As is widely recognized and has been authoritatively established by leading historical researchers, the idea of a worldwide alliance and conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons was constructed, with a specific political objective in mind, in a late nineteenth-century work known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Clive Kessler, The Malaysian Insider
They are at it again, I see.
The Jewish and Freemason conspiracy guys, that is.
Or so YB Ibrahim Ali MP fears and suggests.
He wants to know how the name of the opposition leader YB Anwar Ibrahim MP ― or perhaps someone else somewhere in the vast worldwide ummah who shares his unremarkable name ― can appear in a membership list and leadership table of an obscure branch of that well-known threat to Malaysian nation security, “the Jewish international organization, the Freemasons” (organisasi Yahudi antarabangsa, Freemason”), “Anwar terlibat gerakan Freemason?”, Utusan, August 15.
It may be somebody else, YB Ibrahim Ali concedes, two people with the same name, two inoffensive little pelanduk or “mousedeer” who simply look alike.
But, all the same, the Anwar Ibrahim whom we all know here in Malaysia as a prominent political personality must still explain himself, and fast, says the fearless defender of national integrity, Ibrahim Ali.
After all, he insists, “the Freemasons are a secret Zionist movement aimed at promoting worldwide Jewish power and domination” (kerana Freemason [adalah] satu gerakan sulit Zionis yang bertujuan mempromosi kekuasaan Yahudi di seluruh dunia).
Founded following the Crusades, YB Ibrahim Ali further explains, “the Freemasons were established with the objective of rebuilding the church of Solomon upon the site of the Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, in addition to enabling a certain group of Jews to dominate the world – socially, economically and politically” (Ia ditubuhkan dengan matlamat untuk membina gereja Solomon di atas tapak Masjid al-Aqsa di Baitulmuqaddis selain bertujuan membolehkan kelompok Yahudi menguasai dunia baik dari sudut social, ekonomi serta politik).
Unless Anwar does so, people will leap to adverse conclusions, and will be entitled to do so, Ibrahim Ali maintains, in view of Anwar’s earlier statements supporting the security of Israel.
Yet, magnanimously and also bizarrely, Ibrahim Ali, still clings to the hope that “it” (semua itu), meaning all that he has just said on the matter, is untrue. In other words, that he has simply played upon quite unfounded fears.
“I remain hopeful that all this is untrue, namely that Anwar is not involved in a movement of that character, even though the entire world knows of the close relationship between this leader of the opposition and the Jewish leadership” (Namun, saya maih lagi menaruh harapan bahawa semua itu tidak benar, iaitu Anwar tidak terlibat dengan gerakan sedemikian walupun satu dunia mengetahui hubungan rapat ketua pembangkan dengan pemimpin-pemimpin Yahudi).
To this one can only respond by saying that YB Ibrahim Ali, and all who think and argue similarly, simply do not begin to understand what the movement of Freemasons is all about.
It was founded as a practical expression of one of the central beliefs of the Era of Enlightenment: the principled belief in the unity of humankind, and in the possibility of goodwill among people of all faiths.
Just as the masonic craftsmen of old had built physical structures such as churches and temples, the new Masons would build, so they hoped, a new human moral order based upon beneficence, the doing of good deeds among human beings of all kinds and backgrounds.
It appealed to and drew in people of all faith communities.
But because of its connections with the liberal emancipatory ideas of the Enlightenment ― including its often anti-clerical spirit ― many conservative Catholics, including a number of those who were powerful in the Vatican, opposed the Masonic movement, denouncing it for its humanism and its religiously anti-authoritarian tendencies.
As a result, its membership and the social background of Freemasonry in some places became less than universal.
The movement at times accordingly tended to appeal to and include “everybody but Catholics.”
In some places where tensions and animosity between Catholics and Protestants were strong, the movement even tended at times to become the organizational vehicle or framework for politically-minded Protestants to mobilize against Catholics.
This was the case, for example, in a number of the Australian states, and in particular within the state civil services and, in some notable cases, the police forces.
There, people of English and Irish backgrounds were rivals who manoeuvred as Masons and Catholics for position and advancement, both individual and for their group more generally.
Even so, many notable Catholics throughout history were loyal and committed Freemasons.
Perhaps the most famous of them was the composer Mozart, a lifelong Catholic and, in his youth, a member of the retinue and musical entourage of the powerful Archbishop of Salzburg, Archbishop Colloredo.
Mozart, as his court servant, composed a great deal of sublime church music for his Salzburg patron. One cannot but be moved, for example, by the musical character, the refined and authentic spirituality, and the inexpressible beauty of Mozart’s “Coronation Mass”, especially its Agnus Dei section.
Yet this same Mozart was also a committed and active Freemason.
He wrote some important music for Masonic occasions such as his Masonic Funeral Marches.
More notable still is his great opera The Magic Flute, which is suffused with Masonic ideas, symbolism and imagery.
Was The Magic Flute an exercise in the covert promotion of the ideas of Freemasonry?
Perhaps, if one is of a conspiratorial frame of mind.
But an instrument of covert Jewish intellectual infiltration and cultural propaganda?
Decidedly not!
The whole idea is simply preposterous.
The idea of a worldwide conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons has been decisively exploded and widely discredited throughout much of the world.
It is treated with well-merited contempt and general derision, except in certain parts of the Middle East and by certain elements here in Malaysia who, following uncritically behind, are happy to take their lead from some of the most benighted minds of the Arab world.
So how has the idea of such a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons taken hold and, in those oddly minded parts of the world, become prevalent? How has it captured and convinced those for whom its claims are congenial and the political purpose that it projects so serviceable?
As is widely recognized and has been authoritatively established by leading historical researchers, the idea of a worldwide alliance and conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons was constructed, with a specific political objective in mind, in a late nineteenth-century work known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This was one of the world’s first purpose-designed exercises in modern political propaganda.
It was constructed and fabricated to serve the interests of the “post-liberalization” or “anti-reformist” Russian Tsars or “emperors.”
Their stance, from the early 1880s onwards, became increasingly authoritarian and avowedly ever more absolutist, anti-Western, anti-liberal and also (since it was pro-Slavic, appealing to those with ancient “roots in the Russian soil”) anti-Jewish.
In the name and cause of a renewed Slavic “medievalism” it was a stance that was basically obscurantist, backward-looking and anti-Enlightenment.
The propagandist who confected this fantasy simply composed a collage of fashionable, officially endorsed “evils”.
He identified all the different, and quite divergent and unrelated, groups whom the Tsar’s royalist advisers perceived as influential critics or potentially powerful opponents of the Tsar’s archaizing Slavic absolutism and then “tied them all up together” in one bundle.
Hence the typification of the Tsar’s enemies. He produced a propagandist’s collective “portrait” (much like a composite modern police “identikit” image) of the nominated wrongdoers as a devious, and tightly if covertly linked, group or “conspiracy” of modernizers, Westernizers, Enlightenment liberals, and Jews ― the last-named both as elite middle-class financiers and, quite contradictorily, at the same time as communist radicals.
