The political leaders of the Islamic world met yesterday for their first summit since the September 11 terrorist assault, complaining mightily that their “creed, culture and social and political orientation” are being targeted as never before. This was their opportunity, as Kofi Annan gently put it to them, to counter the “ugly, dangerous and wrong” currents of “hostility between Islam and the West” by forthrightly condemning suicide bombings, embracing political reform and showing that “the Muslim peoples are capable of much greater things” than blaming others for their signal failures to come to terms with modernity.

Yet what draws their applause? Denunciations of the United States; and an ugly, dangerous anti-Semitic tirade by their host, the thankfully soon-to-be-gone Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian Prime Minister. He opened proceedings by calling on Muslims to unite brain and brawn against the “few million Jews” who, he alleges, “rule the world by proxy”. The autocratic Dr Mahathir, remember, passes in the Muslim world for a moderniser: a reputation he in many ways deserves, not least for inveighing against Islam’s obscurantist opponents of science. He is enough of a realist to understand that Malaysia is a rapidly modernising, relatively tolerant trading nation whose interests are threatened by Islamist extremism.

Listen, then, to this “realistic” elder statesman’s swansong. “We are actually very strong, 1.3 billion people cannot simply be wiped out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of twelve million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. We are up against a people who think.” He said they invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy, so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, thus gaining control of the most powerful countries to “become a world power”. Muslims, therefore, must reassess their tactics, not lashing out violently but executing a “strategic retreat”, even by negotiating on the Palestinian question, to achieve “final victory”.

This is final-solution language, redolent with conspiracy theory and an implicit choice between destroying the Jews or being “wiped out”. Mahathir’s detestation of “hook-nosed” Jews is a matter of record. He denounced them as the “sinister powers” behind Asia’s financial crisis in 1997, when he accused the financier George Soros of triggering the ringgit’s collapse.

His defenders may say that his bark is worse than his bite, that his paranoia is only skin-deep. If so, he must be all skin. That might be dismissed as a problem for him, not the world — this is, after all, a man heading into history’s out-tray — were it not for the damage that so deliberately inflammatory a speech to that particular audience could do. Mahathir fancies himself as a strategist, author of works such as Perspectives on Islam and the Future of Muslims. Yet by linking that future to the defeat of the Jews, and Islam’s necessary embrace of modernity to the need for “guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and rockets”, he pushes what passes for Islamic debate in a direction that gives comfort to its darkest forces.

After September 11, Mahathir denounced the futility of Islamist terrorism. He has said that “we cannot express our anger by killing people, we are not getting anywhere with that”. But do “moderate, modern” Muslim leaders oppose terrorism because it is futile, and not because it is repugnant and criminal?

When people like Mahathir pour poison not just on Israel but on Jews everywhere, do they seek the clash of civilisations that will destroy their peoples? If that is their intention, they are going the right way about it.