The collective unconscious?

ND Batra The Statesman Asia News Network Calcutta

Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, notorious for calling a spade more than a spade, outraged the international community with his vitriolic anti-Semitic comments as to how Jews "rule the world by proxy: They get others to fight and die for them." Torn out of context, his words seemed outright bigotry unworthy of a national leader.

And read within the framework of his address to a worldwide gathering of most powerful Muslim leaders, kings, emirs, presidents, and military autocrats at the Organization of Islamic Conference in Putrajaya on Oct. 16, the utterance was no less abominable and sounded dangerously disturbing, however one parses the speech.

The utterance was the rhetorical equivalent of Sept. 11 and all the more shockingly so since it received a standing ovation from the conference. The sentiment reverberated throughout the Muslim world with a varying degree of acclaim. The words must be paid attention to if the battle against terrorism has to be won. Even though Mahathir unequivocally condemned terrorism, his heart was full of bitterness that Muslims have let themselves fall behind.

Mahathir said that Muslims can't defend themselves "because we are discouraged from learning science and mathematics as giving us no merit for the afterlife, today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for defense." It's true that while Islamic fundamentalists have been pouring money into madrasah to train martyrs for jihad, they have not paid attention to the tools of economic progress.

Though some Muslim countries such as Pakistan and even Iran are capable of producing missiles and atomic weapons, everywhere the national ethos is Islamic orthodoxy, the promise of Paradise, rather than rational thinking and scientific education. Mahathir was trying to draw the attention of the Muslims for their general apathy toward science and technology as a cause of their backwardness and grief.

Mahathir might have spoken for many Muslims especially in West Asia when he said, "Our religion is denigrated, our holy places desecrated. Our countries are occupied, our people starved and killed," which according to him has led to uncontrollable anger and irrational behavior resulting in "killing just about everybody, including fellow Muslims, to vent their anger and frustration."

Then he gave a heart-rending cry: "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?" This was nothing if not a reprimand to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to find an alternative to suicide bombing, which he called as "irresponsible and un-Islamic acts."

It's unfortunate that Mahathir sees Jews as the enemy, though he paid them a great, albeit a left-handed, compliment as "a people who think .. They survived 2000 years of pogrom not by hitting back but by thinking." But then his mind surrendered itself to twisted logic and the worst kind of conspiratorial thinking. Jews, he said, "invented Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they could enjoy equal rights with others." What unpardonable ignorance in a national leader!

While Karl Marx, a Jew, had nothing to do with democracy and human rights, he did not write Das Kapital to enable Jews, "this tiny community" to become "a world power." Mahathir forgot two other great Jewish thinkers, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, who changed the way we look at the universe and ourselves. He also forgot to tell his audience that without Judaism there would have been no Christianity and no Islam. Both Jesus and Mohammad rose in a land fertilized by Old Testament narratives and monotheism.

These scholarly inaccuracies and distortions may not be so relevant to a politician. But they poison the mind of the Muslim youth. But what is important is the fact that his brazen half- truths and woolly analysis of the Muslim condition received a standing ovation from rulers of the Islamic world. Mahathirs performance and the audience response might have been revelatory of the Muslim Collective Unconscious, as Freud would have put it. It must not be dismissed merely as divisive bigotry of an individual politician.

A week after his address, Mahathir continued his tirade against "the great exponents of democracy," that is, the U.S., and how it has been "terrifying the world" after Sept. 11. Worse still, he said, "the speculative and manipulative rogues" cause "economic terrorism," which inflicts no less damage to life and property than bombs and guns.

Addressing an audience of engineers in Indonesia, he knew his remarks would touch a deep chord. Currency speculators destabilized Indonesian economy and the country has never been the same since the 1997 South East Asian currency collapse. Indonesia has been transformed from a strong healthy secular nation to a hotbed of fundamentalists.

It is unfortunate that Mahathir chose the Jewish people as a whipping boy to flagellate the Muslim world to think afresh and refashion its ways instead of training its youth as suicide bombers with the promise of Paradise.

But in the process of his half-baked intellectual fulminations, Mahathir has also given the Bush administration a glimpse of how deep is the Muslim frustration and anger and how difficult it is going to be to eliminate terrorism that feeds on it.

The writer is Professor of Communications, Norwich University, Vermont.