How Malaysia Became One of the Most Anti-Semitic Countries on Earth
There are strong similarities between the prejudice that the Jewish “entrepreneurial minority” faced in Europe and the one faced by ethnic Chinese throughout South East Asia.
Jon Emont, Tablet
Malaysia is in political and economic crisis as it has been, now, for many months, due to a huge and still unresolved corruption scandal featuring a mysterious $700 million that was transferred into a bank account belonging to the country’s Prime Minister Najib Razak. The money arrived just before a hotly contested 2013 national election, which saw Najib’s United Malay National Organization (UMNO) triumph by a whisker. Where this money came from is anyone’s guess. The Wall Street Journal, which first uncovered the scandal, reported that it came from the1MDB, a Malaysian state development fund, which is now many billions of dollars in debt. Malaysia’s Attorneys General Office, in a recent report, insisted that the money wasn’t looted from a state institution and that the $700 million was actually a gift from the Saudi royal family.
But this, needless to say, isn’t a very good explanation. Even assuming the money did come from the Saudi royal family, why would the prime minister be receiving such a princely sum from foreign royalty on the eve of an election campaign? It’s hard to imagine someone dispatching $700 million without expecting anything in return. (The Attorneys General Report did not explain why the Saudi royal family would be motivated to make such a generous donation.) But as Aziz Kaprawi, division head of the United Malay Party Leader and deputy head of the Transportation Ministry, explained, the prince did expect something in return. “If we had lost [the 2013 election], [rival political party] DAP would be in power. DAP with its Jewish funding would control this country. Based on that, our Muslim friends in the Middle East could see the Jewish threat through DAP.” According to this account, the mysterious Arab prince had sent $700 million to the prime minister’s bank account for a cause that any average Malaysian might be expected to understand, even sympathize with: to protect Malaysia from the Jews.
As this bit of Malaysian current events trivia suggests, blaming Jews for all manner of machinations, crimes, and failures is a normal part of Malaysian politics, even though very few of the country’s citizens have ever laid eyes on a Jew. While Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country of 30 million, nestled just south of Thailand, had a minuscule Jewish population that mostly emigrated decades ago, it still has a very active history of selecting leaders who make anti-Semitic remarks. Mahathir Mohamed, Malaysia’s prime minister from 1981 to 2003, gained international notoriety (as well as, in some circles, approbation) for his 2003 speech at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, where he suggested that while Jews and Muslims were natural enemies, “1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews.” He also noted that, “The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule the world by proxy.”
Malaysian leaders’ anti-Semitism has trickled down. A 2014 ADL survey found that more than 60 percent of Malaysians exhibited anti-Semitic beliefs, making Malaysia the most anti-Semitic country surveyed in Asia outside of the Middle East. Michael Salberg, the Director of International Affairs at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said, “There is a decades long tradition of political leaders in Malaysia defaulting to anti-Semitic tropes to explain all kinds of social, political, and economic circumstances. It is classical scapegoating, deflecting responsibility to an unseen hand.”
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The Penang Jewish Cemetery, established in 1805, is the oldest Jewish cemetery in South East Asia. Tucked behind gray decaying buildings in Georgetown, Penang’s capital, this small, nearly immaculate plot is tended by a Hindu Indian caretaker, Rajim, who brushes fallen coconuts from the graves. He is about 70 years old, plump, with a slight hunch, dressed in a sarong. He also sports an impressive white handlebar mustache that moves up and down as he guides me through the cemetery’s history in a local patois of Malay and English. Members of his family have been caretakers of the Jewish graves for generations, he explains, as he shows me the oldest grave, of a Shoshana Levi, interred on July 9, 1835.
There are about 110 graves here, marking the lives of the Jewish British colonialists and Middle Eastern Jewish traders who had settled in Penang over the centuries. Shuffling slowly along, Rajim takes me to the gravestone of Mordechai David Mordechai, buried in 2011. When Mordechai died he was, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the last Jew on the island—quite possibly the last practicing Jew in Malaysia, through in Kuala Lumpur, the capital down south, there are doubtless some foreign Jewish expat workers (and at least one Jewish-American journalist).
Anti-Jewish prejudice in Malaysia did not develop in response to the tiny population of Jews who lived here but instead was tuned to the frequencies of a Muslim world that saw the rise of Israel—and the subjugation of the Palestinians—as their religion’s great humiliation. According to Daniel Chirot, Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington, since the Iraq War, global anti-Semitic discourse has focused on the ways that Jews use political proxies to fulfill their geopolitical goals: This idea is present in the claim that Jews are using rival political parties as proxies to dismantle the Muslim Malaysian state.
