Despite a barrage of international criticism over his allegedly anti-Semitic remarks, an unrepentant Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad maintains that Jews are arrogant and insists they do control the world.
Among an array of world leaders, US President George W. Bush personally condemned Mahathir's statements and pulled him aside at the APEC meeting to say the remarks were "wrong and divisive," a White House spokesman said.
But Mahathir, who retires at the month's end after 22 years as the leader of mainly Muslim Malaysia, said the global reaction "shows that [Jews] do control the world," the Bangkok Post yesterday quoted him as saying.
PHOTO: REUTERS
"Israel is a small country. There are not many Jews in the world. But they are so arrogant that they defy the whole world. Even if the United Nations say no, they go ahead. Why? Because they have the backing of all these people," said Mahathir, who often makes acerbic speeches against globalization and US policy in the Middle East.
Mahathir triggered an uproar last week at a summit of Islamic countries by stating that "Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
The issue trailed him to the APEC summit, which was to close yesterday, where leaders ranging from Australia to the US continued to criticize Asia's senior statesman.
Shortly before Bush and Mahathir sat down together in the same room with 19 other APEC leaders Monday, US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the American president "thinks those remarks were reprehensible. I do not think they are emblematic of the Muslim world."
Later White House press secretary Scott McClellan quoted Bush as telling the Malaysian leader face to face that, "It stands squarely against what I believe in."
After Mahathir's latest comments published yesterday, Australian Prime Minister John Howard -- himself a regular target of Malaysia's ire because of his government's close ties to the US -- said, "any attempt to divide this world according to religious affiliation is the last thing we want."
The thrust of Mahathir's address, made at the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Kuala Lumpur, was that the world's 1.3 billion Muslims had been outmaneuvered by "a few million Jews" and needed to give up violence and think hard about greater unity and improved education to defend their interests peacefully.
Mahathir said in the Bangkok Post interview that his remarks had been taken out of context,
"In my speech I condemned all violence, even the suicide bombings and I told the Muslims it's about time we stopped all these things and paused to think and do something that is much more productive," he said. "That was the whole tone of my speech, but they picked up one sentence where I said that the Jews control the world."
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