Was our Dr. Mahathir Mohamad being racist when he accused the Jews of ruling the world by proxy?

I think so. When you stereotype a whole people with such a long and complex history, and make them the common enemy of all Muslim nations, you are liable to charges of racism in our contemporary world. If Edward Said is alive today, he would have pointed out that there is no one Jewry, but many Jewries, just as there is no one Islam, but many Islams.

It is easy to stereotype a whole complex community if you think of them as an abstract idea, and not as composed of numerous individuals. That is why racist remarks can be so dehumanising, humiliating and hurtful to the individuals,

I happened to have quite a few Jewish friends in my student days in North America. The winds of fortune had me squatting in Brandeis University for a few summers. In case you didn't know, Brandeis is a distinguished university funded and run by the American Jewish community, and named after Justice Louis Bembitz Brandeis, the US Supreme Court Judge of Jewish descent.

From what I observed then, the academic standard among the Jewish students was frightfully high. Many of them had rich parents. But otherwise, the Jewish boys and girls at Brandeis were pretty much like you and me when we were at that difficult age, struggling with the growing pains of new found freedom and uncertain self-identity, while experimenting with romantic or sexual adventures at times.

Over the years, I have come to realise that, once you cultivate meaningful friendship with a member of a different "race", you tend not to feel and think about that person in terms of this abstract idea of race.

It was in 1974 (I think) when I first met Jamal in the International Student Lounge at the University of Manitoba in Canada. It was his first day in the vast frozen Prairies of North America, and he looked nervous and disoriented like all first timers from Malaysia.

The Jamal incident

We struck up a conversation, and he told me he was enrolled in the Engineering Department for a graduate degree. I liked his confident cultured manner, and invited him home for dinner. He gladly accepted.

My housemate, a PhD candidate in chemistry from Sibu, opened the door when we arrived. Jamal took a look at him, and his face froze. With a hurried apology to me, he turned and left abruptly.

I looked at my housemate in dismayed amazement. With a sheepish guilty expression, he explained that he was having a discussing with some Malaysian Chinese students at the International Lounge before my arrival there, bitching about how a new Malay graduate student must have been spoon-fed with a government scholarship to study engineering in our university etc, when Jamal, unrecognised, was sitting right next to them.

A decade later, I used to meet Jamal in the Dewan Rakyat; he had become a rising star in Umno. To-day, Jamal, or Datuk Dr Jamalluddin Jarjis, is the second finance minister of Malaysia. Irrespective of our political differences, I sometimes wonder what was going through Jamal's head and heart during that embarrassing moment at my place 29 years ago.

The incident burned itself onto my memory. Even without Jamal becoming a prominent politician, the incident will always alert me to the tragedy of reverse racism mirroring all the prejudices of the original racist venom that gives rise to it in the first place.

That is precisely the tragedy with Malaysia. Racial prejudices stand in the way of our making friends with members of another ethnic community, and that alienated, truncated, isolated existence breeds, transmits and exaggerates those very silly prejudices. The casualty is not so much our mythical almost god-like national unity, but the diminishing of our common humanity.

I am convinced that not many Malaysians have friends outside of their ethnic circle. Perhaps the necessity of making a living or that of social intercourse may have compelled us to cultivate a few nodding acquaintances among people of other races. But perish the thought that we should dine with them, exchange political or religious views frankly over a whole convivial evening, or even sleep with them in the same room.

Those young people who have experimented with inter-racial romance would have known the unbearable burden of hostile pressure from their respective families, as if the heartache of overcoming religious and cultural differences is not already sufficient to strain the relationship to breaking point. Usually, love loses out in the end.

Hypocritical symbol

In the absence of real inter-racial fraternity, the flaunting of open house during festivals especially in the media stands out like a giant sore thumb, symbolising for me all that is hypocritical about the politics of race in our country.

(As the Hari Raya approaches, I cringe at the ugly spectacle of perfectly decent middle-class Malaysians elbowing and fighting for a plate of food at the prime minister's open house in Putrajaya.)

And so, most Malaysians live within the comfort zone of their exclusive ethnic universe. At the fringes of that universe, they build invisible but impenetrable high walls from rocks of religious or cultural values and practices. Over decades, their strong castle has become a mental prison from which all routes of escape to freedom are closed off.

Secure in the solipsism of their racial/ethnic castle/prison, these residents of fractured existence cast their majestic glance over the castle walls, and make Olympian judgements about the moral or intellectual worth of those savages living in the wilderness, outside the walls.

Such judgements must necessarily be made in the secrecy of the heart, for in the name of inter-racial harmony we must be sensitive to the feelings of other people. Above all else, we must be sensitive to the risk of incurring the wrath of the Seditious Act and the ISA. Common logic of self-preservation dictates that our face and our heart must never express the same feelings.

Occasionally, private prejudices break through the surface of conscious control in various manifestations of racial slurring. I suspect that none of us is ever spared a racial slur or two over a life time. Upon reflection, if we are honest with ourselves, we will discover that we cannot be free from the guilt of uttering a racial slur or two either.

A classification

Very often, racial slurs do not verbal expressions. A chance encounter, a slight knotting of the eye-brows, a subtle twitch at the corner of the mouth, a stiffening and turning away of the shoulder, a sideway glance pregnant with meaning, and you know you have been classified, pinned, pigeonholed, judged, and assigned with qualities you may or may not possess.

During moments like this, the lines from TS Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock leap into my mind:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall.

Then how should I begin

To spit out the butt - ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

Perhaps this mad scramble for exclusive identification with one's own ethnic grouping, in a power relation with, and in opposition to other ethnic groupings, has made Malaysia a land of anti-ness. We define ourselves by how we negate the Other.

Is it any wonder that during the normal course of a political discourse, we hear endless accusations of people being anti-Malay, anti-Indian, anti-Chinese, anti-Islam, anti-Christian, anti-West, and now anti-Semitic?

In a land where the Anti-ness Syndrome has ravaged the minds of millions for nearly half a century, and where racial stereotyping has been our normal mode of thought since adolescence, why should we be surprised at a prime minister sounding like an anti-Semitic racist?

Frankly, I don't think our prime minister is an anti-Semitic at heart. I don't even want to examine where anti-Zionism ends, and where anti-Semitism begins. This topical issue, like all other topical issues in the past, will blow over soon, for that is the nature of modern politics played out in the flickering limelight of local and world media.

What I am concerned with has far greater relevance to our lives than a single fleeting political issue.

Our political parties and politicians are like vegetation, while our people are but the soil on which the vegetation grows. The health of the vegetation depends entirely on the condition of the soil. Yet, some particular type of vegetation can actually improve the fertility of the soil.

If a national leader has made a racist remark in public, then we are all responsible.