Let's not take anything away from Malaysia's retiring prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad. By any measure Mahathir is a vile racist and a detestable autocrat. And he's devious with truth, facts and history a merchant of spin that his state-controlled media slurps and slaps up. Even the idea propagated by his cockeyed supporters, that Mahathir has been solely responsible for Malaysia's economic 'successes', is as delusional as their lofting the bigot to statesman.

Mahathir is a stencil of that other Third World despot, the despicable racist, thieving and murderous tyrant, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Both men loathe domestic dissenters; they revile criticism of their rule from inside and outside. Both are xenophobic and homophobic. And in their pretension of being hard nationalists, it's mostly for domestic political consumption. The old codgers will take pot shots but only at a long list of slow moving targets that are predominantly whites and the West. For Mahathir better if the targets are Jews and Anglophiles.

All this is perhaps in their blithe efforts to shore up their paltry images for the sake of a place in history's annals. But their own doing has blackened their names. The BBC's John Simpson is dead right: "Mahathir will be remembered less as a man who transformed his country and more as a tiresome old autocrat who is just hung up on the past."

Distorting the facts

In his twilight years, and last days in office, Mahathir has gone completely batty, spewing bile after bile. He has lost his marbles many times before, but he certainly went over the top before the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a peak body heralding 57 Islamic nations. The OIC is about as relevant as the Non-Aligned Movement. Only 33 members bothered to turn up to the Islamic talk-shop, assembling recently at Mahathir's RM30 billion lavish administrative centre, Putrajaya, where Mahathir's office alone has cost Malaysian taxpayers RM5 billion of their money. It's just one more symbol of Mahathir's wasteful pretentious grandeur, another swab of the white elephantitis disease that has long marked his regime.

Mahathir told the OIC people that's if they weren't asleep in their comfortable seats and their women weren't busy shopping in Kuala Lumpur's many mega-shopping malls that "the world is looking at us". Indeed it was. Meeting for the first time since the Islamic terrorist attacks in America, Bali and Jakarta, a non-event looked certain until Mahathir lashed out, again, with his remarks about the world's Jews. He copped a black eye, deservedly.

His sycophants in Malaysia's state-controlled media were quick to his defence. They choreographed that there was nothing wrong with Mahathir stating the 'fact' that "Jews control the world by proxy", or that the Jews get "others to fight and die for them". But if these perfunctory drivellers had done some research, and if they had any integrity whatsoever, they'd have known that Mahathir had grossly distorted that 'fact', and more by posing a scurrilous claim in absolute terms. But then these sycophants are products of Mahathir's education system.

Mahathir has established form on not just hurling insults but, worse, deeply hateful racist gibes and slander. These last few years he has grappled with intelligent things to say. But for Western journalists to suggest that Mahathir's most recent diatribe again illustrates the man as mysterious and a paradox only shows their own naivety. Even worse, such labels accord a renowned racist a gratuitous excuse. Mahathir is neither mysterious nor a paradox.

'Hooked-nosed' Jews

Thirty-three years ago Mahathir had labelled Jews as 'hooked-nosed' power-mongers who could smell money like the Chinese. How would Mahathir react if Malay-Muslims are depicted derogatorily? In 1970, in his book The Malay Dilemma, which became the constitution by which racist strategies framed the New Economic Policy a statist 'affirmative' plan to secure ethnic balance in economic, social and political life in Malaysia for Malay-Muslims Mahathir had also targeted Chinese Malaysians as the bogeys of Malay-Muslims' problems.

During the Asian economic crisis, he called Jewish-American billionaire financier George Soros "a moron". Mahathir lives, breathes and has nightmares about foreign conspiracies. Here's Mahathir's pathetic defence: "We are Muslims, and the Jews are not happy to see Muslims progress. We may suspect that they have an agenda, but we do not want to accuse them." That's double-speak. He was also playing up to a deeply fractured Malay-Muslim constituency, for whom Jews were portrayed as faraway enemies of Islam. It was also Mahathir's veiled attempt at political point scoring at a time when Anwar Ibrahim was readying to challenge Mahathir for Umno presidency.

In a keynote speech before Umno in 1999, Mahathir heaped contempt on what he called "ethnic Europeans", whom he reckoned were bent on "recolonising Malaysia". He added: "Many among them are of the opinion that Muslims cannot possibly succeed, more so when their skin colour is brown." It's always the same old bile.

At the OIC he called Jews "thinking people" but amid racially motivated taunts. That was his so-called "context". In the week after the OIC meeting, Mahathir and his stooges in government and the media desperately tried to explain away that it's his frustration that always gets the better of him. Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar offered this hare-brained justification: because of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Muslims feel "sidelined or marginalised"; that's why they carp about the Jews. Yet Mahathir has been cracking down on Islamic radicals, extremists and militants at home. It's simple: nobody trusts a racist with form.

If Mahathir and his sycophants really feel that 1.3 billion Muslims are feeling marginalised, and if Mahathir has any aptitude for honesty, he'll look long and hard inside each of the Islamic states, including his own, and see that for the most part it is cowardly regimes like his and others ruled by vile, corrupt despots who shamelessly use variants of Islam to oppress their own people including Muslims.

Racial vilification

In fact, the greatest part of Muslims' sense of deprivation stems from domestic policies that manifest in the mal and mis- distribution of the national wealth, including access to vital resources which are reserved for the regimes' cronies and oligarchs. Primary example since it wants to champion itself as a 'success story' among the world's Muslim states is Malaysia, under Mahathir. The statistics, if Mahathir hasn't cooked them first, will show that the income/wealth gulf between the richest and the poorest Malay-Muslims has widened under Mahathir, not narrowed. Or simply open your eyes, wide.

Mahathir shouldn't be absolved from his spineless use of Jewish bogeys, or anyone in the Western world. Nor the Chinese as his scapegoats. These are another of Mahathir's many deceptions to detract scrutiny of his and the other illiberal Islamic regimes' monumental failures in providing good and transparent governance and welfare for their people. Mahathir may have helped modernise Malaysia but there were enough external factors that have helped push the industrial trajectory along. Still, there's no escaping that Mahathir has also presided over the most corrupt government in Malaysia's short history. That'll be among his 'legacies'.

Neither should Muslims' plight be confused with Mahathir's overt, puerile and disgusting racism. Moreover, historically, Muslims have always faced off each other according to their sectarianism - another reason for their sense of deprivation. But racial vilification is indefensible, period. Mahathir is rightly condemned. So too his mindless cravens in government and the media. The Muslim world can have a ghastly bigot like Mahathir as its champion, leader even, but they shouldn't expect tangible alleviation of the ummah's plight any time soon. Racists like Mahathir will only bring out the worst in human nature, as had Hitler of the Nazis, and inevitable social and intellectual regression. Perhaps Mahathir's comfortable with all that, and comfortable with bringing enormous humiliation to Malaysia. He's retiring. Good riddance.

MANJIT BHATIA is managing director of AsiaRisk - a political and economic research and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. The writer specialises in international economics and politics and the Asia-Pacific region.