'Jews rule the world by proxy'
2003-10-16 08:15
Putrajaya, Malaysia - The biggest summit of Islamic leaders in three years opened on Thursday with calls for the world's 1.3bn Muslims to unite against "a few million Jews" who allegedly rule the world by controlling the world's major powers.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Muslims for years believed mistakenly that Islam rejected new technology and progress. He urged Muslims world-wide to ignore teachings by religious fundamentalists that scientific studies are somehow un-Islamic.
"We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defence," Mahathir told leaders from 57 nations gathered for a summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
"But because we are discouraged from learning of science and mathematics... today we have no capacity to produce our weapons for our defence," he said.
Malaysia, a moderate, mostly Muslim nation in Southeast Asia, has long been a long-time critic of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories and of US policy in the Middle East, including its strong backing of the Jewish state.
Mahathir, chairing the two-day summit, launched a blistering attack on what he described as Jewish domination of the world and Muslim nations' inability to adequately respond to it.
"The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy," Mahathir said. "They get others to fight and die for them."
'They survived by thinking'
"We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back but by thinking," Mahathir said. "They invented Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others."
"With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power."
Mahathir said that "1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way."
'Final victory'
He suggested new tactics other than lashing out violently against "the enemy," including leveraging the political, economic and demographic forces at the disposal of Muslim nations, calling it a "strategic retreat" that would lead to "final victory."
Other leaders also attacked Israel, making its treatment of the Palestinians on the occupied territories a centrepiece of their speeches at the conference.
"The cause of the Palestinian people will remain our organisation's major concern," Moroccan King Mohammed VI said.
The OIC meetings are being held in Putrajaya, the gleaming new administrative capital of Malaysia, which has used limited oil and commodity resources to become a major exporter of high-tech goods and the world's 17th top trading nation.
- AP