A Jewish Oxford student has condemned how the Malaysian prime minister - who called Jews "hook-nosed" in a BBC interview during his visit to the UK - was hosted at the university.
Mahathir Mohamad, the 93-year-old leader, who has espoused antisemitism for decades, addressed the university's Islamic Centre as part of a tour that and also took in Imperial College and the prestigious London think tank Chatham House.
Mr Mohamad arrived in London early Sunday morning and gave a speech at Oxford University’s Centre for Islamic Studies that day.
Jordan Bernstein, Oxford student and previous president of its J-Soc, told the JC: “The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies is an integral and important part of the university, both in its contribution to academia and in the support it provides to students.
"However, the centre’s decision to host Prime Minister Mohamad to speak must be condemned in the strongest terms. It is a move which risks giving air to, and hence legitimising, clearly racist views.
"Jews have a right to feel safe on campus, and inviting a speaker, whatever their qualifications, who proudly wears the badge of ‘antisemite’ seems antithetical to this.”
The centre told the JC it would not comment.
At Imperial College, the Malaysian prime minister met with billionaire inventor Sir James Dyson, before speaking at the prestigious Chatham House about the ‘Future of Democracy in Asia’ on Monday evening.
Director of Communications at Community Security Trust (CST), Mark Gardner, told the JC: “The Malaysian Prime Minister’s deep rooted antisemitism is very well known, but nobody will be surprised that his British hosts apparently deemed it too impolite or irrelevant to even mention it.”
Mr Gardner said that the UK’s welcoming reception is in “stark contrast” to “what the reaction would have been to an Israeli politician who made such racist comments against Muslims.”
A Chatham House spokesman denied that hosting Mohamad suggested support for his views, saying it "provides a neutral convening environment" that "does not imply endorsement".
During his visit to Britain, he gave an interview with the BBC's Hard Talk, in which he was asked why he called Jewish people "hook-nosed" in his 1970 book, The Malay Dilemma.
He said: "They are hook-nosed. Many people called the Malays fat-nosed. We didn’t object, we didn’t go to war for that."
In May, The Anti-Defemation League condemned Mr Mohamad's "decades-long record of antisemitic conspiracy theories".
