Today, a lot of people are passing around a very interesting column by Jackson Diehl, on Anwar Ibrahim. He is the Malaysian politician who is the symbol of democracy and sanity in that increasingly oppressive country. The government has imprisoned him in the past, and is poised to imprison him again. One of the government’s tricks is to call him a Jew, a Zionist, and so on. If you want to slime someone in that part of the world, you play the Jew card, early, often, and persistently.
Ibrahim mentioned the government’s attacks on him as a Zionist agent, etc., at the Oslo Freedom Forum earlier this year. I did a journal from this forum, here on NRO. Ibrahim said, “Of course, I’m against the crimes against the Palestinians.” He did not mean crimes committed by Hamas, Fatah, and others who rule the Palestinians, in the usual cruel ways. I muttered under my breath, “To heck with you, Anwar.” (I am cleaning up that thought.)
Lately, as Diehl records in his column, Ibrahim has been playing the Jew card himself, warning of Zionist conspiracies and the like. “Everybody wants to get into the act,” as Jimmy Durante said. Diehl quotes Paul Wolfowitz, who told him, “What Anwar did was wrong” — his playing of that common card — “but considering that he’s literally fighting for his life — physically as well as politically — against a government that attacks him as being ‘a puppet of the Jews,’ one should cut him some slack.”
This comment has not sat well with everybody, and I can understand that not-sitting-well. But I can understand Wolfowitz, too. Plus, it helps that Ibrahim has been repentant, at least in talking to Americans. And, in Malaysia, he is about as good as it gets. We shouldn’t hold our breath for anyone better.
In that journal from Oslo, I noted Ibrahim’s extreme charm, polish, and pluck. Among the memorable things he said was that, in Malaysia, “we had freedom of speech — but we never had freedom after speech.” A crucial distinction.