Mahathir's Antisemitic Outburst/ Sources of Media Bias

Update from AIJAC

Mahathir's Antisemitic Outburst/ Sources of Media Bias

October 20, 2003
Number 10/03 #09

Updates leads today with some more discussion of Malaysian PM Mahathir's antisemitic speech last week at the Organisation of Islamic Conference.

Many commentators contend that it's just Mahathir, he's always said things like this, and anyway he is retiring in a few weeks. Except it is not just Mahathir, it's wider beliefs in Malaysia and the Islamic world. Mahathir's foreign minister Syed Hamid Albar theoretically apologised for any misunderstanding, but actually said he agrees with all the antisemitic elements of the speech. For instance, on the "Sunday" program this week, he said Mahathir was right, the Jews are inordinately powerful, it is this power that prevents the UN from taking strong action against Israel. Moreover, he said, if you think that this is antisemitic, or even that the word "antisemitic" means hatred of Jews, then this also shows how powerful the Jews are. For this full story, CLICK HERE.

Moreover, as this editorial from the New York Times points out, the scariest part was how warmly Mahathir's words were received by the Islamic world. He got a standing ovation even from Islamic moderates, and many said they fully agreed with him. For the full editorial, CLICK HERE.

Finally, on a totally different topic, Bret Stephens, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, has an unmissably good piece about how the overall perceptual lenses of journalists shape what they perceive as news and how they will cover it. To read his important insights, CLICK HERE.

Interview: Syed Hamid Albar

"Sunday", Channel 9, October 19, 2003
Reporter :Jana Wendt

There was widespread outrage this week at remarks made by retiring Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad. The often controversial leader accused the Jews of ruling the world by proxy, and urged Muslims to rise up against them at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in Malaysia. While John Howard described the comment as repugnant, Dr Mahathir's Foreign Minister, Syed Hamid Albar, says his leader was quoted out of context. Syed Hamid Albar spoke to Jana Wendt from Kuala Lumpur ...

Transcript

JANA WENDT: There was widespread outrage this week at remarks made by retiring Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed. The often-controversial leader accused Jews of ruling the world by proxy, and urged Moslems to rise up against them.

DR MAHATHIR MOHAMMED: [Excerpt.] The Europeans killed six million Jews, out of twelve million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. [Excerpt ends.]

JANA WENDT: While John Howard described the comment as repugnant, Dr Mahathirís Foreign Minister says his leader was quoted out of context. Syed Hamid Albar joined us from Kuala Lumpur.
Syed Hamid Albar, thank you very much for joining us. Your Prime Ministerís remarks have created a storm around the world. Do you feel you should apologise for them?

MALAYSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER SYED HAMID ALBAR: I donít think so. I think a lot of problems that arise in the world is brought about because of misunderstanding, and because of failure to look deeply into what he really said. So I think it is unfortunate that there is so much misunderstanding, and I think when one look at issues from the perspective of history, you must give the person the freedom to exercise his thoughts. And I think this is very important, and donít get emotional or over-reacting to something and try to create a storm when there is no storm at all.

JANA WENDT: Well, the Germans, the Italians, the Belgians, and the Australians have called his remarks ìoffensiveî, ìinflammatoryî, ìcrazedî, and ìtotally anti-Semiticî. Why do you think they have all misunderstood?

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: I think I do not know what they have read. If they read the whole text of the speech they would understand that the speech - the underlying factors of the speech is the question of reminding Moslems if they want to be successful, they must start to think. They must start to plan. And not try to use military - not to use aggression, not to have the approach of killing people. Nobody should be forbidden from making comments about other people. We have been commented in contempt - very contemptuously - about ourselves. Even about our prophet, about our religion, and you know, I think one has to be fair and balanced in whatever we do.
You know, so I think this is what he has said. I - I think itís most unfortunate that the reaction has come out is terrible, I think.

JANA WENDT: Well, those countries are reacting not to what youíve just said, but to Dr Mahathir saying that despite the fact that six million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust, Jews now rule the world. Do you agree with that?

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: No, I think if you look his comment, itís not a comment that is plucked from the sky. There are so many researches and books have been written about the real power of the Jews, because they have taken the trouble to work hard and achieve the success of knowledge. Through that knowledge they are able to participate in the mainstream of world affairs. And they are very, very influential and strong in many countries. You cannot deny the fact that the Jewish economic power is tremendous. Their lobby is tremendous. So whatís wrong in saying that. You are not saying, ìKill all the Jewsî. You say, ìTake the example of the Jewsî.

JANA WENDT: But he also said about Jews, ìJews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for themî. Do you share his beliefs?

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: I think in the ? in the first place, I think you have to be very clear. If I want to look at a speech, I start to look at the semantics of it, how I word the thing, and try to give the slant, and try to - to spin it. I can spin any speech of anybody.

JANA WENDT: You talk about spin, but Iím not spinning now. Iím simply reading your Prime Ministerís words. He also said that Jews successfully promoted human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong. Do you agree with that?

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: No, I think it is if you do any act that is against human rights, and against the ideology of - of course it would be considered as wrong. If I am a propagator of certain ideologies, then if anybody speak against that ideology that has been accepted, definitely it will be construed as I am going against that. You know, I think you have to be fair in this particular case, if I want to dissect any statement made by leaders of the world, made by European or any other leaders, then I can pick up on this, and do not give the substantive meaning of it, the substance of it.

JANA WENDT: Well, Israel is saying that his reference of the Holocaust is a desecration of the memory of six million innocent victims of anti-Semitism. What do you say?

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: You know, to give the picture, as if Moslems and what we say is anti-Jews is different. But we can be against what Israel is doing in other countries. So this - the double standard, the selectivity - Iím not - Iím not - Iím not going to get into the polemic of trying to defend ourselves, when we are doing the right thing. Trying to explain the thing - we have never intended to say that oh, this is what - you know, we desecrate the Holocaust. I think that is far from the truth. This is again, you know Ö

JANA WENDT: If Dr Mahathir meant that Israel is the enemy - that he opposes the policies of Israel - why did he keep referring to Jews?

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: Well, you refer to Israel, so I answered about Israel. When he talks about the Jews, he was analysing the history. How successful the Jews had been in the process of bringing themselves to this stage that they are able to influence and in many cases even the resolutions of the United Nations has - Israel - has failed to even follow, adhere to the United Nations resolutions. They are the only country they have got a lot of special privileges. And yet we tend to ignore this. So I - I think you must look at it in a positive light. If one wants to give a very negative meaning to every word he is saying then you are - you can do that. But I think it is not what he said. It is not the content of his speech. So Iím confident that he has no anti-Jewish feeling Ö

JANA WENDT: Letís be frank here. The suggestion is that Dr Mahathir is purely and simply anti-Semitic, and that he has a track record in this. He has written in the past the Jews are not merely hook-nosed, they understand money instinctively.

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: I think even your definition of Semite is very surprising. Have you forgotten that Arabs are also Semites?

JANA WENDT: No, you know, the generally accepted meaning.

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: Yeah, I think - this is the problem. This is why whenever a Jew say that Semites only refer to Jews, then it becomes an accepted thing. So thatís how powerful the Jewish lobby is - the control of the media, by the - by the Jewish community. But that should not create anti-feeling against them.

JANA WENDT: Letís move on to another subject. Weíve heard from Dr Mahathir that he sees Australia as a puppet for the United States in this region. As Foreign Minister, do you see things the same way?

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: You know, when you are announced as ìDeputy Sheriffî, then you are promoted to ìSheriffî, how would you conclude? I mean, I do not know, because this is not said by us, it is said that - today I see that Prime Minister Howard is saying that he doesnít want to be the sheriff, heís not the sheriff of anybody. So I think that is up to Australia, but we are just quoting from what Australia has been called. So if you are appointed by somebody, of course you have to follow the dictate of somebody.

JANA WENDT: Following Dr Mahathirís speech, do you expect to get the cold shoulder from Western leaders at APEC this week?

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: I donít know. I always believe that there must be maturity. You know, we have been called names and all sorts of things, and yet we know how to interact with people.

JANA WENDT: Minister, I very much appreciate your time today.

FOREIGN MINISTER HAMID: Thank you very much, itís very nice to talk to you.

Islamic Anti-Semitism

The New York Times
October 18, 2003

It is hard to know what is more alarming ó a toxic statement of †hatred of Jews by the Malaysian prime minister at an Islamic summit meeting this week or the unanimous applause it engendered from the kings, presidents and emirs in the audience. The words uttered by the prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, †in a speech to the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference on Thursday were sadly familiar: Jews, he asserted, may be few in number, but they seek to run the world.

"The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy," he said. "They get others to fight and die for them." Muslims are "up against a people who think," he said, adding that the Jews "invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others."

When Israeli officials noted that such talk brought Hitler to mind, the assembled leaders were mystified. Yemen's foreign minister said he agreed entirely with his Malaysian colleague, adding, †"Israelis and Jews control most of the economy and the media in the world." The Egyptian foreign minister, †Ahmed Maher, called the speech "a very, very wise assessment." Even the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said the speech was "very correct."

Perhaps the saddest element is just how impotent the representatives of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims feel. When Syed Hamid Albar, Malaysia's foreign minister, sought to contain the controversy, he explained that because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Muslims feel "sidelined or marginalized," so please understand why they complain about the power of a tiny competing group like the Jews.

Sympathy for the Muslims' plight must not be confused with the acceptance of racism. Most Muslims have indeed been shoddily treated ó by their own leaders, who gather at feckless summit meetings instead of offering their people what they most need: human rights, education and democracy.

The European Union was asked to include a condemnation of Mr. Mahathir's speech in its statement yesterday ending its own summit. It chose not to, adding a worry that displays of anti-Semitism are being met with inexcusable nonchalance.

Eye on the media: Why the media botches it

Bret Stephens

Jerusalem Post, Oct. 17, 2003

In 1962, an American historian named Roberta Wohlstetter wrote a book that is required reading at Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. It ought to be required reading for every foreign correspondent, too.

The book, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision was an effort to explain why the United States had failed to anticipate the Japanese attack, despite quantities of intelligence indicating that an attack was soon coming. For years, Americans had known of this failure, and that knowledge spawned the view that Franklin Roosevelt had taken the US to war "through the back door," or, as Clare Booth Luce put it, that he had "lied us into a war because he didn't have the courage to lead us into it."

Wohlstetter saw it differently. In the run-up to December 7, she noted, US intelligence knew not only that Hawaii was a potential target for the Japanese, but that Siberia, the Panama Canal, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies were, too.

All this information created what she called "noise," an overwhelming barrage of signals in which significant information tended to be drowned in trivia. Indeed, "there was a good deal of evidence available to support all the wrong interpretations of last-minute signals and the interpretations appeared wrong only after the event."

The analysis holds good in other situations. In the spring of 1941, Stalin had ample information that Hitler was massing troops on their shared front. In the fall of 1973, Israel knew the movements of the Egyptian and Syrian armies. The Soviets and Israelis were taken by surprise not because of faulty information. The problem was one of faulty interpretation, which in turn came from faulty assumptions about enemy motives. Stalin was convinced Hitler was maneuvering toward negotiation, not war; Israel thought the Arabs would never launch a war they were bound to lose.

NOW FAST-FORWARD to August 3, 2000. On that day, The New York Times published a story by reporter John Burns, headlined "Palestinian Summer Camps Offer Games at War."

"Last summer," Burns wrote, "some 27,000 Palestinian children participated in the camps, where they receive weeks of training in guerrilla warfare, including operation of firearms and mock kidnappings of Israeli leaders. A common theme in the camps was preparation for armed conflict: 'slitting the throats of Israelis' is one of the children's exercises at these camps."

To its credit, the Times ran this piece on the front page. Other US newspapers also picked up the thread; this was a time, remember, when the Palestinian Authority was in bad odor for walking away from the Camp David talks. But within a month the story was pretty much forgotten. When fighting broke out on September 30 most of the news media were prepared to believe that it was Ariel Sharon who had started it by taking a walk on the Temple Mount.

To me, Burns's reporting is of a piece with the early warnings about Pearl Harbor. Who, reading his dispatch now, can fail to see that it foretold the coming war? Yet with a few exceptions, everyone failed to foresee it, certainly everyone in the foreign media. As late as September 27, two days before the beginning of hostilities, Burns's colleague Deborah Sontag was writing that Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat had succeeded in "breaking the ice" over dinner, thereby providing "fresh momentum" for negotiation.

Now consider all this in the light of Wohlstetter's analysis. During the Oslo years, the dominant framework was roughly this:

First, Yasser Arafat, a reformed terrorist, had made a strategic decision for peace based on the calculation that a state in Gaza and the West Bank was the most he would ever get.

Second, Yitzhak Rabin, a mellowed hawk, had concluded that the Jewish state was more secure with the majority of Palestinians outside smaller borders than it was with those Palestinians inside larger borders. He too wanted to cut a deal, and the PLO was the only really credible partner for it.

Third, this new political center represented by Arafat-Rabin was threatened by Palestinian fanatics who would not abandon their claims to Haifa and Jaffa, and by Jewish fanatics who would not abandon theirs to Hebron and Shechem (Nablus).

Fourth, the solution lay in strengthening the center, chiefly by supporting Rabin diplomatically and Arafat financially and militarily. Israelis would be moved to withdraw from their territories to the East if they felt more secure in their friendships with the West. As for Arafat, he needed guns and money to suppress "militant" Palestinian factions and establish the institutions of statehood.

That was the compelling logic of Oslo, and it was a logic to which most of world media subscribed. How often did we hear it said, by commentators and reporters alike, that peace was threatened by "extremists on both sides"? How much ink was expended on the question of Arafat's personal chemistry with Rabin/Peres/Netanyahu/Barak? And how little attention was devoted to countervailing data: for example, Arafat speeches that reaffirmed, in Arabic, his commitment to the PLO's old "plan of stages"?

No wonder, then, that Burns's August 3 dispatch did not cause the upset is should have. The idea that the Palestinian Authority was not part of the vital center for peace - indeed, that it was as extreme as the extremists it was supposed to suppress - was information that could not be adequately explained within Oslo's interpretive framework.

The media was dutiful in reporting the terrorist summer camps. But it was not dutiful in asking the necessary follow-up questions about why these camps were there and what they betokened. Instead, we had what Thomas Schelling, in the foreword to Wohlstetter's book, described as "a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely" - settlers, terrorists, Sharon and so on.

SINCE THEN, things have changed somewhat. Whereas once there was one dominant interpretive framework, now there are three competing ones.

The first of these is the "occupation" framework.

Its subscribers include all the Arab media, most of the European media, the BBC, the Economist magazine, and some US news organizations.

According to this framework, this is a conflict that began in 1967 when Israel "conquered" Palestinian land, attempted to settle it, and in the process dispossessed and eventually enraged the Palestinian people. Palestinian "militancy" is a consequence of this.

Then there is the "cycle-of-violence" framework, which strongly influences the American news media. In this view, the conflict did not begin in 1967 or even in 1948; indeed, its origins lie somewhere in the misty dawn of time. At bottom, it sees Israelis and Palestinians as two tribes caught in a kind of blood feud, with each fresh assault demanding retribution. As to who is guilty and who is innocent, the question is irrelevant and the answer is anyway unknowable.

Finally, there is the "Arab rejectionism" framework. Its votaries in the media include the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. This framework holds that the conflict has its roots in the Arab world's refusal to accept a Jewish state in its midst and its attempts to roll back - via diplomacy, embargoes and terrorism - facts achieved on the ground in 1948 and 1967.

From these separate frameworks identical headlines will often emerge. But the stories will read differently. Consider a hypothetical example: A Palestinian suicide bomber detonates himself in a Jerusalem bus and kills 20. Hamas takes responsibility.

A reporter from the "Occupation" school is dispatched to write the story. He discovers that the bomber is from the Dehaishe refugee camp near Bethlehem; his family was originally from Ramle; his father used to work construction in Israel but has been unable to get to his job due to IDF closures. As for the bomber himself, he had a talent for carpentry but never found a job. He was recruited by Hamas after his brother was shot by the IDF; he hoped that his own martyrdom would bring honor and money to his parents and nine siblings.

Then there's the reporter from the "cycle of violence" school. She describes the scene of the bombing in detail; she interviews the families of the bereaved. In paragraph four, she notes that a leading Hamas spokesman had recently been killed in an IAF helicopter attack and that the group had vowed revenge. In paragraph nine, she writes that the Israeli security cabinet has convened in a late-night session to weigh its response.

Finally, we have our reporter from the "Arab rejectionist" camp. He describes the scene of the bombing, interviews the families of the bereaved, attends the funerals.

Little attention is paid to the personal circumstances of the bomber. Perhaps it will be noted that the bomber's brother was killed by the IDF while attempting to plant a mine on the road to a nearby settlement. Perhaps, too, the family expects to receive money from abroad. There's a story there about Saudi funding of terror.

Plainly I'm engaging in a bit of caricature. My point simply is to illustrate how different interpretive frameworks put reporters on the trail of different sets of facts. All of these facts may be true. The question is, which of them are significant? To a certain extent, the answer is in the eye of the reporter. But the suicide bombings belong to a larger narrative, and it's important that readers not be consistently misled as to where this story might be going.

Few people anticipated the collapse of Oslo because few reporters bothered to ask themselves whether incitement in Palestinian schools, corruption in Palestinian officialdom, or the collusive relationship between groups like Hamas and the PA, weren't really bigger stories than, say, new construction in Gilo.

Similarly, had a moderate Palestinian leadership taken control of events in the past few months and stamped out terrorist groups, the Arab rejectionism camp would have a hard time making sense of things. It might have resorted to rationalization or conspiracy theories. By the same token, the persistence of Palestinian terror aimed at targets in pre-'67 Israelis should put a heavy onus on the "Occupation" camp to explain Palestinian motives.

As for the "cycle-of-violence" camp, they ought to be puzzling out why the August 19 bus bombing in Jerusalem preceded Israel's targeted assassination of Ismael Abu Shanab, which Palestinian spokesmen now claim was what brought the hudna to an end.

EVERY REPORTER and editor needs at least some kind of framework to make sense of the news. I am certainly not coy about the framework to which this newspaper subscribes. I believe it is solidly grounded in historical fact, and I think its predictive record has been good. Still, I admit it's a sign of media vitality when no single framework dominates news coverage as it did in the 1990s. And I will try, at least occasionally, to pose the sorts of questions my colleagues in the other two camps so routinely ask. The wiser journalists among them will return the favor.