Opinion:What to talk about? All-purpose answer: Jews. It always is. According to an EU poll last week, 59 per cent of Europeans think Israel is the biggest threat to world peace, writes Mark Steyn
If that 59 per cent sounds kinda low, don't forget it's an average; 69 per cent of Austrians and 74 per cent of the Dutch think Israel is the world's greatest menace. Not bad for a country that at its narrowest point is barely wider than my rural township in New Hampshire.
The Europeans are only a step away from that substantial chunk of the Arab world which manages simultaneously to rejoice in the slaughter of 9/11 and blame the Jews for it.
Now that increased vigilance by America, Britain and others has made it harder for terrorists to gain access to their most sought-after targets and now that al-Qaeda has been reduced to massacring fellow Muslims in Saudi Arabia, it's surely only a matter of time before that, too, is pinned on the Jews.
Which brings us to Dr Mahathir. He'd knocked out a no-punches-pulled, tell-it-like-is analysis of the Muslim world's comprehensive failure on every front - military, scientific, commercial etc.
But, aware that playing the Islamic summit circuit is like playing the Catskills, he knew he had to sing a few old favourites to keep the crowd on side. So he blamed the aforementioned Islamic failures on those sinister Jews.
"The Jews rule this world by proxy. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power."
That's the great thing about the International Jewish Conspiracy: no Jews need be involved. One day, there will be only one Jew left on the whole planet. But everything will still be his fault.
That's how devious they are. "We cannot fight them through brawn alone," Dr Mahathir said. "We must use our brains also." In fact, Dr Mahathir's comrades don't use "brawn" either, unless by "brawn" you mean a West Bank schoolgirl with a Tel Aviv bus ticket.
But, on balance, that makes marginally more sense than Gregg Easterbrook's argument for the New Republic magazine re Kill Bill. How loopy do you have to be to sit through 90 minutes of an Italian-American video-store nerd's homage to Hong Kong movie actors celebrating their distinctive cultural heritage of slicing each other's limbs off and figure: "I think I'll go with the Jew angle."
Mr Easterbrook's line is that while there are "plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else" (the "other", presumably, are the Japanese), that doesn't make it "right" for Jewish executives to worship money above all else. "Recent European history" imposes a special obligation on Jewish executives.
In a way, Dr Mahathir is on firmer ground. He may not be strictly correct in asserting that the Jews invented democracy as a cunning front - they weren't big in ancient Athens, and there weren't a lot of Jewish barons egging King John to sign the Magna Carta, though some may have been married to pushy Jewish baronesses.
But the general point that Jews have prospered by developing forms of universal appeal is a sound one, at least in America, at least in popular culture - Hollywood, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley.
Gay novelists may write gay novels, African-American poets may pen African-American poetry, but "Jewish movie executives" just make movies.
Poor old Easterbrook was criticising Jewish execs for not behaving Jewish enough (as he sees it) and wound up getting fired for "anti-Semitism" from his other gig at the sports station ESPN. Which, if you were Dr Mahathir, would sort of confirm the point that you were making.
Not for the first time, America's excessive ethnic touchiness has reduced a big macho sports network into a bunch of shying geldings at a ladies' trotting race.
Unlike the hapless Easterbrook, Dr Mahathir got a standing ovation from his 56 fellow leaders. For Assad and Mubarak and most of the Arabs, it was probably the anti-Jew stuff. But for General Musharraf and Hamid Karzai, and the less kooky ones present, it was (at least I like to hope) the rest of the speech.
Mahathir essentially signed on to the entire Bernard Lewis view of Muslim history, pointing out that a once superior civilisation has now been in decline for over 600 years. It wasn't just generalities either: he noted that, while Crown Prince Abdullah and old Yasser may be gung-ho for (other people's) martyrdom, the suicide-bomber is merely the latest symbol of impotence.
Mahathir's plan (we need to embrace modernity in order to achieve our final victory over the Jews) is an improvement on traditional Islamic thinking (we reject modernity because it's a Jew racket). But it's still inadequate. I'm reminded of Andrew Roberts's recent book, Hitler and Churchill. As the critic Philip Hensher put it, Churchill "knew very well what Hitler was like, but Hitler had no idea what sort of man Churchill was". Exactly.
When you read Hitler's private assessments of the man who stood between him and world domination, they're feeble: Churchill was "that puppet of Jewry". The Führer was so over-invested in ideology that he persisted in jamming every square peg of hard reality into the round hole of his prejudices.
Similarly, even when offering a sharp-eyed analysis of the Islamic world's failures, Dr Mahathir is obliged to subscribe to the great all-purpose consolation: we're the victims of the Jews.
When it's reality versus delusion, bet on reality. That proved true in the second World War, and in the Cold War, too.
A culture whose modes of discourse are so hemmed in and constrained that all but received wisdom is beyond the pale is not a good long-term proposition. If the dar el-Islam wants to defeat the West, they will have to wait until, via the sensitivity police at ESPN and elsewhere, the West has defeated itself.