The Malaysian PM visits Germany and gets accused of supporting Hamas by an audience member - but are these westerners completely illiterate?
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has defended Malaysia's relations with Hamas, saying he made "no apologies" for his nation's historical links with the Palestinian militant group and reiterating his stance that the Middle East conflict predates the October 7 attack on Israel.
"What I reject strongly is this narrative, this obsession, as if the entire problem begins and ends with the 7th of October," the prime minister said. There had been decades of "atrocities, plunder and dispossession of Palestinians," he added at a press conference alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin.
Despite the hysteria that the “geopolitics understanders” made about Anwar Ibrahim’s NED credentials months ago, Westerners seemingly forget that his initial rise came from the radical student organizations in the 1970s which were in-part connected with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolution and other influential Islamic movements at the time.
Of course he will be anti-Israel. That has been the hallmark of Malaysian foreign policy since the beginning - even with our 1st PM in 1957 - and he was the most Western friendly of them all.
As the article mentions:
Anwar's staunch support for the Palestinians can be traced back to his years as a student leader in the 1970s including as the leader of the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement.
Muslim-majority Malaysia does not recognise Israel's statehood. It has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, hosting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1984 and 2001 and welcoming Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashal, leaders of the political wing of Hamas, in 2020.
This reminded me of when multiple “Israeli” news outlets accused Malaysia of being the most anti-semitic country on Earth, despite historically having no native Jewish population, and a residential population that at it’s peak only reached the teens. Completely unhinged and insane.
Banning our palm oil will not change the fact that we were able to succesfully industrialize its production and outcompete your local biofuel industry. Europeans needs to stop barking like a rabid dog. It isn’t the 1800s or even the neocolonial late 1900s anymore.
These deindustrialization policies will not work, especially when you yourself have lost any capabilities of enacting economic warfare. Hiding behind a facade of environmentalism doesn’t change reality.
As Bloomberg noted, there will be other markets that the palm oil could be sold to. You are kneecapping yourself just to appear “environmentally friendly”.
Perhaps it’s just the final cries of a region declining into subordination. The garden after all, will inevitably be reclaimed by the jungle. It just takes time.