IS the gulf widening between Muslims and Others?

This religious fissure can hardly be alleviated by the likes of Takaful's Fauzi Mustaffar at the centre of the flutter over Deepavali greetings. What we might want to ask ourselves is whether the Fauzi-type mindset is the exception or steadily creeping towards the norm. Why are we witnessing more of such explosive incidents, for example the new twist Langkawi has given to the term 'terrorising tourists'?

The prolonged debate in malaysiakini over mixed-race relationships where one partner is Muslim has also thrown up some arresting viewpoints. The dozens of letters is doubtless a small sample and anecdotal. What's noteworthy though is that several of these letter writers revealed a pronounced negativity concerning the beliefs of others. From one Fauzi, here are now several Fauzis and Fauziahs.

Non-Muslims are rightly concerned about how the increasing Islamisation of national life will impact them and more so their children. As a reader trenchantly put it, if we've not reached developed nation status by 2020, we would have achieved an Islamic state in any case.

The most worrying aspect of this inexorable march away from whatever shreds of secularism we have remaining is that Malaysians are to be harangued, intimidated and proscribed from even discussing this matter of vital importance. I daresay that more so than most people, I've in recent days borne the brunt of hostility and verbal aggression from certain Muslims and other friends of the faith. And I'm accorded this dubious distinction even though I've never touched directly on the religion in my writing.

My reference to the proliferation of Muslim terrorists, relative to bombers who are adherents of other religions blowing up people in the name of their gods, is met with some acutely emotional venting. And skimming only the surface of Zionism an enemy of Islam, as some Muslims who felt 'denigrated' by my article have tried to impress upon me aroused an equal measure of ire. Very soon it might even be a crime to talk about bad dates (the palm fruit, not social companion).

Us versus them

The Merdeka Centre study on Muslim attitudes is to be commended for its pioneering effort. Until another study surfaces with more data, discussion in the rest of this article will remain to an extent conjectural. I shall take a letter to the editor by Maszlee Malik as an example of how the writer's attitude could well be symptomatic of the matrix as well as defined by the rubric.

Maszlee proffered to coach me to a better understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and concluded with the parting shot: 'But again, I'm skeptical whether she will accept this offer, merely because I'm a Muslim!'

I could easily tell Maszlee I have no reservations about being mentored by Muslims. After all, my academic referee is the eminent Prof GS Yousof, my professional referee Puan S. Rahman, both of whom I'm immensely grateful to for their support through the years. What's regrettable is the conditioned reflex of Maszlee and his ilk in invoking my religion-your religion, more so on Palestine-Israel which is essentially a territorial dispute.

Maszlee makes another misguided attempt to score a religious point. He challenges: 'Can Ang prove any mass-scale Jewish pogroms that happened in Muslim countries?'

He's asking me to show apples when I've been talking about oranges. To recapitulate, I had recounted how for millennia Jews were persecuted in Europe. They were the primary victims of Nazi concentration camps, falsely blamed and killed for poisoning wells when the Black Death pandemic hit, and slain by Christian soldiers on the march to Jerusalem for the Crusades.

Maszlee further insists: 'Indeed, the Jews suffered enormously under the Catholic kingdoms'. Indeed, what did he think I had been discussing all along? The enormity of Maszlee's ability to skew the thread of an argument awry is a tribute to Mahathir Mohamad's deep imprint on Bolehland. Look who's talking now about 'police state' and 'a climate of fear'.

In fact if Maszlee cares to ask, I can additionally inform him that Jews were expelled from their lands in Spain by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, from Lithuania in 1495, Portugal, Sicily and Sardinia (1497), Rhodes (1502) and Naples (1541), not to mention the waves of expulsions in the centuries before and after.

One of the events that pushed Theodor Herzl into formulating the Zionist ideology was the horrific pogroms against Russian Jews in Kishinev, Bessarabia around the turn of the 20th century. Nor should we forget Stalin's purges in the 1930s.

Considering Europeans versus Muslims if we must, it is the undoubtedly the latter who historically cut Jews a better deal. Nonetheless why should we, who are in living in a flattening world and rapidly evolving technological age, want to run on outmoded software predicated on 'us against them'?

Can the adversarial cast of Maszlee's mentality only compute should I make a baseless claim that Muslim caliphates brought about the deaths of six million Jews? Or other critics assuming me a Christian (I'm not) so that I could be more neatly pigeonholed into the opposing camp in the alleged clash of civilisations?

According to script

There's lately been much public hand-wringing over the abysmal standard of the country's education mills where the bar has been lowered drastically to accommodate mediocrity. The inevitable outcome of this downward slide is that the ability to articulate solid and sound reasoning in support of one's case has been hampered.

Instead, these hamstrung people resort to slander. Maszlee's litany of complaints against my writing which he deems to be 'filled with falsehood smoothly blended with bits and pieces of untruthful rhetoric' is completely unsubstantiated. Read his letter and see how he fails to back up his allegations with any concrete examples or quotes attributable to my work.

He also accuses me of 'parroting' whatever I read from 'one side of the river' on the Palestinian issue. The system today may require students to memorise and regurgitate exam material wholesale and Maszlee may or may not have been a product of that system. But I'll thank him not to presume that I rolled off the same assembly line.

When facts get in the way of spin, the convenient Boleh recourse is pro forma. Hurl allegations of a 'tendency towards Islamophobia' (I wonder, is this to be the catch-all catchphrase 'keris-crossing' the country?) Accuse Ang of compulsively 'gulping down everything' she finds on the Net. Maszlee even goes so far as to exhort me: 'Don't only depend on the Internet, and don't hear only one side of the story'.

Cue to hit the 'Pause' button! Which side of the story do you really think is more likely to be sidelined in this, our model country of monopolies (be it in the privatisation of national interests or in the control of information flow) Palestinian or Jewish? And from our brief tour of history showing serious lapses in rationality with regard to the Jewish Diaspora, it boggles the mind that Malaysians can believe either 'the West' or European press today to be automatically pro-Israel.

What Maszlee's letter serves to demonstrate is merely that he is projecting his own limitations and handicap. And he debases what could otherwise have been a positive exchange of ideas by dragging the discussion down to his level.

To see how facts are presented straight, let's look to Berlin. My visits in September to the capital city's German Historical Museum, and the Jewish Museum were instructive. There a visitor learns how one country, which has already made restitution by paying reparation for its war crimes, confronts its past with honesty and allows a public exhibition of it without whitewashing unsavoury aspects regarding Germany's treatment of Jews.

Perhaps I should count myself mildly fortunate in that I've built up a body of work in malaysiakini over the last three years which I can draw upon. I'm thus able to indicate how I've previously supported the positions of those who just happen to be Muslims, like Indonesian maids (sadly abused) and PAS incumbents (who miraculously lost their seats in Parliament by the narrowest of margins).

So yes, I can pen a refutation, like this one-on-one rebuttal for Maszlee Malik, and leave it to readers to judge for yourselves whose writing is more credible. But if I'm required to buck an entire system and a whole generation came of age under its imprimatur then it's a lost cause.

I'm not a malaysiakini staff, I do not make my living and pay my bills from writing and I'm certainly not indefatigable. Nor do I derive any perverse satisfaction from what I have to say in the hard-hitting Z Sunday.

There's only so much one can take and I've become thoroughly fed-up at having to continually fend off all the wild accusations flung at me. But that's the way things work here, isn't it? Think about this. Even if Helen Ang is harassed into putting away her keyboard, the facts on the ground will not change one iota. It'll just be one critical voice less in the public domain.

I'm only one individual and I may soon choose to walk away from this highly frustrating situation. The system, on the other hand, is here to stay. If you think you have a stake in the future of this country and how it shapes up, you're the ones going to have to contend with it.

Note A:

Maszlee Malik claims that the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri) is a 'Zionist propaganda mouthpiece'. I had linked to two of its special reports relating to sermons by influential clerics beseeching God to annihilate Jews who are 'the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs'.

Memri is an organisation that translates reports originating from the Middle East into English, Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, French and Hebrew. The hate speeches it translated have not been refuted nor has the accuracy of its translation been contested.

High ranking Muslim clerics do make controversial statements in Arabic. The Mufti of Australia just recently on uncovered women, rape and rotting meat is a case in point. This same Mufti has reportedly 'denied the Holocaust, defended suicide bombers, described as "God's work" the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, and blamed Jews for "all the wars and problems that threaten the peace and stability of all the world".' I read this not from Memri but mainstream.

I would note that Memri would have no fodder for Zionist 'propaganda' if venom directed against Jews in particular and the West / others in general failed to emanate from the Muslim world. Besides Memri (and his charge against it is certainly debatable), Maszlee can cite no other biased websites from which I supposedly 'parrot' my 'stereotypical prejudices' of Muslims.

Note B:

The now widely-known and extrapolated quote 'Palestinians are a people with a penchant for violence' is taken from 'Black September: Path of Violence' (February 2, 2006, a week after Hamas wrested control of the Palestinian Authority by popular mandate).

The actual quote in its entirety and in context reads: 'Displaced Palestinians have remained stateless partly due to their own penchant for violence.'

The passage before the sentence above explains how Palestinian resistance forces had been expelled from one host country and another, including Lebanon, while the passage after it observes that the Hashemite monarchy went a long way to accommodate Palestinian demands for autonomy. It was Arafat's Fatah which destabilised Jordan by forming its 'state within a state' in the refugee districts and foolhardily attempted to 'take over' the kingdom.

'Black September: Shooting the messenger' is a letter in which I stressed that none of my critics had managed to point out 'any single factual inaccuracy in my account of the Palestinian acts of terror, assassinations, bombings, massacres and other atrocities'.

One related development has some bearing on what I wrote a full nine months ago. Last fortnight, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad questioned whether violence has become a 'Palestinian disease'. Writing in the widely read Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam, Hamad asked: 'Has violence become a culture implanted in our bodies and our flesh?' . The now deadly infighting between Hamas and Fatah gunmen should clue you to the obvious.