To fight ‘insults, do it the Jewish way

Zaid Ibrahim to Muslims: learn to deal with insults and prosper or kill and be killed.

KUALA LUMPUR: Muslims should learn from the experience of the Jewish people who, despite being insulted and persecuted for centuries, put their energies into productive purposes and prospered, Zaid Ibrahim said today.

The former de facto law minister, writing in his newspaper column today about “defending Islam”, said a war of retaliation merely because of so-called insults was not a clever idea.

The Muslim world would not win a war against the West and democracy. “The 1.5 billion Muslims – including the poorest of the world’s population – will wreak havoc and cause the loss of innumerable lives, mostly innocent ones. But they will not win” against 7 billion “infidels” with the largest array of weapons, advanced technology and more money.

If anger and emotion were all they could offer, Muslims had “no chance” to win this fight.

Zaid suggested a better way: imams and preachers to advise Muslims to follow in the footsteps of the Jews.

“Jews have been persecuted and hounded throughout history; if Muslims feel insulted and humiliated by the West, then Jews have surely suffered a hundred times more,” Zaid wrote.

“And yet the Jews did not go on a rampage burning churches or beheading innocent Christians – they knew they would not win a killing game.

“Instead, they set up banks and financial institutions, and quietly took control of the media. They also produced brilliant minds, reaching the top at the best institutions of higher learning in the world such as Harvard and Yale.

“They believed that their “war” could be won only by economic power and education, and now the Chinese are using the same formula just as successfully.

“Isn’t it time that Muslims learnt to cope with the challenges of the modern world and modern values too?”

Killing was not the answer, he said. Muslims in Malaysia and elsewhere must be willing “to grow up” and learn to live in harmony with others.

He urged the government to engage in a non-threatening way with Muslims and non-Muslims alike in a discourse about Islam and to accept the voices of dissent with no penalty.

“Liberal ideas might be immoral, inconvenient and decadent [but] they do not kill – unlike the extremism that justifies murder and calling other Muslims “kafir harbi” a term that had been used on him, he said, explaining that it referred to the worst kind of unbeliever who deserved no protection from an Islamic state, as opposed to kafir zimmi.

Zaid urged the government and Islamic authorities to deal seriously with the rising threat of extremism and the spread of the militant ideology of the “Islamic State” movement.

He likened it to the communist insurgency of Emergency times, and said there was a need to be “doubly vigilant” of the new threat, “even if the armed struggle is couched in religious doctrine and pretends to be a holy endeavour”.