> Mahathir's surely not wrong in saying that Israel
> exercises a significant weight with US foreign policy and that
> Muslims might learn from that, absorbing the lesson of the futility
> of violence at this juncture?
IMO Mahathir _is_ wrong and he is buying into antisemitic conspiracy theory, because the the reverse is true --- Israel is a useful surrogate for the US in the ME, and for that reason the US has "significant weight" (e.g. billions of $ in aid) in Israeli foreign policy.
> in view of the
> contemporaneous reports about that US under-secretary's speeches re
> the satanic Muslims, and the writings of such as Lewis and Pipes,
> etc., not to mention Friedman -- is sanctimonious cant.
That doesn't make Mahathir any less a jewbasher. It was only a few months ago that members of his party were flogging Henry Ford's Nazi propaganda and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
> While it is no longer permissible in respectable company to talk
> of Jewish control of the US this or that, it is not only respectable
> but seemingly well-founded academic wisdom to go on and on about the
> Chinese control of the economy, etc. Pick up virtually any summary
> article on Malaysia and there it will be: the Chinese dominate the
> economy. Heck, that was said thirty years ago when foreign ownership
> of corporate equity was running at close to 70%, and the bulk of
> large plantations and tin mines were foreign owned.
Which brings me to Mahathir's more demonstrable form of racism --- "affirmative action" is usually used to promote _minorities_ , but not in Malaysia. He is a classic right-wing capitalist politician, feeding ethnic and religious bigotry, to promote the interests of a racially-defined, indigenous majority capitalist class, as well as global capital. Even liberal muslims like Anwar have been the targets of Mahathir's smear campaigns and repression. Why shouldn't he be held to the same standards as the likes of Berlusconi?