IT is time for the Malaysian boy to stand up and point out that “the pharaoh has no clothes!” Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad makes one gaffe after another without feeling any tinge of shame or remorse. His example of the Chinese community using chopsticks to highlight their challenges in assimilating into the Malay population in the country is but the latest in a line of embarrassing bloopers that started from the first book he wrote.
Dr Mahathir’s intellectual dilemma
Dr Mahathir’s first book, The Malay Dilemma, was an instant hit among the ambitious power grabbers in Umno since it provided them with a recipe for rallying populist support along ethnic lines in their bid for power just before May 13, 1969. It was a time-tested recipe for opportunistic politicians to use “race” as the rallying cry for political support. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was, of course, the tragic earlier model for such a political route.
Dr Mahathir’s The Malay Dilemma shares the same paradigm as Hitler’s Mein Kampf and present-day white supremacists in the sense that they analyse society from the perspective of race. His book was the clarion call of the new Malay ruling class after May 13, prodding “the Malays” to rise against “the immigrant races”. His book was banned by the then Tunku–led government when it first appeared because of its unashamedly racist paradigm. It was clearly seditious by the definition of the government of the day in its undermining of sacred constitutional provisions:
“…the Malays are the rightful owners of Malaya…immigrants (read non-Malay Malaysians) are guests until properly absorbed…immigrants are not truly absorbed until they have abandoned the language and culture of their past.”
So, it is not good enough if Chinese Malaysians master the national language, they must give up using their chopsticks as well – now we are getting into the nuts and bolts of the National Culture Policy!
Dr Mahathir is clearly not familiar with the social sciences otherwise he would have known that race as a concept has been discredited for years now and any social scientist worth his/her salt would not dare to air such racial theories in respectable centres of learning. Have the social science departments in all our local universities subjected his Malay Dilemma to rigorous critique? I wonder…
It is sad to see Dr Mahathir in his twilight years still clinging to his race-tinged perceptions. He waved the keris as the patron of the far-right Malay supremacy group Perkasa after his first stint in retirement; then more recently, he formed another racially based political party while trying once again to resurrect his discredited thesis that “the Chinese control the Malaysian economy”.
While Dr Mahathir’s “Chinese control the Malaysian economy” card managed to carry some weight in pre-NEP Malaysia, it is laughable that he should try the same card trick after fifty years of Bumiputera policies. Malaysians will no doubt remember that after the GE13, Mahathir blamed Najib for “wasting money on the Chinese who had chosen to vote for the opposition.” Future writers of Malaysian fairy tales will no doubt deride the New Economic Policy very much like we lampoon the emperor’s new clothes.
Dr Mahathir cannot distinguish Jews from Zionists
Is it an intellectual disability that prevents Dr Mahathir from distinguishing between Jews and Zionists? He continually chooses to stereotype people by race, which is apparently the key defining social category in his political world. He has made disparaging comments against Jews by claiming that they are “inclined towards money”, “Jews do a lot of wrong things, which force us to pass comment” and he has even described Jews as “hook-nosed”.
What is disturbing is that through the years, we have witnessed Dr Mahathir deliberately refuse to make any distinction between Jewish people and the ideology of Zionism. This has huge consequences for how he stands on racism and racial discrimination in Malaysia. Those who have followed his political career will note the continuity in his ethos and it was not unexpected that he should continually play the recalcitrant on the international stage by conflating Jews with Zionism.
But why does Dr Mahathir hold such a blatantly racist attitude towards Jewish people as an ethnic community? If Dr Mahathir had studied abroad like I have, he would have come across many Jewish academics, students and politicians who are anti-Zionist activists. One of the most notable anti-Zionists and pro-Palestinian activists is of course Noam Chomsky. There is even a Palestinian solidarity group called Jews for Justice for Palestinians based in Britain that advocates for human and civil rights, and economic and political freedom for the Palestinian people.
Zionism is a different matter altogether. It is itself a racist nationalist movement that has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine. Certainly not all Jews support Zionism nor do they support Israel’s discriminatory and repressive actions against Palestinians. More Jews live outside of Israel than inside and not all inhabitants of Israel are Jewish as there are also many non-Jews living in Israel. Many Jews, both living in Israel and elsewhere, support a Palestinian state alongside Israel as a possible solution to the conflict. In other words, not all Jews identify with Zionism, and it is mischievous to conflate “Jews” with “Zionists”.
Is Dr Mahathir ready for a paradigm shift?
The anti-Icerd (International Convention on the Eradication of Racial Discrimination) rallies organized by Umno and PAS in 2018 gave then Prime Minister Dr Mahathir the excuse to say the country was not yet ready to ratify Icerd.
The real question is: Is Dr Mahathir ready to eradicate racism, racial discrimination, and related intolerances from his own mental paradigm? As someone has quipped, “Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age… Sometimes age just shows up all by itself!”
It’s not too late for aging politicians who advocate lifelong learning to enrol for a course in Social Science 101 to understand the intersection of race and class. – The Vibes, December 14, 2021
Kua Kia Soong is director and adviser of Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram), and a former MP
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