A predictable piece of idiocy from today's New York Times. Paul Krugman, in his op-ed piece, "Listening to Mahathir," manages not only to totally misunderstand Mahathir Mohamed's speech, but to turn its meaning completely on its head.
It's worth reading the rest of last week's speech, beyond the offensive 28 words. Most of it is criticism directed at other Muslims, clerics in particular. Mr. Mahathir castigates "interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology." Thanks to these interpreters, "the study of science, medicine, etc. was discouraged. Intellectually the Muslims began to regress." A lot of the speech sounds as if it had been written by Bernard Lewis, author of "What Went Wrong," the best-selling book about the Islamic decline.
Hardly. I've read Bernard Lewis and Mahathir's derranged rantings bear no resemblance in either style or content. But Krugman also somehow manages to miss the point, in spite of its being delivered with a two-by-four. Mahathir isn't castigating Muslims for their cultural and scientific regression. He's castigating them for failing to conquer their enemies (i.e., the rest of the world). And he paints the Muslim predicament today as one of utter oppression, humiliation and subjugation -- by the Europeans and Jews. Mahathir:
Today we, the whole Muslim ummah are treated with contempt and dishonour. Our religion is denigrated. Our holy places desecrated. Our countries are occupied. Our people starved and killed.
None of our countries are truly independent. We are under pressure to conform to our oppressors’ wishes about how we should behave, how we should govern our lands, how we should think even.
Today if they want to raid our country, kill our people, destroy our villages and towns, there is nothing substantial that we can do. Is it Islam which has caused all these? Or is it that we have failed to do our duty according to our religion?
Uh, right. Yet Krugman considers this man to be "a cagey politician, who is neither ignorant nor foolish", "in many ways about as forward-looking a Muslim leader as we're likely to find."
If Mr. Krugman only managed to find 28 offensive words in Mahathir's speech, he must have been reading the Cliff Notes version. I think I managed to find 28 inoffensive words in there, but only when I took them out of context. And Krugman, of course, utlimately assigns the blame for the inclusion of the few elements that offended him squarely on the Bush administration's war on terror. We made him do it.
And that's what he was doing last week. Not long ago Washington was talking about Malaysia as an important partner in the war on terror. Now Mr. Mahathir thinks that to cover his domestic flank, he must insert hateful words into a speech mainly about Muslim reform. That tells you, more accurately than any poll, just how strong the rising tide of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism among Muslims in Southeast Asia has become. Thanks to its war in Iraq and its unconditional support for Ariel Sharon, Washington has squandered post-9/11 sympathy and brought relations with the Muslim world to a new low.
Like most people, Krugman obviously doesn't understand the pivotal references in Mahathir's speech that were directed specifically toward his Islamic listeners. And as Charles and others have already pointed out, if you don't fully understand the implications of reference to the Treaty of Hudaybiya, you don't understand this speech. It's a lesson we in the West continue to learn the hard way.
