Soros was dead right about Mahathir
What's the difference between former Malaysian premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Nothing.
Both are charlatans. Both are racist to their core. Both must be condemned without hesitation and reservation.
Ahmadinejad has been adamant that the Jewish holocaust during Hitler's reign was a figment of Western imagination. Worse, it was a conspiracy to hoodwink the rest of the world into offering sympathy to the Jewish race and the Jewish state of Israel.
Mahathir is renowned for his anti-Semiticism. Recall, during the height of the late nineties financial crisis when he blamed billionaire George Soros and his Quantum Fund for trying to bring the Malaysian economy to its knees.
All that without a shred of evidence. For which he was pasted by Soros, calling Mahathir a 'menace to his own country'. Soros was dead right.
Nevertheless Mahathir has continued with his imbecilic rants. Last week he suggested that if Americans can make 'Avatar', the world's top-grossing film, so spectacularly and convincingly, then they must have also manufactured their own bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York and elsewhere in and around Washington, DC and all this just to pin blame on the world's Muslims.
Mahathir has never been one to depend on cold, hard evidence. He banged up Anwar Ibrahim without a cantlet of evidence, and countless other times when he willfully nabbed and jailed under the Stalinist ISA his critics and opponents.
You can be sure people like Ahmadinejad who are Mahathir's ardent fans would have applauded him.
And Malaysians across the races have long put Mahathir on a pedestal. They even called him an international 'statesman'. Je was even named him 'Man of the Millennium'.
Go figure: Why reward a desperate xenophobic and devious dictator with ludicrous titles and banal praise?
Mahathir is a crass populist. Always has been. Read Barry Wain's book 'The Malaysian Maverick', thus far 'refused sale' in Malaysia. It's code for banning the book.
Such oft-contradictory idiocy by the Malaysian ministers and their bureaucratic class has stopped amazing me a long time ago. Idiocy is expected, by nature, in Malaysian political life.
Mahathir has always used his brand of Malay-ness (despite his Indian ancestry, of which he refuses to discuss or even accept, wholly usurping his Malay mother's side and crafting his 'Malay' identity through this), his brand of racist neo-nationalism, his brand of Islam, which can warp from time to time depending on his political agenda, and melding all of these into pushing forth his authoritarianism by centralising power in his hands for 22 years.
Except for the reprehensible sections of the world who see authoritarianism and the brutalising of human rights as a virtue whilst they cronyistically siphon off the wealth of their own countries, the rest of the world has ignored Mahathir. And this cuts him up.
The US embassy in Kuala Lumpur refused to comment, not because they didn't want to buy into his tired baloney, but because he's just not worth their time.
Mahathir is a tired, angry old fogey who craves attention. He fears his growing irrelevance amongst his adoring Muslim brotherhood, at least of the monied class, and even amongst those in Malaysia who have supported him.
The next generation of Malaysians, including Malays, may not know Mahathir any more than they will know much else given the parlous and shameful state of Malaysian education, which borders on the lunacy of inwardness, irrelevance and incompetence.
Which explains so-called policies such as '1Malaysia' and the National Civics Bureau - all baldfaced attempts that seek, in fact, to ideologically indoctrinate innocuous Malays, pitting them against non-Malays on the basis of barefaced lies and institutionalised racism.
Even the Malaysian constitution, so bastardised since independence by ruling Malaysian politicians, defends and embeds institutionalised racism, almost on par with the former apartheid system in South Africa.
Such massive corruption
Mahathir is a menace to his country, even in retirement. Nobody is telling him to shut up. He has every democratic right to voice his opinions. It's a pity that he disenfranchised these same democratic rights from the rest of the Malaysian citizenry during his 'lordship' except for his cronies, whom he helped enrich at the expense of the bulk of other Malaysians.
Mahathir not only lied to them; he also cheated his 'own' Malays, many of whom continue to live at the same level of poverty that
previous generations had in the 1950s and 60s. The New Economic Policy was a spectacular failure.
Mahathir's 'The Malay Dilemma' was a joke aimed at delivering him and his cronies to the pinnacle of power.
Mahathirism is laughable because it only fanned such massive corruption throughout Malaysia that today it reaches every echelon of the cabinet, bureaucracy and security forces, including the hopelessly incompetent police force.
Mahathir had presided over this corruption in full knowledge. He should be hammered from all sides for this, and for his diehard racism.
He must be constantly reminded that he's not god, any more than he may think that he's above the law. But the gutless Najib Abdul Razak regime won't even dare touch him.
Both are charlatans. Both are racist to their core. Both must be condemned without hesitation and reservation.
Ahmadinejad has been adamant that the Jewish holocaust during Hitler's reign was a figment of Western imagination. Worse, it was a conspiracy to hoodwink the rest of the world into offering sympathy to the Jewish race and the Jewish state of Israel.
Mahathir is renowned for his anti-Semiticism. Recall, during the height of the late nineties financial crisis when he blamed billionaire George Soros and his Quantum Fund for trying to bring the Malaysian economy to its knees.
All that without a shred of evidence. For which he was pasted by Soros, calling Mahathir a 'menace to his own country'. Soros was dead right.
Nevertheless Mahathir has continued with his imbecilic rants. Last week he suggested that if Americans can make 'Avatar', the world's top-grossing film, so spectacularly and convincingly, then they must have also manufactured their own bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York and elsewhere in and around Washington, DC and all this just to pin blame on the world's Muslims.
Mahathir has never been one to depend on cold, hard evidence. He banged up Anwar Ibrahim without a cantlet of evidence, and countless other times when he willfully nabbed and jailed under the Stalinist ISA his critics and opponents.
You can be sure people like Ahmadinejad who are Mahathir's ardent fans would have applauded him.
And Malaysians across the races have long put Mahathir on a pedestal. They even called him an international 'statesman'. Je was even named him 'Man of the Millennium'.
Go figure: Why reward a desperate xenophobic and devious dictator with ludicrous titles and banal praise?
Racist neo-nationalism
So what's Mahathir's motive for making such inane comments? Is it politically calculated?Mahathir is a crass populist. Always has been. Read Barry Wain's book 'The Malaysian Maverick', thus far 'refused sale' in Malaysia. It's code for banning the book.
Such oft-contradictory idiocy by the Malaysian ministers and their bureaucratic class has stopped amazing me a long time ago. Idiocy is expected, by nature, in Malaysian political life.
Mahathir has always used his brand of Malay-ness (despite his Indian ancestry, of which he refuses to discuss or even accept, wholly usurping his Malay mother's side and crafting his 'Malay' identity through this), his brand of racist neo-nationalism, his brand of Islam, which can warp from time to time depending on his political agenda, and melding all of these into pushing forth his authoritarianism by centralising power in his hands for 22 years.
Except for the reprehensible sections of the world who see authoritarianism and the brutalising of human rights as a virtue whilst they cronyistically siphon off the wealth of their own countries, the rest of the world has ignored Mahathir. And this cuts him up.
The US embassy in Kuala Lumpur refused to comment, not because they didn't want to buy into his tired baloney, but because he's just not worth their time.
Mahathir is a tired, angry old fogey who craves attention. He fears his growing irrelevance amongst his adoring Muslim brotherhood, at least of the monied class, and even amongst those in Malaysia who have supported him.
The next generation of Malaysians, including Malays, may not know Mahathir any more than they will know much else given the parlous and shameful state of Malaysian education, which borders on the lunacy of inwardness, irrelevance and incompetence.
Which explains so-called policies such as '1Malaysia' and the National Civics Bureau - all baldfaced attempts that seek, in fact, to ideologically indoctrinate innocuous Malays, pitting them against non-Malays on the basis of barefaced lies and institutionalised racism.
Even the Malaysian constitution, so bastardised since independence by ruling Malaysian politicians, defends and embeds institutionalised racism, almost on par with the former apartheid system in South Africa.
Such massive corruption
Mahathir is a menace to his country, even in retirement. Nobody is telling him to shut up. He has every democratic right to voice his opinions. It's a pity that he disenfranchised these same democratic rights from the rest of the Malaysian citizenry during his 'lordship' except for his cronies, whom he helped enrich at the expense of the bulk of other Malaysians.
Mahathir not only lied to them; he also cheated his 'own' Malays, many of whom continue to live at the same level of poverty that
previous generations had in the 1950s and 60s. The New Economic Policy was a spectacular failure.Mahathir's 'The Malay Dilemma' was a joke aimed at delivering him and his cronies to the pinnacle of power.
Mahathirism is laughable because it only fanned such massive corruption throughout Malaysia that today it reaches every echelon of the cabinet, bureaucracy and security forces, including the hopelessly incompetent police force.
Mahathir had presided over this corruption in full knowledge. He should be hammered from all sides for this, and for his diehard racism.
He must be constantly reminded that he's not god, any more than he may think that he's above the law. But the gutless Najib Abdul Razak regime won't even dare touch him.
MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.
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