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v Last week, the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad telephoned Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, to express his government’s strong support for the Palestinian cause.
Significantly, Mr Mahathir chose Palestinian Islamism and not Palestinian nationalism — Hamas, rather than Fatah — to demonstrate Malaysian solidarity. His telephone call came shortly after his controversial anti-Jewish — as opposed to anti-Zionist — remarks at the Oxford Union.
As a radical Islamist, the 93-year-old premier came of political age after 1945, an era of anti-colonial struggles for independence, but also during the conflict between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs which ended in the establishment of a Hebrew republic and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
Although there were quiet contacts and growing trade relations, Malaysia has never recognised Israel and refused to establish diplomatic relations, and Mr Mahathir’s approach has long outstripped that of many Arab leaders towards Israel in its uncompromising virulence.
Whereas most Arab leaders have studiously avoided attacking Jews per se, he demonstrated no qualms about plunging into a racist cesspit for over half a century.
Tunku Abdul Rahman, the founder of the Malaysian Federation, hoped to establish diplomatic relations with Israel on independence in 1963. Indeed Golda Meir, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, sent him a congratulatory telegram — but internal Islamist opposition and rivalry with its neighbour, Indonesia, stopped any progress.
In November 1964, Moshe Yegar established a commercial concern in Malaysia, which became a point of contact between the two countries, but he was expelled in January 1966 due to Islamist pressure.
Malaysia has refused, time and again, to allow Israelis to visit the country. In January 1968, Israeli seamen were refused permission to disembark. The following year, it became the first Asian country to permit Fatah to open an office. Full diplomatic recognition was accorded the PLO in 1982.
Mr Mahathir himself has advocated force to retake lost Palestinian land and, during a visit to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in 1986, told his audience that the Jews had become “gifted students of Goebbels”.
In December 1992, Malaysia refused to allow an Israeli footballer, a member of the Liverpool team, to enter the country. Liverpool ended up cancelling the entire trip.
The Oslo Accords created a dilemma for the Malaysian Prime Minister — after all, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin had resolved to work for peace and reconciliation.
He did not establish diplomatic relations or revoke the trade embargo but did allow Malaysian Muslims to visit Jerusalem.
In the election campaign that returned him to power last year, he told the crowd that, if Donald Trump could ban Muslims from five countries — “Why can’t I?” And so, Malaysia refused to allow an Israeli Paralympic team to enter the country for a (now removed from Malaysia) qualification event for the 2020 Games.
While all this reflects the ongoing Israel-Palestine imbroglio, it is Mr Mahathir’s antisemitic comments which are exceptional: not the odd outburst from a doddering nonagenarian, but the latest in a long career built on the promotion of Malay nationalism to the disparagement of others: Chinese, Indians, indigenous ethnic groups — and the Jews.
Despite claims of a model multi-ethnic society, Mr Mahathir’s about-turn on a UN agreement on racial discrimination last month was simply the latest episode in this saga.
Mahathir’s anti-Jewish comments in Oxford reiterated what he had written in his 1970 book The Malay Dilemma, a title banned in Malaysia until he took power in 1981.
The Chinese were “almond-eyed”and “inherently good businessmen”; the “fair-skinned” Europeans possessed “an insatiable curiosity”, the Malays were “brown, easy-going and tolerant” while “the hook-nosed Jews understood money instinctively”.
It was “Jewish stinginess and financial wizardry,” according to Mr Mahathir, that allowed them to gain “commercial control of Europe”.
It was this world outlook that allowed Mr Mahathir to describe the Wall Street Journal as “a Jewish tool” and permit the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s The International Jew in Malaysia.
He refused to allow the New York Philharmonic to include a work by the Jewish composer Ernst Bloch in its repertoire (August 1984), banned the showing of Schindler’s List (March 1994) and promulgated the belief that George Soros was behind the economic crisis of 1997 in Malaysia.
Yet the Oxford Union preferred to brush such racism under the carpet and to promote Mr Mahathir’s anti-imperialism and Malaysia’s economic prowess instead. It is another example of the closing of the progressive mind in which universal principles are gleefully abandoned.
