Here's Amer Taheri from Canada's National Post (via FrontPage) on Malaysian leader Mahathir Muhammad's anti-Semitic and anti-Christian speech. Check it out.

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Council meeting, President Bush criticized Muhammed's remarks. Here's La Vanguardia's Washington correspondent Eusebio Val's reaction on page four of Tuesday's paper, in the lead international news article (NOT opinion or analysis) jumped over from page three.

At the margin of the summit a tense episode occurred with the reprimand president George W. Bush meted out to the prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Muhammad, for a recent commentary on the Jews. According to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, the American president, in a meeting with Muhammad, told him that his assertions were "wrong and a cause of confrontation". During a recent Islamic summit, the Malaysian prime minister stated that "The Jews govern the world through their representatives." "It's other people who fight and die for them," he added.

The speech of the prime minister of Malaysia was not bellicose; rather, it called upon the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world to respond to the "few million Jews" without violence, with more unity in the defense of their interests and an improvement of the education of their young people.

Gee, you could have fooled me. All it looks to me that Mohammed said was that the Jews run the world (so therefore everything bad is the Jews' fault, he did not say, but he sure implied) and the Muslims need to all get together and stop them. But without violence!

The American secretary of State, Colin Powell, also brought up the subject in a meeting with his Malaysian homologue, Syed Hamid Albar. Albar emphasized, before the American secretary of State, that Mohammed's speech had been eminently critical towards Muslims themselves and that only "one or two fragments" were problematic.

Yeah, he was criticizing the Muslims for letting the Jews and their lackeys, the decadent, perverted Christians, run the world, that's all, and he just called upon them to unite to do something about it. Nothing much. He's not calling for a clash of civilizations or anything like that, just explaining to all us naive innocent ingenuous stupid folks that the Jews are our secret bosses. He wasn't nearly as anti-Semitic as Gregg Easterbrook, not at all. And Eusebio Val isn't reporting this defense of Mohammed because he sympathizes with Mohammed's "non-bellicose" (in his words) comments. He wouldn't be an anti-Semite either, of course, just like Andy Robinson and Baltasar Porcel and Xavier Bru de Sala (he has been known to write on the theme that the Jewish / Israeli lobby controls the American government) aren't anti-Semites. They're just telling us the truth about the Jewish conspiracy.

Note: A lot of Spaniards, including the guys from Libertad Digital, are anti-Masons. Yes, I know there was a Masonic lodge in Italy that served as the cover for a high-level financial fraud ring. That's one example. But the idea that the Masons are a secret organization operating for nefarious purposes (mostly getting rich and running the world) is widespread here. Of course, that's ridiculous. The Masons are a social organization just like the Shriners and the Elks with a little bit of excess fraternity-initiation mumbo-jumbo. My grandfather the rich and powerful railroad repairman was a Mason, for God's sake. He had the Masonic members' secret book. I looked at it. It's just dumb, not scary. These dopes are playing at having a secret club, like we all did when we were ten.

Ironically, anti-Masonism exists on both the Spanish Left and Right. The Left thinks of them as just capitalist bloodsuckers, while the Right thinks of them as both atheistic traitors and capitalistic bloodsuckers. Back in the Franco days there used to be a lot of heated rhetoric about "the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy."

Oh, yeah, congratulations to President Bush for speaking out against anti-Semitism.