Moderate Muslims and the voices of anti-semitism

Our local National Public Radio station recently replaced in the early Sunday morning hour its really good religious program ("Sound and Spirit") with a moderately good religious program ("Speaking of Faith"). Among the first segments broadcast was one featuring an extensive interview with an American Muslim apologist, Omid Safi, a professor at Colgate and the editor of a collection of essays entitled "Progressive Muslims." Professor Safi sounds like a most interesting and attractive fellow, spiritually imaginative and intellectually lithe, warm, humanistic. Speaking of the general American reaction to Islamic terrorism, he said he found it hurtful to hear repeated references to "the deafening silence of moderate Muslims." This struck me forcefully and rather personally, as very similar complaints came my way a couple of years ago when I published on this page a series of columns concerning Sept. 11th.

Where can we find the "authentic" majority voice of political Islam — if not at the multinational, multiracial, inclusive Organization of the Islamic Conference? At the recently concluded summit meeting of the Conference, the "moderate" Muslim Prime Minister of the "moderate" Muslim nation of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, gave a rousing keynote address calling for Muslim unity. In part a survey of pop history, in part a plea for the study of science and technology within the "ummah," the speech had at its core a naked anti-Semitism reminiscent, perhaps, of an article in "Der Strmer" about 1936, say. (This is, incidentally, no mere rhetorical flourish. There are clear genetic stylistic and intellectual relationships between Nazi propaganda of the 1930s and current Islamist hate literature.) A sample from the moderate Mr. Mohamad: "Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them . . . They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong . . . "

Only rarely does one find nearly identical editorials in The New York Times and the New York Post; but both of them blasted the speech, with the Times musing as to which was worse: the actual speech or the rapturous applause with which it was greeted by the assembled leaders of the "Muslim world." It surprises me not one whit that thugs and theocrats would be cheering; but it is reported that among the "moderate" Muslims joining in the standing ovation for this hateful harangue was our good friend Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, the very same who less than one month gone stood on the stage of Alexander Hall basking in the adulation of our president, our dean of the WWS, student and faculty eminences, and a simulcast throng of admirers, manifesting the sweet reasonableness of his religion and advising us just to say "no" to extremism and hashish, in that order. The Muslim Conference did not take place in a corner, and when the well-wired world raised its eyebrow (to be sure, rather sleepily in some Francophone parts) Malaysia's foreign minister (though not Mohamad himself) apologized, dismissing the whole fuss as a "misunderstanding."

Mr. Karzai took a different tack. This was a speech about education, he said; and it was not anti-Semitic. I have only read his remarks, so that I am unable to comment upon how straight his face was when he uttered them. Alas, it seems impossible that this intelligent and cultivated man is stupid enough to believe himself. I very much hope that he merely fell into that kind of spontaneous prevarication common enough among politicians of all climes and creeds when they are embarrassed. The more plausible explanation, however, is that anti-Semitic discourse has been so "mainstreamed" among the social and political elites of the "Muslim world" as to become not merely acceptable but actually expected as a prerequisite of political leadership. The unrepentant Mr. Mohamad said testily that his remarks "have been taken out of context." At least he didn't say "Some of my best friends are Jews" or "It takes all kinds to make a world." There is context and context. I have already identified the political context of the speech. You may judge the verbal context of passages cited for yourself, as the official transcript of the complete speech was published on-line by the English-language "Star" of Malaysia (thestar.com.my). An "occidentalist" aspect of context not mentioned in the "Star" was the general distribution among the delegates to the Islamic Conference of copies of such classics of anti-Semitism as Henry Ford's "The International Jew" and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

It is wrong to speak of a "deafening silence of moderate Muslims." If you get up early enough on Sundays you can hear such voices on NPR. But at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, when the subject is Jews, you will hear them only with the aid of such powerful sonar as searches for stealthy submarine life scuttling across the floors of silent seas. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.