Your neighbour's dog made you angry so you drive across town and strangle

the pet rabbit belonging to a family you've never met before. In a similar vein, Palestinians reacting to Pope Benedict's speech in Germany elected to fire-bomb and bullet-spray old churches on home ground. Or terrorists kill young backpackers in Bali. Or the US attack Iraq in its war against terrorism.

Many Malaysians who are fashionably anti-American nonetheless remain impervious to the gaps in logic manifest in the above courses of action except for the Iraq analogy. Maybe our brains have become addled after 22 years of Mahathirism. And more as the ex-premier, who stubbornly refuses to make his stage exit, is once again hogging the limelight by blaming the root cause of Islamist extremism on the Palestine occupation.

This inability among terror apologists to see the whole picture that violence targeted at those uninvolved is illogical derives from a self-referential victim culture which supposes the West/Americans, in cahoots with Zionists, to be neo-con religious crusaders. Or the prejudiced outlook comes about because they do not have access to the full facts due to information blackout.

For the sake of argument, let us accept a nexus between Palestine and much of Muslim global violence as posited by Mahathir. From there, we can examine the Illogic Syndrome (there really is such a word as 'illogic') in the way the ummah reacts to the Holocaust, the seminal event that tilted the balance and guilty conscience of Europe into making the Jewish state aspiration (or Zionism) a reality.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) is an umbrella body for more than 350 Muslim organisations (mosques included) that claims to represent 1.6 million Muslims out of the UK's roughly two million.

Unlike some other Muslim bodies, the MCB does not deny the Holocaust* but the council did boycott Holocaust Memorial Day last year, a 60th anniversary of the welt on European history. It gave the excuse that the remembrance service was not inclusive enough.

It wanted the killings in Palestine, Chechnya and Kashmir commemorated but conveniently overlooked mentioning other areas of conflict where non-Muslims are or had been victims of genocide, like Cambodia and many places besides. MCB's citation of only the three Muslim territories signals the 'us-them' dichotomy in the council's viewpoint.

Moral equivalency

The 'what's in it for us' MCB appears willing to mark Holocaust Day if the Muslim cause celebre got a slice of the action but would object to its observance otherwise. Its stance reveals a lack of charity for Others spelled with a capital 'O' to denote unbelievers.

For the general information of readers, it was not solely Jews who perished in the WWII holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of Roma (in English, gypsies) were also killed for purely racial reasons. Slated for 'euthanasia' too were the German mentally ill, political dissenters, homosexuals and ultimately, even Christian clergy. Millions of Polish slave labour and Soviet prisoners of war added to the death toll.

Equally little known in Malaysia is the fact that Jews were not slaughtered in Germany alone, which saw 142,000 casualties. The greatest loss of Jewish lives at some three million occurred in Poland where the Auschwitz- Birkenau, Treblinka and other major concentration camps were located.

Next in line comes Russia with an estimated 1.1 million Jewish deaths at German hands. About 569,000 Jews were murdered in Hungary, 287,000 in Romania, 277,000 in (then) Czechoslovakia, 143,000 in Lithuania and lesser numbers in more than a dozen other European nations.

The breadth of the killing-field invites one to ponder on how Europeans separately across so many countries could have been complicit in the extermination of six million Jews. Or how the equally culpable (through their inaction) British could have blithely ignored the Nazi pogroms that should have rung urgent alarms bells.

The lesson in this for the rest of us today is that if we are not vigilant about protecting human rights, anyone can be targeted simply because they do not subscribe to the dominant dogma or are regarded as the hated Other in a fascist regime. This assessment encompasses Muslim terror suspects being held in American detention centres although I do not deem the US to be a totalitarian country.

More pertinent to our own domestic scenario though is that once we allow ourselves to demonise or scapegoat a people any people on account of their race alone, we've begun our journey into the heart of darkness.

Political Islam

One reader takes umbrage at the term 'Islamic terrorists'. Although 'Islamic terrorists' (1,530,000 Google hits) is more commonly used than 'Muslim terrorists' (670,000 hits), I concede his argument that the latter is more apt. It does indeed better emphasise how it is chiefly the adherents who carry out acts of violence in the name of their religion.

He further challenges me 'to prove anything Islamic out of the act of killing innocents'. I politely decline to pick up the gauntlet in our highly charged climate where fellow Malaysian Malik Imtiaz Sarwar ( left ) - who incidentally was conferred his first degree by the International Islamic University - has morphed into 'the face of the traitorous lawyer to Islam' on a widely circulated Wanted Dead poster. And where British demonstrators aggrieved by cartoons have brandished placards with the message 'Behead those who insult Islam'.

As an alternative, I would strongly encourage anyone with an interest to read the sacred texts be it the Bible, Quran or Torah for themselves. Use the index in the holy books for assistance in thematic research or get online to do supplementary reading; several faith freedom sites on comparative religion are useful resources.

Prudence aside, I still reiterate my original point that the reason the phrase 'Buddhist terrorists' registers negligible Google hits (1,570) is because the Buddhist philosophy exemplifies non-violence in practice as well as in preaching. Rarely do we hear of Buddhist extremism or Buddhist fundamentalism. After the Taliban blasted to rubble Bamiyan's world heritage Buddhas, there was no sweeping backlash where Buddhists rioted, burned effigies and killed imams, torched mosques or blew themselves up in a Turkish kebab restaurant.

Unclear on the concept

Is it the reality on the ground that a majority of Malaysians are antagonistic to Jews? I would say a conditional yes, given Bolehland's long-standing saturation propaganda and Pavlovian training.

It's a common fallacy that Zionists control the world media and orchestrate the slant in coverage. If anything, faked footage in French TV over the al-Dura affair (see here for special report) and recent Reuters photographs of the Lebanon bombardment which proved to be both digitally doctored and staged illustrate an anti-Israel bias in some media if not a deliberate agenda to discredit that country. And in the Middle East, the Arab media is still saying Zionists or/and Americans were behind 9/11.

Another peddler of hate is Muslim religious leaders, not only in Palestine but many Western countries too, who wind their congregation to a high pitch through their sermons.

The Middle East Media Research Institute reported that in a weekly sermon in April 2002, Al-Azhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the highest-ranking Sunni cleric, called Jews 'the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.' The non-partisan institute (which does mostly translation work) also noted that Saudi sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, imam and preacher at the Al-Haraam mosque - the most important in Mecca - in one of his sermons beseeched Allah to annihilate the Jews.

Other imams teach that any Jew anywhere is a legitimate target for murder. Meanwhile, more 'high-minded' critics would make some kind of distinction etween the people and the movement. What leads Zionism to be called a 'hideous ideology'?

Explanation required

The same reader who took me to task is one proponent of the hypothesis that Zionists are beyond the pale.

Summarised, his propositions are:

  1. Zionism is the enemy to Islam's existence.

  • No Muslims with the slightest tint [dint?] of conviction in God and the Hereafter would approve Zionism.

  • Zionism is a belief anti-thesis [sic] to the Muslims' belief.

  • Helen Ang who has the temerity to say that Zionism has undeservedly been made out to be a dirty word 'deserve(s) full condemnation in the heart of true Muslims'.

    • It cannot be denied that Zionism has operated to displace large numbers of Arabs in the Middle East. However, many pro-Palestinians still perceive that a greater number than is truly the case were dispossessed. This misconception arises due to the inclusion in some statistics banks (the records vary) of the population of what is now Jordan, as well as West Bank and Gaza when by rights the count should have been strictly restricted to the area to be apportioned the nascent Jewish state.

    When the first Zionist Congress convened in Basle, Switzerland in 1897, 'Eretz Yisrael' was a barren, rocky little strip of land containing some 400,000 Arabs and 50,000 Jews. When the United Nations drew up its Partition Plan in 1947, official UN estimates said the land assigned to the Jewish state contained approximately 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs (a figure which includes Christians, Bedouins, Druze and others).

    First Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, reading the declaration proclaiming the establishment of the Jewish homeland, described Israel as the birthplace of the Jews where their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. It was a land, he said, to which Jews had never ceased praying to and to where they had always hoped to return. Ben-Gurion also called upon the Arab inhabitants of the state to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the state on the basis of 'full and equal citizenship'.

    That briefly explained and after acknowledging that Israel was formed under circumstances where Peter was robbed to pay Paul, can a true Muslim now please enlighten me on what Zionism, in his understanding, actually represents? How does it relate so negatively to all Muslims and to Islam?

    Or is Zionism destined to remain just a woolly bogeyman concept in our Malaysian psyche the hateful yin to the beloved yang of our favourite fluffy phrases like 'Asian values' and 'Islam Hadhari'?

    Note:

    The meaning of holocaust is 'an occasion of great destruction, especially by fire, and great loss of human life'. It's a noun used also in a wider sense, e.g. nuclear holocaust. Spelled with a capital 'H' though, it refers to the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis.

    Middle East Media Research Institute

    Memri special report No 11

    Memri special report No 12