MAHATHIR'S OIC SPEECH

What Is This Brouhaha All About?

The chorus of condemnation targetting Dr Mahathir Mohammad’s alleged racial slur in his address at last month’s OIC meet at Putrajaya against Jews still continues. Among several other things, he had remarked that Jews make others fight proxy wars on their behalf. Quite a few people are feigning injured innocence. The US Department of State took no time to denounce Mahathir, as did the Italian foreign minister by condemning the speech in his capacity as foreign minister of Italy as well as by raising the issue at a European Union ministerial. The largely Jewish-controlled US media raised a storm over Mahathir’s remarks that is yet to die down.

Amid the orchestrated madness some saner voices too have been heard every now and then. In his column in the New York Times  Paul Krugman remarked that in his long speech Mahathir’s reference to Jews was contained in 28 words only. And the essential message was not hatred against Jews, but to learn from them how to act in adversity. It did not incite violence against them, but asked Muslims to use their minds as Jews had chosen not to retaliate against Europeans, but build a new life for themselves using their minds.

The brouhaha over Mahathir’s remarks seems contrived and strange as he has not said anything about America fighting a proxy war (in Iraq on behalf of Israel) that mainstream media in the US, Britain and Israel have not already written about in great detail. Given below are excerpts from six major publications –– the American Conservative, Time, New York Times (US), the Guardian (UK), the Ha’aretz (Israel) and the Sacramento Bee (US) –– that say far more on the issue than Mahathir did.

In the July 17, 2003 issue of the Guardian Julian Borger said that right-wingers in the US administration had created an Office of Special Plans to gather valuable intelligence, bypassing the CIA. Created under the influence and inspiration of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it had direct access to Vice President Dick Cheney and the White House. It was itching for a war with Iraq on the specious plea that it had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and Saddam regime had relations will al Qaeda. Of course, the first turned out to be a monumental farce, but the Bush administration tried to hold fast to the al Qaeda-Saddam angle. The group of neoconservatives trying desperately to push President Bush into an Iraq war fed “the Bush administration with more alarmist reports than Mossad was prepared to authorise”, Borger wrote. Interestingly, most of these neocons are Jews with strong Israeli ties.

Ari Shavit wrote in the April 5, 2003 issue of Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz:

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history.

In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town (Washington), the belief in war against Iraq. The ardent faith was disseminated by a group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history.

Columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times  wrote in April 4 issue of the newspaper with characteristic chutzpah:

I could give you the names of 25 (all of whom are at this moment within a five block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.

 It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris.

 Joe Klien wrote in theTime  magazine of February 5, 2003:

 A stronger Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is a part of the argument that dare not speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by the neoconservative faction in the Bush administration and by many leaders of the American Jewish community.

 The fantasy involves a domino theory. The destruction of Saddam’s Iraq will not only remove an enemy of long-standing but will also change the basic power equation in the region. It will send a message to Syria and Iran and to Palestinians too: Democratise and make peace on Israeli terms or forget about a state of your own.

 It is quite clear from the above whose proxy war America is waging against the Iraqi people: “A stronger Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war in Iraq.” Also, the war would deter Syria from helping the Palestinian struggle for independence and force Palestinians “to make peace on Israel’s terms or forget about a state of their own”. Is it not a clear example of the Jews making others fight proxy wars on their behalf as Mahathir said?

James Rosen, wrote in the Sacramento Bee of April 6, 2003:

 In 1996, as Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to take office (in Israel), eight Jewish neoconservative leaders sent him a 6-page memo outlining an aggressive vision of government. At the top of their list was overthrowing Saddam and replacing him with a monarch under the control of Jordan.

 The neoconservatives sketched out a kind of domino theory in which the governments of Syria and other Arab countries might later fall or be replaced in the wake of Saddam’s ouster. They urged Netanyahu to spurn the Oslo peace accords and stop making concessions to the Palestinians.

Lead writer of the memo was Perle, other signatories were Feith, now (US) undersecretary of defence, and Wurmser, a senior advisor to John Bolton, now (US) undersecretary of state.

 Fred Donner, a professor of Near Eastern history at the university of Chicago, said he was struck by the similarities between the ideas in the memo and ideas now at the forefront of Bush foreign policy.

One wonders what the Mahathir brouhaha is all about. Did Mahathir say anything that the world did not already know? Even the Israeli attack on Syria follows this old Zionist script. So does the American warning to Iran.

Mohd Zeyaul HAQUE