“The whole world is looking at us”

The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, recently said that the Jews rule the world. If so, Your Humble Blogger is not getting a piece of that action. Of course, it is true that in among the handful of incredibly powerful people in the world there are more Jews than you would expect judging strictly by proportion of the world's population. This doesn't mean that "the Jews" have greater influence than you would expect, just that the Sulzburger family has greater influence than you might expect. Do the Sulzbergers (and the other wealthy and influential Jewish families) use their influence to help push a Jewish Agenda of some kind? Well, possibly, in regards to Zion, but it's hard for me to see any other kind of agenda.

However, if you read the full speech, it's clear that it is a call for unity, political unity, among Muslims. It's a vision of the Muslim community, the ummah, as divided and oppressed, in need of that unity to survive. "We are all Muslims," the Prime Minister said. "We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated." Now, that's a bit hard for me to swallow; some Muslims are certainly being oppressed, whilst others are oppressing and humiliating people. Further, some Muslims are being oppressed and humiliated by Muslims, some by Jews, some by Christians, some by Hindus, and some by, well, my Gentle Readers already got my point. The entire idea of all Muslims being part of a community, all similarly under attack, is rotten thinking. It is, however, the exact kind of thinking he ascribes to Jews, and with some reason.

It was fairly common for American Jews after the Holocaust to ask themselves about any public question "Is this good for Jews?" The instinct is born of fear, and contains in itself the idea that we are all Jews, we are all oppressed, we are all being humiliated. That is, in the humble opinion of Your Humble Blogger, entirely the wrong lesson to be learned from the annual recital we make: We were slaves of Pharoah in Egypt. One lesson is humility, compassion, and a shared history, the other lesson is fear, defensiveness, and exclusivity. In every generation they rise up against us, we say. Pour out your wrath upon the nations, we say. It's not altogether surprising that the nations, on occasion, get the impression that we mean it. And perhaps some of us do, but some of us don't, and very very few act as if we did. There is no Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. Sorry, but there it is.

But if Jews had been acting the way Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad says that Muslims should act, the rest of the speech makes sense. Why, after all, weren't the Jews entirely wiped out? How, after the numbers were reduced to one out of six hundred and fifty, did the community remain strong, if not exactly communal? How did the remnant manage to gain a nation, a massive military, atomic weapons, and disproportional influence in international politics, economics, and culture? Well, mostly because Europe and the US were nice to us, but that's not how Dr. Mohamad sees it. He sees it as because Jews are "a people who think." And that's what he wants the ummah to be.

The problem with that is that (a) he sees a thing that doesn't exist, that is, a powerful, unified nation/religion/ethnicity, and (2) he attributes that thing he doesn't see to sinister forces working against him and his own people, rather than to simple and obvious forces used in the open. That is, he has allowed his preconceived notions of what Jews are like to distort his worldview. That's why we are against prejudice; not solely because it's morally wrong (it is), but because it blinds us to the universe in all its glory, and it leads us to make bad decisions. Such as the one Dr. Mohamad made in that speech.

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.