Chinese are Jews: A Malaysian syllogism for Ketuanan

Morality of this tale: You were right to emigrate; it’s still safer elsewhere.

Ng Wei Aik (left) is state assemblyman and aide to Penang chief minister Lim Guan Eng. This fact is of no fundamental political consequence until, one day soon after Israel’s military operation against the Gaza flotilla, he saw that his party, the DAP, had beaten Najib Razak to the clock. The prime minister was being tardy, Ng complained. “He took 12 hours to register his anger,” a news portal quoted Ng on Najib’s remarks (the prime minister had twitted his response).

In another way of saying the same thing, the DAP was quicker on the draw. If Najib is slower, then by inference, his heart may not be with the Palestinians, that is, Muslims. If not with Muslims, who with? Conversely, DAP people like Ng cast the impression that they think of Muslims every moment of their waking hours. So touching….

Now it seems domestic politics is beginning to be measured in terms of hours taken to react and to issue a condemnation. And that over an ancient, Jewish-Muslim conflict nearly half a world away and reignited more than half a century ago, it having sparked when Malaysia was not even in existence.

Ng’s posturing is sign that the country is off on yet another trajectory in demonizing Chinese and in Sino-Malay relations. Anti-Chinese racism in Malaysia has this historic, lasting quality in varied forms: before, in stereotypical portrayal of Chinese as gangsters, prostitutes, towkays, usurious money-lenders (‘Ah Longs’); today, gamblers and Jews.

Most tellingly it is DAP’s scathing attacks on Israel that beat even the usual hate mongering coming from Umno and PAS/PKR.

This is to the credit of the Gaza flotilla, which offered a window of opportunity to propel Malaysia into arriving at the milestone in Chinese-Malay relations – a milestone reaffirmed on the streets earlier this month in demonstrations against Israel (against Jews really), and almost simultaneously in the Ketuanan Melayu propaganda papers: Jews equal Chinese.

He who started it

Mahathir Mohamad has been one of the earliest to bed the Chinese and the Jewish diaspora – his two pet hate projects. His most recent rants against both Jews and Chinese are today preambled and chorused by other Malaysians, notably Mohd Ridhuan Tee Abdullah (left), and Muslims and Chinese Christians who are staunchly anti-Jew.

From a lone Mahathir project before, it’s gone truly Malaysian. DAP, PKR, Chinese, everybody appears to have unanimously jumped on the bandwagon, or should we say the flotilla?

Equating Jew and Chinese, Ridhuan Tee says upfront: “the Jews are already right in front of our eyes”. To rub it in for the Chinese, he praises Hilter and fascism.

Ng, of course, did not equate Jew and Chinese. In suggesting that Najib was slow on the Palestinian, Muslim side, he has to mean, equally, the man was hesitant to stand against the Israeli Jews (recall the Apco episode).

It isn’t just the religious undertone. More pertinently, Ng invokes the default moral position – Jews are oppressors, Muslims oppressed – that puts him, on parallel in point of principle to Ridhuan Tee: one side oppressors, the other side oppressed. This requires little imagination to name the two sides.

In consequence, Ng contributes to feather the very bed made by Mahathir – Jews equal Chinese – and which Ridhuan Tee now repeats to no end.

Drive Chinese into the sea?

The device Mahathir employs (and in whose hallowed footsteps Ridhuan follows) is a form of logic technically called syllogism, using two inter-related or parallel concepts, and tying them up to forge a third – the conclusion.

Because it is so easily mistaken as truth, syllogism is used everywhere in the English speaking world, as in Malaysia by individuals who otherwise cannot make a convincing case from empirical evidence.

From one of the latter editions of The Malay Dilemma, below is a sample of terms, all Mahathir’s, and note they are entirely of a subjective, adjectival kind because in syllogism no objective facts are required – just say it.

First Parallelism (P.1):

• Jews: hook-nosed, stinginess, financial wizardry, commercial control, understand money instinctively.
• Chinese: almond-eyed, unscrupulous, manipulative, monopoly wholesale trade, defer to riches.

Second Parallelism (P.2):

• Palestine: whole country was taken (sic!) and handed to the Jews
• Malaya: predatory immigrants, Sinocization (sic!) of the country

The examples above pile syllogism on syllogism. The conclusions in each of them automatically pull together to create a third: (P.1) Jews = Chinese; (P.2) Palestine = Malaya; therefore, (P.3) Chinese illegally occupied Malaya. Extrapolate P.3, hence, drive the Chinese into the South China Sea as Mahathir did to the Vietnamese boat people? (Arabs say the same of Israel’s Jews.)

These conclusions need not be made plain; they become intuitive just reading the stuff.

The Chinese profile being constructed for hate has evolved so far along these lines (and note the same syllogism at work):

• Chinese are Jews.
• Chinese are infidels and the heathen.
• Jews killed Jesus.
• Jews kill Palestinians.
• Therefore Chinese are anti-Palestinians
• Palestinians are Muslims.
• Malays are Muslims.
• Therefore Chinese oppress Muslims.
• Chinese won’t become Muslims or Christians (neither will Jews).
• Therefore Chinese are anti-Muslims and anti-Christians.

Taken far enough in this reconstructed profile of racial hate, as Mahathir did in the Dilemma, is a recipe for a future pogrom.

Adopting the Mahathiristic ‘logic’

Although a little tilted, but equally insidious, sinister and purposeful, the Anglophile Chinese, virtually all Christians – Goh Keat Peng,Josh Hong, Thomas Lee, KTemoc – feather the Mahathir racism and anti-Semitism along an angled plane. They don’t go after the Chinese directly but are equally nuanced, like it is with Mahathiristic logic.

For example, the Malay gangs who in the days of May 13 had killed Chinese are today made to look like victims of the Chinese instead. This seems to defy belief but, then, belief was never necessary to work a logical tool; only assertion is needed because syllogism requires no proof to buttress a claim. The conclusion is like the topping in the pudding – very enticing.

Hence, Thomas Lee [journalist] says Malays cannot be at fault for hacking to death hundreds of Chinese. Well, if there is ever another riot, it won’t be the children of the media and political elites who’ll be hacked with a parang but some poor sod of a noodle hawker riding his old sputtering Honda Cub to collect his daughter from school or a 18-year-old boy dashing off to a stand in Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman for a nasi lemak takeaway.

And KTemoc [blogger] says Jews are fascists for acting distinctive, different – and murderous in a sea of suffering (caused by Arabs to begin with) – and he said elsewhere the Chinese have the same insularity, therefore also acting distinct, refusing to be Malaysian. Josh Hong [columnist] labels outright the Chinese as racist. And Goh Keat Peng? This Christian missionary says of those who disagreewith his pro-Palestinian views: “But your knowledge of the situation on the ground is appalling and so is your theology.”

The propaganda doesn’t stop there: praising the anti-Semitism, opposition politicians fawning after the Muslim vote are locked hand-in-hand with the Muslim fundamentalism they once denounced.

The greatest Malaysian achievement in the ‘Peace Flotilla’ to Gaza is, therefore, not concern for Palestinians. It is doesn’t even unify the local political divide, a cooperation that many online commentators have extolled as virtuous since domestic political enemies have gotten together to found a common offshore enemy.

More than all that, the Turkish flotilla electrifies a domestic, Malaysian, hate-Chinese project by transforming and giving it an international character, supported even by local Chinese, Lim Kit Siang et al.

From Mahathir, anti-Semitism as a way to drum up Chinese hatred is to be expected. But how could the opposition, one might ask, be so callous in their politics?

courtesy of Centre for Policy Initiatives