Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [255]
16. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech to Congress available at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/national/speeches/spch2.html (November 9, 2003).
17. See Buhite and Levy, Fireside Chats.
18. See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/bush.statement (November 9, 2003).
19. I am not thinking here so much of the verbal idiosyncrasies that have occasioned so much innocent humor, but the words that are “wrong,” off-key, for the circumstances in which they are spoken. President George W. Bush is much more prone to this kind of misspeaking than his father.
20. Official transcript. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030702-3.html (November 9, 2003).
21. Ibid. I have changed “them” to “ ’em,” because this clearly is what the audio recording presents rather than the tidied-up version of the transcript. These minor variations in tone are significant.
22. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Towards a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986. The whole final section is significant. “There is neither a first or a last word and there are no limits to a dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even ‘past’ meaning, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed, in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue). At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of a dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in a new form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming.”
23. See Allen Brill, The Right Christians: “It is time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christians. Prime Minister Mahathir’s main point was a valuable one: Muslims must embrace modernity. That was bitter medicine for fundamentalists who would like to go retreat into some idealized past when Islam was dominant throughout the Mediterranean world, so Mahathir took the seemingly easy course of adding plenty of the ‘sugar’ of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. While the broader world audience would have been ready to applaud him for his condemnation of terrorism, his giving in to the temptation to tell his audience what it wanted to hear—Jews are evil and powerful—made that impossible.” See October 18, 2003, http://www.therightchristians.org.
24. For Mahathir’s full address, see the version reported at Millat Online, October 16, 2003, http://www.millat.com/events/oic/index.htm (November 9, 2003). The whole address totaled some fifty-eight sections, and the three sentences about the Holocaust which principally appalled Western opinion was in section 39 (“We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”) In section 34 he said, “It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack.” But in section 42 he declared: “We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us. Some are well disposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.”
25. See Jerry Chamkis at http://lists.gp-us.org/pipermail/texgreen/2003-August/002924. html (November 9, 2003).
26. See Brill (note 23): “At the time, what he said produced not criticism but accolades. Now that a broader community has heard what he said while in uniform, it’s a different story.”
27. There is an Encyclopaedia of Dr Mahathir Bin Mohammad, Prime Minister of Malaysia. At the book’s launch “Dr Mahathir in his recorded