Why is the West so angry with Dr. Mahathir?

The Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohammad’s presidential address at the Islamic Summit last week in Putrajaya—Malaysia’s spanking- new capital—seems to have touched some very raw nerves in the western world. It looks as if the intrepid Mahathir, known for speaking his mind fearlessly, has disturbed a hornet’s nest in many a western capital.

For years, Mahathir has been a thorn in the side of the west for his robust advocacy of Islamic causes and denunciation of the western duplicity and hypocrisy. As the longest-serving ( 22 years at the helm ) but democratically elected leader of his country, he has transformed Malaysia from its economic back waters of yore into a modern and dynamic idustrial economy. Malaysia , today, is the 17th largest trading state in the world—a title that no other Muslim state rivals. And the most remarkable thing is that he has pulled this miracle without any support from the west. In fact, he has done it inspite of open discouragement and hostility from the western world, which sniggered and openly disdained his decision, ten years ago, to build a new capital city for Malaysia.

Besides hewing his country out of its colonial morass, Mahathir has also risen to prominence as a fiercely independent defender of the Islamic world of which he has become an icon. He has earned the reputation of a statesman who doesn’t mince his words and is never averse to a challenge, especailly on Pan-Islamic causes and issues. However, his has largely been a one-man crusade in defence of the Muslim rights the world over, for there is no other leader in the arc of Islam—stretching from Morocco to Indonesia—with his kind of stridency and pugnacity to take on the western detractors of the world’s last revealed religion.

In his remarks before the assembled galaxy of his Muslim peers from 56 other Islamic states in the world, Mahathir was unsparing, as usual, of both his fellow Muslims and their western nemeses. In what might well have been his swan- song as Malyasia’s long-serving leader—for he is due to step down, voluntarily, at the end of October in favour of a younger successor—Mahathir shamed his audience for the appalling failure of the Muslim world to rise up to the challenge of the modern age. He lambasted his 1.3 billion fellow Muslims, constituting one-fifth of humanity, for still living in a make-believe world of their own and mired in ignorance and religious bigotry. Muslims are still riven by sectarian schisms and other divisive tendencies. This paralysis has made them easy prey of their western detractors and mired the Ummah in utter helplessness.

Mahathir warned the global Muslims that there could be no panacea to cure their long-festering ills other than modern education and acquisition of contemporary technology. Without these tools at their command, he served notice, they would always be at the mercy of their enemies and would lose the battles raging against them. They will have to change their outlook, he was clinically direct, if they wished to win the war.

Turning to the west, Mahathir castigated it for having declared war on the Islamic world in the flimsy guise of ‘war on terrorism.’ Muslims were being targeted, the world over, for just being Muslims and thus entitled to receive the thick-end of the stick.

But it was his punch line against the Jewish domination of the world which has led to the western bully boys crawling out of the wood work to launch a full scale blitz against their favourite Muslim bete noir.

The chorus of Mahathir’s denunciation in the western capitals has quickly reached a crescendo. Every western leader of substance—and even the weightless ones—has seen it fit to jump on to the rolling bandwagon against him, as have other ‘opinion-makers’ and media lights. They are accusing him of having unleashed anti-Semitism—a favourite ploy to silence any and all critics of Israel and its Zionist policies. Mahathir is being blamed of fanning religious hatred in the world and adding to the insecurity of the Jews.

It is obvious that extraneous motives are being attributed to Mahathir and his remarks are being quoted out of context.

The mischief of the west is evidenced in the selective reporting of Mahathir’s exhaustive statement. They aren’t focusing at all on how hard he came down upon his fellow Muslims and showed them no mercy for failing to pass the modern world’s test.

The element of deliberate mischief is reeking from the near-total white-wash, in the western reporting, of his remarks critical of the Palestinian practice of suicide bombing that kills innocent Israelis. He cautioned that the practice was counter-productive to Palestinian interests. He, in fact, strongly advised the Palestinains to seek a negotiated settlement with Israel even if it didn’t meet all their legitimate rights.

Mahathir was charitable and complimenary to the Jews for showing remarkable resilience and survivability over two millennia of their persecution in Europe and inventing socialism and communism in the process to advance their own agenda. Mahathir is being faulted for stating the obvious: the Jews, through centuries of planning and concerted action are today in control of the world—because of their choke-hold on global economy—and also ruling it, indirectly, because of their lock on the policies of the world’s only super power.

The campaign of vituperation against a plain-speaking Mahathir is, no doubt, part of that global western agenda unfurled against Muslim interests some time ago. The motivation behind the tirade is to put all independent thinkers in the Islamic world on the defensive and silence any opinion-maker breaking out from the line of the lambs in the unenviable company of Muslim leaders. Mahathir has long been an exception to this rule. Any fair minded person, Muslim or otherwise, concerned with harmony in global ranks would hope that Mahathir—the doctor with a scalpel in his hand—would continue to be the fiercest, and most feared, champion of Islamic causes even in retirement from active politics.

Mahathir, as a matter of fact, has thrown a challenge to not only his peers in the ranks of Muslim leadership but also to the entire Ummah. The gauntlet for the contemporary Muslim leaders is whether they can develop the vision to lead their largely disenfranchised people—frustrated and low in morale because they have been made the western world’s punching bag—to the desired new frontiers, of democracy and egalitarianism. An uncompromising respect for human rights of all their subjects and citizens, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, was the hall-mark of the early Islamic regimes. That tradition has got lost for centuries, as mahathir pointed out. The leaders of today’s Muslim world will have to demonstrate their capacity to reinstall this lost heritage even at the expense of their own authoritarianism. They must learn to become statesmen—who put the country before themselves—and not remain mired in petty politics of self above everything else.

Mahathir’s challenge for the Muslim masses is that they must put the paralysis of the past and intellectual hammoerhage of the present behind them and enter a new age of learning—of modern sciences, arts and other creative pursuits. By doing this they will only be re-discovering their long lost heritage.