Dr Mahathir waves during the launch of his memoirs in Kuala Lumpur, March 8, 2011. — Picture by Choo Choy May
Dr Mahathir has been an ardent defender and critic of the Malay race, and has both written and commented extensively on the community and its future direction.
“Outwardly, the Malays seem to be nationalistic, at times to the point of being racist. They can become very anti-Chinese and do not hesitate to be rude and unreasonable when criticising them. Their attitude recalls the behaviour of the Arabs in Palestine,” the former prime minister wrote in his autobiography, “A Doctor In The House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad”.
“Nationalist or not, they could not resist the prices offered,” Dr Mahathir said in his comparison of the two races half a world apart.
He observed that while the Arabs were strident in condemning the Zionists for carving out an Israel state out of their land, they had also “willingly sold their land to the Jews”.
“I am not suggesting that our Chinese Malaysians are like the Jews, only that the Malays have acted like the Palestinian Arabs,” said Dr Mahathir, a known world leader in championing Palestine’s cause against the Zionist regime in the strife-ridden Middle East conflict.
Closer to home, he is known as the patron of pro-Malay rights group, Perkasa, which has been lobbying the Najib administration to keep the New Economic Policy (NEP).
The NEP was a 20-year national policy introduced by in 1971 to boost Malay and Bumiputera ownership in the corporate sector to at least 30 per cent, but failed; an outcome which Dr Mahathir himself acknowledged in the book published this month by MPH Group Publishing.The Malaysian prime minister from 1981 to 2003 said this was due to the Malays’ own weaknesses.
“Malays like to believe or claim that the Chinese have succeeded in business through cheating. Yet when a Malay wants to sign a contract (to build a house, for example), he will not give it to a Malay contractor. He would prefer a Chinese contractor. He obviously trusts the Chinese more than the Malays,” he pointed out.
“Many Malays have become so used to a life of continual economic support, that when the flow stops they simply cannot continue on their own. Rather than learn about business and managing money, they spend their energies on cultivating contracts and gaining access to easy, short-term opportunities,” Dr Mahathir further observed in the book published nearly eight years after he left public office.
The retired medical doctor who turns 86 in July said that as a Malay, he does not want to “denounce the bad work ethic of so many Malays” but hopes that his honesty will help prod them into action for their own sake.
“I fear that those brave words of Malay defiance — Takkan Melayu hilang di dunia (Malays shall never disappear from this world) — will one day come back to haunt us.
“Preventing this from happening has been the biggest challenge of my life and of my generation,” Dr Mahathir wrote in the 809-page tome.
The country’s longest-serving prime minister announced his political retirement in tears in 2002, saying he had failed to change the Malay mindset but was persuaded by Umno to remain as party president and premier until 2003, when he handed power to then deputy Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
While Abdullah went on to win the ruling Barisan Nasional’s (BN) biggest majority of 91 per cent of parliament seats, Dr Mahathir went on to campaign against his successor for allegedly promoting his (Abdullah’s) family and friends at the expense of others.
In a stunning reversal of fortune, Abdullah then led BN to its worst electoral losses in Election 2008, when it lost 82 parliamentary seats and four states to an opposition pact led by Dr Mahathir’s sacked deputy prime minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
Dr Mahathir has come back to public prominence under new prime minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, and even rejoined Umno, which he left in a huff in protest against Abdullah, who resigned from his post in April 2009.
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