Jew-haters under every bed?

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how two people can read the exact same text and get two very different impressions out of it?
I wrote here on Tuesday about Malaysian PM Mahathir’s speech. George Loper, who runs a local community bulletin board here in Charlottesville, posted it up on his board, where it elicited a furious response from a young man called Henry Weinschenk:

    The one that needs to “get a grip” is Elena [sic] Cobban. It is true that Mahathir said “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?” But, we should not think that he means peaceful ways to deal with Israel… or the “jewish problem”. He is not talking about peaceful ways to solve the conflict in Palestine. He is only talking about changing to more effective tactics, than the ones being presently used.
    When Mahtir [sic] says “As Muslims we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Surely the 23 years struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do.” Most westerners don’t know what this means. It actually means ethnic cleansing and genocide of the jews of Medina (Madinah). The same jews that gave him, and his followers, asylum from his enemies in Mecca.
    Mohammed and his people, just as Hitler did centuries centuries later, expulsed [sic] two of the three jewish tribes in Medina under some flimsy pretext. Then, the last tribe — approximately seven hundred people, consisting of men, women and children — was killed. A “final solution” if there ever was one, with striking parallels to Hitler’s. And, here lays [sic] the problem with Mahathir’s words. What he means is very clear. There is no need to try to embellish his yearning for an effective way to eliminate Israel. No more no less.

So that was Henry’s reading of Mahathir’s speech. (Well, I hope he read the whole of it.) My reading was, as I’d noted, very different. I think it’s very interesting that Henry claims to have “inside knowledge” as to what Mahathir “actually meant” by his references to the Prophet Muhammad’s actions 1400-plus years ago. That is SO amazing! What incredible, long-distance mind-reading powers this young man must possess. (DARPA should hire him immediately.)
Especially amazing since none of the hundreds of Muslim leaders, pols, and journalists who were present at the event were ever smart enough to be able to give that explanation of what Mahathir “actually meant” in a speech that, as I’d noted, also contained references to Jews as objects of emulation, a couple of impassioned pleas against suicide bombings, and a reminder that some Jews are actually well-disposed toward Muslims…
Henry’s reading of the historical record of what happened to the Jews in Medina in Muhammad’s day was also, let’s say, a very particular one. PBS, in its recent series “Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet” had an interesting, and carefully researched and expressed description of what happened to those Jews. You can read it here. It is a complex rendering (unlike Henry’s), of what must have been a complex series of events in the city’s inter-tribal politics.
But Henry W seems determined to find a Jew-hater under every bed. The problem with that kind of mindset is that if you (over-)react to everything you encounter in life based on it, then unfortunately it trends towards becoming a self-implementing prophecy.

12 thoughts on “Jew-haters under every bed?”

  1. http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/jj20031024.shtml
    “Mahathir’s Judeophobia is an old story. More than 30 years ago he wrote: “The Jews . . . are not merely hook-nosed but understand money instinctively.” He has blasted Jews as “monsters”; in 1994 his government banned the movie “Schindler’s List” for being too pro-Jewish. When the Malaysian currency collapsed in 1997, Mahathir blamed it on George Soros, an American investor. “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews,” he thundered at a rally, “but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge — and coincidentally Soros is a Jew.””
    Interestingly, Mohammed’s own central bank, Bank Negara, speculated recklessly in the forex markets for years until disastrous missteps in the late eighties and finally, a 15bn RM loss in 1993 forced them out of that business for good. Coincidentally (?)it was a position taken against Soros’ fund that proved to be the last straw.

  2. Here is par. 51 from the speech you cite:
    “The enemy will probably welcome these proposals and we will conclude that the promoters are working for the enemy. But think. We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.”
    So, just so we’re straight — Mahathir claims Jews invented human rights and democracy in order to achieve world domination , but Henry W is an overreacting paranoid? That’s a pretty disturbing conclusion.

  3. Alex– I hate to be picky but in the para you cite there, I read these two sentences as separate:

      They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.

    I don’t quite read them as supporting what you claim they support.
    For the record, I do think MM seems to be something of an over-reactor (though not a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite). He also seems to operate from a pretty strong base of anti-westernism, which seems fairly understandable given his country’s history of having been ravaged by three European colonial powers. But all of that is still no reason for others to over-react to what he says.
    As for Soros, he–like Jeffrey Sachs– developed an interesting case of conscientious reflection over time, which is great. Read what I wrote about him here.
    Also, on the content of MM’s stewardship of his country’s economy, do go back and read the Krugman piece.

  4. I wouldn’t bank on Soros’ getting a Nobel Prize any time soon. His endorsement of leveraged attacks on the currencies of developing nations is the same as it was in ’93, leftward rhetoric and philanthropic fig-leafs notwithstanding. Take this exchange from Nightline:
    “TED KOPPEL : [I]f you could have profited by destroying Malaysia’s currency, would you have shrunk from that?
    GEORGE SOROS: Not necessarily because that would have been an unintended consequence of my action. And it’s not my job as a participant to calculate the consequences. This is what a market is. That’s the nature of a market. So I’m a participant in the market.
    TED KOPPEL: Apolitical, amoral?
    GEORGE SOROS: That’s exactly right. ”
    Needless to say, Soros and the anti-globalization movement make for extremely odd ideological bedfellows.
    As far as MM’s anti-semitism goes, if you do not identify conspiracy-mongering and wholesale ethnic slanders as simple, old-fashioned anti-Semitism, I certainly can do little to convince you. The record of MM’s past antisemitic outrages is well-documented and unequivocal — in June of this year, to cite one example, his party distributed Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” to delegates at their annual assembly. In the speech under question, Mahathir refers to Jews throughout his speech as “the enemy” — not some Jews: all Jews. The admiration you cite is directed at their cunning, ability to marshal resources and cynically manipulate world opinion. A similar characterization of Muslims (say, equating Islam with terrorism) would prompt the removal of any Western head-of-state dumb enough to voice it. Does a double standard apply to victims of colonialism in matters of race-hatred? May we not please call a spade a spade?
    Granted, MM has been one of the few Muslim leaders to acknowledge the calculated murder of civilians as “terrorism” — but if this is what passes for enlightened leadership then god help the Islamic world.

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