A Battle for the Future of Islam:

From Mahathir Mohammad to the Streets of Gaza

A Weekly Briefing on Israeli and Middle Eastern Affairs

October 22, 2003

 

Dr. Eran Lerman

Director Israel/Middle East Office

The American Jewish Committee

  

The prime minister of Malaysia paid us a compliment and gave us a gift at the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) Summit last week. The compliment is not entirely undeserved. “The Jews,” he said, invented human rights (and a number of other great ideas of the modern era) just so that they might not be persecuted: How clever of “the Europeans,” he implied, to see through this ruse and kill six million of them anyway.

 

To some extent at least, we can plead guilty as charged; from the time of the Exodus to the Soviet Jewry movement, our people have indeed given a headache to the likes of Mahathir who see liberty and human rights as a troublesome, relativist “Western” and Jewish invention. It was the American Jewish Committee, after all, that pressured the U.S. government to create within the UN a Commission on Human Rights. No amount of post-summit spin could hide the fact that what he said meant not only that the Jews were plotters and manipulators—but also that the world  (or just the Islamic world?) would have been a better place for him and his likes without those pesky “human rights.”

 

Therein lies the “gift”; by saying this—and winning a mindless standing ovation—he brought into focus the danger that such opinions constitute, not for the future of the Jewish people, but for the future of Islam. This man’s rants are not new: On a conference call organized by Natan Sharansky’s Global Forum on Anti-Semitism, we heard from the Australian participants that Mahathir’s opinions about their country are equally exterminatory. (Note that he spoke of a fifty-year struggle “for Palestine”—not for the territories, or even the Temple Mount, taken in 1967, but against Israel’s very existence.) By making these remarks at the OIC—even if cloaked in an appeal for the use of wisdom and nonviolence, and for an end to suicide bombings—he transformed his opinions into a broader claim about what should define Islam: namely, a death wish directed at the other, a commitment to conquer as in days of old.

 

True, we have some of our own people for whom Judaism is epitomized by the Book of Joshua or by the unspeakably bitter words of Psalm 137:9 (“a blessing on him who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rocks”). But they are not our face to the world or the message we transmit to our children as we exhort them to be better at what they do. Here, on the other hand, was Islam, for all it has created in fourteen centuries, being reduced to a tribal gathering of “us against them”—the Jews being the ultimate “them,” inherited, ironically, not from Muslim tradition but from the pathologies of Europe. Rarely has a greater disservice been more loudly applauded by its audience. 

What this means, however, is that the war we are in acquires a significance and meaning well beyond the political and territorial issues of the moment. This is why:

 

·        The Iranian nuclear effort must be brought to a halt, by diplomacy if possible, by other means if necessary—not because Iran as a nation does not deserve to have a deterrent in a bad neighborhood, but because the present regime, the “Iranian Islamic Revolution,” represents one of the worst incarnations of this kind of retrograde—or rather, totalitarian and simplistic—interpretations of a noble religion (in this case, the Shi’i faith), and is liable to use a strategic capability as a torch with which to light revolutionary fires across the region;

·        Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Islamist tendencies sown by Arafat even within Fatah, which presumes to be a secular nationalist movement, must be fought and defeated, at times even at the price of painful loss of life. (As it turns out, the Palestinian version of the facts about civilian losses in Gaza on Monday was a case of successful spin and manipulation: Israeli helicopters did not fire into a crowd, as there was no crowd nearby when they hit the suicide bombers’ escape car.) Indications of weakness in this struggle play into the hands of Mahathir and his likes, for whom this will always be a zero-sum game.

·        Finally, and most delicately, this brings us to the “Geneva document”—however well-intentioned its group of signatories may have been—with its proposal to include almost all of the Old City of Jerusalem, including the entire Temple Mount (barring the Western Wall alone) in the territory to be handed over to Palestinian sovereignty. Casting all other considerations aside, one concern that should have colored the signatories’ thoughts was the historical significance of such an act—not to us, but to the balance of power and ideas within Islam. To hand over the upper layer of the Temple Mount, graced by its two mosques, to a representative Islamic group that included moderates (Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia, and others) would have been a sensible act. To offer this most glittering of prizes to the blood-splattered hands of Arafat, making him the victor in this murderous war and the heir of `Umar and Saladin, would be to reward and confirm precisely the sort of sentiments expressed by Mahathir.