COMMENT It’s just as well that it was Mujahid Yusof Rawa who pooh-poohed the claim of PAS research director, Mohd Zuhdi Marzuki, that the Israelis offered DAP RM1.2 billion to build a military base in Port Dickson if the opposition triumphed at the last general election (GE13).

By laughing Zuhdi’s claim to scorn, the MP for Parit Buntar, elected in GE12 and GE13 on a PAS ticket but now crossed over to Parti Amanah Negara, has shown how far he has come from the days of his father, Yusof Rawa, the PAS president (1982-89) and its first murshidul am (spiritual leader).

In his inaugural presidential address at the PAS muktamar in 1983, Yusof, who died in 2000, had warned of a Western conspiracy to “Christianise” Indonesia.

The conspiracy to Christianise Indonesia was a favourite Islamist trope in those days.

But this sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands, 700 languages, with the world’s largest Muslim population, and significant minorities of Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, remains significantly diverse and after seven decades of independence from colonial rule determinedly ‘Bhinneka Tunggal Ika’, united in its diversity, as the old Javanese saying is rendered in English in this context.

It’s a measure of how far Mujahid has come in freeing himself from susceptibility to conspiracy theories that warp the Islamist worldview that this scion of Yusof Rawa now laughs at Zuhdi’s claim which DAP organising secretary Anthony Loke termed “ridiculous” and its parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang has said would be the subject of a libel action .

The libel suit should be pursued.

Perish the thought, though, it would have a reductive effect on one of the world’s more enduring pastimes: the penchant of Islamists for conspiracy theories.

Barely had the debris been cleared from the site where the Twin Towers in New York were brought down in September, 2001, than theories began circulating on why Jews supposedly were not among the nearly 3,000 dead under the rubble.

The destruction of the towers by jetliners commandeered by the Egyptian, Mohamed Atta, and his mainly Saudi accomplices, could not have been the work of Arabs, mused the theorists.

The Mossad was fingered. Even someone of Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s empirical mind-set came round to averring that the felling of the Twin Towers could not have been the work of Arab plotters; its ingenuity was beyond the compass of the Arab.

Longtime Islamic trope

The Jews as schemingly clever fiends have been a longtime Islamist trope such that these days about the only people who believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a supposed blueprint for Jewish domination of the world, is not what it is - a 19th century Czarist forgery - are to be found in the Islamic world, particularly in Arab countries.

Before long - should the current tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran escalate into something more fiery than verbal exhalations of mutual loathing - Israel will be seen as behind the Saudi decision to execute the Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, an action that has led to the severance of ties between the two adversaries.

The Saudis, who fund Islamist hate and anti-semitism around the world, have been forced for geostrategic reasons to look at Israel as an ally against Iran, the latter soon to be become flush with funds from the lifting of sanctions following the reaching of a nuclear deal with Washington.

Funds that will doutbless come in handy for Teheran’s mullahs to oust the Saudis from Sunni political primacy in the Middle East, supplanted of course by Shiite supremacy.

These setbacks to the Islamist isolation of Israel is worsened by the resumption last month of diplomatic ties between Turkey and Israel.

Secular Turkey was Israel’s only friend in the Muslim world, but under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has transformed a secular republic into an increasingly authoritarian Islamic state, relations deteriorated until severance point over Israel’s attack on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship that attempted to break the blockade on Gaza with the result that some Turkish citizens were killed.

Ties between Turkey and Israel have resumed, not because of Erdogan’s newfound love for Israel but because the threat to Turkey from Vladimir Putin’s Russia has changed the strategic situation for Turkey.

Their downing of a Soviet fighter jet for a 17-second intrusion in Turkish airspace has shifted the geostrategic equation for Turkey who must latch on to useful allies it can find against Russia and Iran who are opposed to their desire to see the Bashar Assad regime deposed in Syria.

Also, newly-discovered gas reserves in Israel have lured Turkey into becoming a future customer, if only to reduce reliance on Russian supplies.

Admittedly, even the most febrile Islamist paranoia about Jewish designs would be hard put to attribute to Zionist devilry the Israel-favouring shifts in the geopolitics of the Middle East.

But don’t count on it. Jew-depising paranoia among Islamists is rather like Voltaire’s God: someone who would have to be invented even if he did not exist.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.