jews.

The West is ever ready to turn a blind eye to the faults of the Jews, perhaps because Europeans carry so much guilt over their treatment of the Jews in their history and the Holocaust. They are right to feel guilty, because for ages they periodically massacred the Jews. But this does not justify ignoring Jewish depredations. Most people in the West may have forgotten the acts of terror committed by the Irgun
[3]
 and Haganah militias
[4]
 and the massacre of Palestinian Arabs in Deir Yassin
[5]
 during the Jewish struggle against the British. Nobody dares point out that Israel’s behaviour is not what the world would expect from victims of the Holocaust. To see them treat the Palestinians as they do makes it clear that they did not learn anything from the appalling persecution they suffered under the Nazi regime.
 

For this at least, the OIC must speak with a united voice. In my speech, I said that to survive
the new world order, Muslims had to start thinking, as they were up against a people who think. “Whether we like it or not we have to change, not by changing our religion but by applying its teachings in the context of a world that is radically different from that of the first century of the 
Hijrah
.
[6]
 Islam is not wrong but the interpretations by our scholars, who are not prophets even though they may be very learned, can be wrong. We have a need to go back to the fundamental teachings of Islam to find out whether we are indeed believing in and practising the Islam that the Prophet preached. It cannot be that we are all practising the correct and true Islam when our beliefs are so different from one another.”