Mahathir, Bush, Cohen, Krugman

So, that plucky young leader George W. Bush has “taken on” those naughty Muslims by telling Malaysian PM Mahathir bin Mohamad that his remarks about Jews at the recent Islamic summit were “wrong”.
(Full text of Mahathir’s remarks are here.)
And then, there’s Richard Cohen, pluckily writing on the same subject in today’s Washington Post. Cohen was writing from Berlin, from a spot near the Wannsee Villa, which was where the Nazis’ plans for their grisly “final solution” for Europe’s Jews (and Roma, and gays, and various other unwanted persons) were all hatched.
“Across the lake from where I am writing, hidden in trees streaked with the colors of autumn, is the Wannsee villa where the Nazis in 1942 held a conference on how to dispose of Europe’s remaining Jews,” Cohen writes. “Things have changed. We have gone from the phonograph to the disc player but as Mahathir shows, for too many people the thinking remains the same.”
Cohen goes on to quote–selectively– from what Mahathir told his audience of fellow Islamic leaders, and to accuse all of them of “rampant anti-Semitism”:

[W]hat ails part of the Islamic, especially Arab, world, is both anti-Semitism, which is rampant and state-tolerated, and the sort of thinking that underlies it. The belief that Jews have some sort of mystical powers — that they are smarter and, of course, more diabolical than others — provides the Islamic world with a handy explanation of why more than 1 billion Muslims cannot seem to cope with little Israel.

He goes on to warn, portentously:

The use of such language, the support of such ideas, is too often a precursor to violence. The scenario of Germany and the rest of Europe cannot apply. Islamic countries have next to no Jews. But it does transform the opposition to Israel from a political-nationalistic dispute into a kind of vast pogrom in which compromise becomes increasingly impossible.

Get a grip, Richard! It does seem you didn’t actually read the full text of Mahathir’s speech.
If you had read it, you would have seen, in Mahathir’s carefully numbered paragraphs, first of all an honest and very moving description of the Muslim community’s decline from its days of glory. Then, in paras 33-34 comes this:

33. But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they 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?
34. It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack. 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.

Then, in paras 38-40, we have this:

38. It is sure[l]y time that we pause to think. But will this be wasting time? For well over half a century we have fought over Palestine. What have we achieved? Nothing. We are worse off than before. If we had paused to think then we could have devised a plan, a strategy that can win us final victory. Pausing and thinking calmly is not a waste of time. We have a need to make a strategic retreat and to calmly assess our situation.
39. We 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.
40. We may not be able to do that. We may not be able to unite all the 1.3 billion Muslims. We may not be able to get all the Muslim Governments to act in concert. But even if we can get a third of the ummah and a third of the Muslim states to act together, we can already do something. Remember that the Prophet did not have many followers when he went to Madinah. But he united the Ansars and the Muhajirins and eventually he became strong enough to defend Islam.

It was, of course, that latter part of para 39 that Bush and Cohen had read and focused exclusively on– NOT the broader context in which Mahathir was actually presenting the achievements of the Jews in modern times: as an object of emulation, not of excoriation.
In the New York Times, Paul Krugman has a far better-informed and more realistic take on Mahathir’s speech. His column is titled, appropriately enough, “Listening to Mahathir”.
Krugman at least seems to have read all of Mahathir’s speech (though he does seem to have given the key passage about Jewish power a more paranoid rather than more generous reading). But he notes, rightly, that “A lot of the speech sounds as if it had been written by Bernard Lewis, author of … the best-selling book about the Islamic decline.”
Krugman asks, “So what’s with the anti-Semitism?” And then he goes on to give a fairly nuanced political explanation of how, as PM of a predominantly Muslim country, Mahathir has worked hard to preserve a favorable climate in which Malaysia’s mainly ethnic-Chinese (and non-Muslim) traders could continue to contribute to the country’s prosperity while also covering his political flank with the Muslim indigenes…
I actually disagree that the sentiments Mahathir is expressing constitute clear anti-Semitism, at all. For example, in para 42, Mahathir says: “We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us. Some are welldisposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.” That is not the way that purveyors of hate speech usually express themselves.
Then, further on in his speech, Mahathir was mounting a carefully crafted argument against the suicide bombers and other angry extremists in the Muslim world. In paras 48-50 he writes:

We need to be brave but not foolhardy. We need to think not just of our reward in the afterlife but also of the worldly results of our mission.
49. The Quran tells us that when the enemy sues for peace we must react positively. True the treaty offered is not favourable to us. But we can negotiate. The Prophet did, at Hudaibiyah. And in the end he triumphed.
50. I am aware that all these ideas will not be popular. Those who are angry would want to reject it out of hand. They would even want to silence anyone who makes or supports this line of action. They would want to send more young men and women to make the supreme sacrifice. But where will all these lead to? Certainly not victory. Over the past 50 years of fighting in Palestine we have not achieved any result. We have in fact worsened our situation.

So really–and this is directed more at Richard Cohen– is this the kind of language that, as he wrote, “transform[s] the opposition to Israel from a political-nationalistic dispute into a kind of vast pogrom in which compromise becomes increasingly impossible”?
I don’t think so. And I think that if highly-paid columnists (unlike yours truly, that is) in the most powerful country in the world want to even try to engage seriously with the 1.3 billion people in the world who are Muslims, then they would do a lot better to actually read what leaders and intellectuals in the Muslim world are saying rather than just take out selectively-chosen, out-of-context snippets and headlines before they sound off.
I guess the same goes for George W. Bush, too. But then, we already know that he reads only the thin bouquets of pre-digested factoids that his flunkeys lay in front of him.