[lbo-talk] Krugman on Mahathir

[mike larkin]

--- Chris Doss <itschris13 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Listening to Mahathir
> By PAUL KRUGMAN
> 
> Published: New York Times, October 21, 2003
> 
> "The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12
> million. But today the
> Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to
> fight and die for
> them." So said Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister
> of Malaysia, at an
> Islamic summit meeting last week. The White House
> promptly denounced
> his "hate-filled remarks."
> 
> Indeed, those remarks were inexcusable. But they
> were also
> calculated ¡Ö for Mr. Mahathir is a cagey
> politician, who is neither
> ignorant nor foolish. And to understand why he made
> those remarks is
> to realize how badly things are going for U.S.
> foreign policy.
> 
> The fact is that Mr. Mahathir, though guilty of
> serious abuses of
> power, is in many ways about as forward-looking a
> Muslim leader as
> we're likely to find. And Malaysia is the kind of
> success story we
> wish we saw more of: an impressive record of
> economic growth, rising
> education levels and general modernization in a
> nation with a Muslim
> majority.
> 
> 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.
> 
> So what's with the anti-Semitism? Almost surely it's
> part of Mr.
> Mahathir's domestic balancing act, something I
> learned about the last
> time he talked like this, during the Asian financial
> crisis of
> 1997-98.
> 
> At that time, rather than accept the austerity
> programs recommended by
> the U.S. government and the I.M.F., he loudly blamed
> machinations by
> Western speculators, and imposed temporary controls
> on the outflow of
> capital ¡Ö a step denounced by all but a handful of
> Western economists.
> As it turned out, his economic strategy was right:
> Malaysia suffered a
> shallower slump and achieved a quicker recovery than
> its neighbors.
> 
> What became clear watching Mr. Mahathir back then
> was that his
> strident rhetoric was actually part of a delicate
> balancing act aimed
> at domestic politics. Malaysia has a Muslim,
> ethnically Malay,
> majority, but its business drive comes mainly from
> an ethnic Chinese
> minority. To keep the economy growing, Mr. Mahathir
> must allow the
> Chinese minority to prosper, but to ward off ethnic
> tensions he must
> throw favors, real and rhetorical, to the Malays.
> 
> Part of that balancing act involves reserving good
> jobs for Malay
> workers and giving special business opportunities to
> Malay
> entrepreneurs. One reason Mr. Mahathir was so
> adamantly against I.M.F.
> austerity plans was that he feared that they would
> disrupt the
> carefully managed cronyism that holds his system
> together. When times
> are tough, Mr. Mahathir also throws the Muslim
> majority rhetorical red
> meat.
> 
> 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.
> 
> And bear in mind that Mr. Mahathir's remarks were
> written before the
> world learned about the views of Lt. Gen. William
> "My God Is Bigger
> Than Yours" Boykin. By making it clear that he sees
> nothing wrong with
> giving an important post in the war on terror to
> someone who believes,
> and says openly, that Allah is a false idol ¡Ö
> General Boykin denies
> that's what he meant, but his denial was implausible
> even by current
> standards ¡Ö Donald Rumsfeld has gone a long way
> toward confirming the
> Muslim world's worst fears.
> 
> Somewhere in Pakistan Osama bin Laden must be
> enjoying this. The war
> on terror didn't have to be perceived as a war on
> Islam, but we seem
> to be doing our best to make it look that way.

Oh, he's going to get it for this one. It's a good
piece, but I can already hear the slanders of "Krugman
is an anti-Semite" from Andrew Sullivan and those
other liars, et al.

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