Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times by Barry Wain (fantasy novels to read .TXT) 📕

as bleak as the winter weather. An embarrassed junior official tried to save the occasion, on his own initiative, by hosting a dinner for Dr. Mahathir.[63] Nearly 40 years later, Dr. Mahathir had not forgotten how he was treated by the Australians when "out of the government". He said, "They invited me to visit, and then they cancelled it." Was it a calculated snub? "I don't know whether it was deliberate, but anyway they cancelled it."[64]

In government, Dr. Mahathir did not try to hide his dislike of Australia. Hosting a state dinner in Kuala Lumpur for Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in 1982, Dr. Mahathir delivered caustic comments that were "unnecessarily provocative and in extremely poor taste", according to a Malaysian account.[65] On his only official visit to Australia in 1984 he was immensely sympathetic to Prime Minister Hawke, who broke down and wept during their meeting, having just learned of his daughter's potentially fatal drug addiction. Responding both as a fellow parent and doctor, Dr. Mahathir went to considerable personal lengths to get information that he thought might help the Hawke family.[66] But politics was something else. Dr. Mahathir's failure to make another official visit to Australia in 18 years was an expression of disapproval by one of Asia's most travelled leaders.

His general gripe was that Australians, in or out of government, were too fond of criticizing — "that we are not up to their mark and we don't know how to run our country; we don't practice human rights; our democracy is defective...".[67] An exchange in 1988 showed just how deeply Dr. Mahathir resented such unsolicited advice. Responding to a protest by more than 100 Australian members of parliament over the detention without trial of Malaysian politicians, activists and intellectuals in Operation Lalang, Dr. Mahathir wrote, "When Australia was at the stage of Malaysia's present development, you solved your aborigines problem by simply shooting them". After explaining the need for "harsh" laws to ensure tensions were contained in a multi-racial country, he told the parliamentarians to "please concentrate on fair treatment for the aborigines and the Asians in your midst and leave us alone".[68] While Dr. Mahathir was prime minister, bilateral relations would remain in what Malaysian academic Shamsui Amri Baharuddin called a state of "stable tension" — trouble could flare at any time.[69]

Dr. Mahathir's regular skirmishes with Western governments, together with his use of crude language and references to race and religion, invited the judgment that he was blindly anti-Caucasian — and anti-Semitic, since the religion he targeted was usually Judaism. Yet he formed close personal friendships not only with Margaret Thatcher, but other prominent Western officials such as Henry Kissinger, the Jewish former U.S. secretary of state. He also courted leading international corporate figures, persuading the likes of Microsoft founder Bill Gates to act as an adviser to Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor.[70] In fact, most of Dr. Mahathir's anti-West rhetoric was designed to provide him with political cover on the domestic front, or give Malaysians a reason to close ethnic ranks and rally behind the government. It was a potent tool when Dr. Mahathir's leadership of the party or country was under threat.[7l]

As for his outrageous and sometimes odd remarks about Jews, Dr. Mahathir chose to live recklessly. His statements no doubt were anti-Semitic at times, and to the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, formed specifically to fight anti-Semitism, Dr. Mahathir was an "unrepentant anti-Semite".[72] But he denied it, and almost no one who knew him well or observed him at close quarters for any length of time believed he was anti-Semitic. Dr. Mahathir had the habit of denigrating anyone or anything he did not like, and he was not about to restrain himself over Jews. One problem was that he failed to distinguish between "Jews" and "Israel" or "Israelis", using the terms interchangeably. As one of Israel's fiercest mainstream critics — Malaysia did not recognize Tel Aviv — Dr. Mahathir was irked that Muslims could so easily be labelled terrorists, while any condemnation of Israel — a "terrorist state", as he called it — brought an outcry alleging anti-Semitism. Another problem was that Dr. Mahathir had long presented his views of race in terms of stereotypes, distinguished not only by ethnic origin but also other characteristics. As an illustration, he said in The Malay Dilemma that Jews "are not merely hook-nosed, but understand money instinctively".[73] He also wrote: "Jewish stinginess and financial wizardry gained them the commercial control of Europe and provoked an anti-Semitism...".[74] Dr. Mahathir dealt similarly, and at length, with Malaysia's Chinese and Malays — complete with theories of inbreeding — reserving his harshest judgment for his own community. He described the Malays as chronically backward and subservient. So while his analytical approach was hardly scientific and his conclusions questionable, he clearly did not discriminate on the basis of religion or ethnicity.

The record showed that the New York Philharmonic cancelled a proposed visit to Malaysia in 1984 after the government demanded that a work by Swiss Jewish composer Ernest Bloch be removed from the programme, and Steven Spielberg withdrew "Schindler's List" from distribution in Malaysia after the Cabinet ruled in 1994 that several scenes be cut from the movie. Dr. Mahathir voiced no public objection when some UMNO members handed out copies of American industrialist Henry Ford's anti-Semitic book, The International Jew, at the UMNO General Assembly in 2003.[75] Dr. Mahathir countered that he personally invited 14 Israeli high school students to visit Malaysia in 1997, followed soon after by an Israeli cricket team. "I have friends who are Jews," he said, without a trace of irony or embarrassment.[76]

Dr. Mahathir, the politician and Islamic statesman, used extreme language against the perceived enemies of Islam as a device to get his message across in the Muslim world. The message was as pragmatic as it was uncompromising, that if 1.3 billion Muslims were oppressed and humiliated it was largely their own fault, and only they could rescue themselves. Dr. Mahathir couched his problematic statements in the "dichotomies