TEL AVIV – The Malaysian prime minister resumed his long-standing antisemitic rhetoric, describing Jews as “hook-nosed” and denying the Holocaust during an interview with the BBC.
“There are many races in this world, I have said nasty things about them but they never accused me of being anti-this or anti-that,” Mahathir Mohamad said on the program Hardtalk.
Asked about his description of Jews as “hook-nosed,” Mohamad added, “They are hook-nosed. Many people call the Malays flat-nosed. We did not object. We did not go to war for that.”
“If you are going to be truthful, the problem in the Middle East began with the creation of the State of Israel, that is the whole truth,” the Malaysian prime minister said.
In a flagrant denial of the Holocaust, Mohamad stated, “But the Israelis are special, you cannot even mention that in the Holocaust it was not six million.”
During his address to the UN General Assembly last week in New York, Mahathir said the world “rewards Israel” for committing acts of terror against Palestinians.
On his visit to the UK, Mohamad was welcomed by the heads of prestigious academic institutions Imperial College and Oxford University.
In the past Mohamad has boasted that he is “glad to be labelled anti-Semitic.” He has drawn comparisons between the Jews and the Nazis.
“Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them,” he said in 2013.
In 2010, he declared, “Jews had always been a problem in European countries. They had been confined in ghettos and periodically massacred. But they still remained and still thrived and held whole governments to ransom.”
Mohamad has also claimed that Jews “are not merely hook-nosed, but understand money instinctively.”