The collective unconscious?

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.