Author:
Publication: Jihad Watch
Date: February 8, 2005
URL: http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/2005/02/004973print.html
Jihad Watch Board Vice President
Hugh Fitzgerald on Malaysia: Malaysia is a good example of the way in which
Muslims, even in a country in which they are a bare majority, have managed
to create a situation that, to the extent possible, reduplicates the dhimmitude
of yore. When it first became independent, Malaya (later Malaysia) did
not have a Muslim majority. But just as in every country where Muslims
and non-Muslims have lived, the Muslims have driven out or killed enough
of the non-Muslims to diminish their numbers. In the early 1950s, Lebanon
was 40% Muslim and 60% Christian; while censuses are no longer taken, the
proportion is likely reversed. At independence, West Pakistan was 15% Hindu;
now it is 1% Hindu; East Pakistan was 38% Hindu, and is now 8% Hindu. Meanwhile,
the proportion of Muslims in India has risen and continues to rise. While
non-Muslim birthrates everywhere, from Europe to China to Peru, go down,
Muslim birthrates remain the highest in the world -- in Infidel lands and
Muslim lands alike. And Infidels have been prompt with transfers of wealth
to Muslims, both within Muslim lands and within Infidel lands.
In Malaysia, the "jizya" is disguised.
It is called the "Bumiputra" ("Sons of the Soil"), and it supposedly was
intended to help the indigenous Malays. But the indigenous tribes, the
real Malays, are Christianized. In fact, the "Bumiputra" system helps only
the Muslims in Malaysia. By its terms, those who are Chinese or Hindus
(i.e., non-Muslims) must include in all of their economic undertakings,
as equal partners, Malaysian Muslims. So, for example, if two Malaysian
Chinese were to open, say, an architectural office, they would have to
take on as a full partner a Malaysian Muslim, who would receive a share
even if he contributed little or nothing to the enterprise.
And steadily, state by state, Malaysia
is introducing more and more Islamic features into its social and political
life. Anwar Ibrahim (he of the famous "trial") makes Mahathir Mohamed (he
of the rants against the "Jews" and the speech to the O.I.C. in which he
called upon fellow Muslims to embrace "progress," which he then defined
entirely in terms of military technology and other means to defeat the
Infidels and spread the banner of Islam) seem "moderate."
Malaysia's famed "economic success"
is owed primarily to four things:
1) The British commercial and legal
inheritance (Singapore, incidentally, briefly part of Malaysia, had as
its first Chief Minister a member of a family of Iraqi Jews, spread throughout
Asia like the more famous Sassoons and Kadoories, the Marshalls -- Marshall's
nephew attended school in Bombay with the late President Bhutto of Pakistan,
in those relatively relaxed pre-Partition days).
2) Extensive natural resources.
3) An energetic mercantile and entrepreneurial
class of Chinese and Hindus, whose economic activity both supports, and
serves as a useful model, to the Muslims.
4) The encouragement by Malaysia
of the assembly of high-tech goods due to low costs, and that entrepreneurial
class described in #3 above.
But now the Chinese in China, not
the Bumiputra-hobbled Chinese in Malaysia, and the Indians in India, not
the Bumiputra-hobbled Hindus in Malaysia, will be able to replace Malaysia
entirely as a center for technical assembly. And as Malaysia further islamizes,
it will drive more and more of its energetic non-Muslim population away,
and the economy is likely to suffer.
It is surely worth observing what
happens to the Bumiputra system -- that disguised jizya. If it is abandoned,
there may be mild hope for Malaysia. But as in every other state where
Muslims slowly seize control, the likelihood of reversing course and making
things better, rather than worse, for a large community of non-Muslims,
is slim. See Nigeria, Lebanon, Sudan, Egypt.
