alexist

Yay, Yankees won!

Last week, Malaysian PM Dr Mahathir Mohammed gave a speech at the Organization of Islamic States saying that "We [Muslims] are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

This is how The Economist described it:
"The 57-member OIC would have responded with a lot of bickering and finger-pointing, rounded off with a bombastic denunciation of Zionism. Instead, Malaysia, the host of this year's summit, tried to steer the group towards “practical, implementable” measures. Mahathir Mohamad, who steps down as prime minister at the end of this month, deplored “the Jews' rule of the world by proxy” but stressed a need to negotiate with Israel." Nice slant there.

Meanwhile, France prevented the EU from issuing a statement against Dr Mahathir's remarks. Now, if a Western leader had made similar comments about the world's Muslims, I think the West's reaction would have been rather stronger.

It seems like it's almost acceptable, or at least less awful, if a Muslim makes a bigoted comment about Jews. If you try calling the Muslim world on it, you get an argument about how it's because of Palestine. I'm sorry, but the same leftists who trot out that argument wouldn't accept one from Americans about terrorism justifying anti-Muslim/Arab bias. It's perfectly acceptable to be opposed to Israeli policies. It's acceptable to be anti-Zionist. (I'd disagree with you until I ran out of breath, but it's politically legitimate.) What's NOT legitimate is anti-Semitism. Sure, the West agrees on this in theory. But the voices of condemnation are a lot weaker than when Muslims are criticized by the right. The left has tacitly accepted the Palestinian point of view. They shrink from the Hamas/Islamic Jihad "push the Jews into the sea" extremism, but they've accepted the pro-Palestinian viewpoint of Israeli responsibility and oppression. Because the Arab/Muslim world has blurred the lines between "Zionist" and "Jewish", the Western left doesn't always make that distinction as firmly as it should either.

Instead, the West, especially Europe, has accepted, to some degree, the idea that Jews--all Jews--are responsible for the sins of Israel's government. We're rich, we're powerful, we don't need discrimination against us to be condemned. Discrimination only counts when you're doing it against the powerless. So the West makes the occasional noise when Arabs revive the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the blood libel, but no real action is taken.

The West has accepted the viewpoint that the Arabs hate us, this is Bad, and it's our fault. There's a whole set of unexamined assumptions there. I won't tell you that US policy has been perfect, but I rarely see (except in the rightwing Israeli press) the idea that perhaps we're not all wrong, or that the Arabs have their own problems that only they can solve. I'm far more likely to see "if the US would just change its policy on Israel/Palestine..." The Arab/Muslim world has left its own attitudes unexamined. The vicious anti-Semitism of the Arab press is not Israel's or the US' fault, just as anti-Arab tirades in the USA are not the fault of Saudi Arabia. We've accepted, hook line and sinker, the idea that the Palestine problem is the heart of the matter. It's not, at least not in the way it's presented. The Arab world cares about the idea of Palestine, not necessarily actual Palestinians. If they did there would've been an independent Palestine before 1967, no refugee camps, no stateless Palestinians in Lebanon. If an independent Palestine is created, what will the Arab world do? They can't hold up Palestine and Israeli/Jewish repression as the center of all the Arab world's ills.

An article in Ha'aretz

(Amnon Rubinstein is a former left-wing MK--Ratz and later Meretz.)