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(A7) Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad went on an antisemitic rant on Twitter last week, claiming that Jews lacked gratitude for the sacrifice of allied soldiers during World War II and accused Israel of “doing to the Arabs what the Nazis did to you”, Haaretz reported Sunday.
Responding to a list of questions from the Jewish Chronicle, the 98-year-old Mahathir also questioned the number of Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust and claimed that Jews control much of the Western world.
Mahathir is notorious for his controversial statements against Israel and the Jewish people. In 2012, he wrote on his personal blog that “Jews rule this world by proxy.”
In August of 2018, Mahathir defended his right to be anti-Semitic, arguing that anti-Semitism is an artificial construct created to silence critics of the Jews.
In October that year, he said that Jews are “hook-nosed” and accused them of creating problems in the Middle East.
In June of 2019, he unleashed a stream of antisemitic statements during an appearance at Cambridge University.
“I have some Jewish friends, very good friends. They are not like the other Jews, that’s why they are my friends,” he said in response to a question about previous anti-Jewish statements. The response was met with laughter from some in the audience.
In September of 2019, Mahathir spoke at Columbia University as part of its annual world leaders forum, where he defended his past antisemitic statements and questioned the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust.
In the latest incident, the London-based newspaper reached out to Mahathir following a recent visit to the UK, during which he was feted by multiple local religious organizations.
Asked about several previous antisemitic statements by the Jewish Chronicle, Mahathir doubled down, stating that while he sympathized with Jewish suffering only “before the creation of the state of Israel,” whose territory he claimed no longer belongs to the Jews.
“Maybe the Jews once lived in that territory. But other people lived there before the Jews,” he wrote, asserting that aboriginal people no longer have claims to their lands and that “the definitive people of American and Australian are white people originally from Europe.”
“With all your arrogance and cruelty how can I keep sympathizing over your suffering during the holocaust. It was a sympathy that was misplaced and wasted,” he added, justifying his decision as prime minister to ban the Holocaust film Schindler’s List.
“But after your seizure of Palestinian land, expulsion of the Palestinians from their land, oppressing them, jailing them, killing them, I have lost any sympathy that I had for you. I reject Jewish propaganda regarding your sufferings during the holocaust,” charged Mahathir.
Jews, Mahathir continued, “invented and dominate the banking system. They gain control over much of the western media. Their scientists invented the nuclear weapons and other weapons.”
“As a result they have become so influential in Europe and America that these countries have become pro-semitic and support even criminal acts by the Israelis.”
On his 2019 comment about having “some Jewish friends” who were “not like the other Jews,” Mahathir tweeted that “simply because I had Jewish friend, does not mean I should not condemn Jewish wrong doings, Jewish oppression and Jewish seizures of Arab land.”
Defending his challenging of historical accounts that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, Mahathir asked how people arrived at that number, asserting that “it could have been more; it could have been less. If I said it was 4 million, I may be right or I may be wrong.”
