Is Malaysia at war with the Jewish people and the state of Israel? The gathering at the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka was a night of 'Jew bashing'.
It was an eye opener, that the political elite in this country are rabidly anti-Semitic. In Malaysia, mainstream newspapers always demonise the Jews parroting the Arabic publications. Hence, anti-Semitism is spreading like an ugly virus.
Indeed it is no fun being a Palestinian. They don't have an economy worth participating in. The Oslo accords, which granted a halfway sort of authority did not work and would not have worked.
A Palestinian state is inconceivable. It would simply be a time bomb under Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been "artificially created" to focus attention away from the lack of economic and social progress in most of the Arab world. The Palestinian people have been scapegoats to justify everything that is wrong in the Arab world.
Look at the track record of Arabs since their independence from colonial powers. What have they achieved? What have they built? Where in the Arab world is there a trace of democracy? Of constitutionalism? Free inquiry? Where in anyone's house is there an article stamped 'made in Saudi Arabia'?
If following the Oslo accords — or for that matter, in the 20 years of Jordanian occupation, had the Palestinians set aside their fantasies of nationhood, and concentrated on building something more economically viable, it would have been a different ball game altogether.
The number of Palestinians in UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) camps has gone up from 600,000 in 1948 to nearly four million today.
Even if their lives had not been ruined by welfare bureaucracy, the Palestinians would not have been able to get their act together. None of the Arabs have. The Arab world, mind you with their oil wealth, squalor, despotism, cruelty and hopelessness riddle the middle-eastern landscape.
The best they have been able to manage politically speaking are being governed by thugs like Assad, Gaddafi or Saddam. It does not have anything to do with religion, the secular states like Iraq and Syria are just as hopeless as the religious ones like Saudi Arabia.
Are Malaysians supposed to support the notion of a Palestinian state. Why? Everyone knows what it would be like. It will become another 'thug-run state'.
The only issue holding the Arab states together is the issue of Palestine, hence the deluge of anti-Semitism. PAS and Umno, desperate for Malay unity, have fallen into this trap, by seizing upon this issue.
It's an Arab problem, let the Arabs solve it.
*Editor's note : A couple of readers have pointed out
the similarities in the sentences here with those in John Derbyshire's, National Review online article "Why don't I care about the Palestinians?" (May 9). We would like to remind our readers that we view plagiarism very seriously and letters to the editor, in part or in whole, should be attributed to the original writers if they were taken from elsewhere.