Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, leader of Malaysia from 1981 until last year is a hard man for us western liberals to admire. Just as you start to respect him for his country’s ethnic harmony or economic progress he goes and sends his deputy to jail for homosexuality or claims that Jews run the world. For all his many achievements in office, his legacy will always be tainted by his bigotry.

The man himself would often boast that Malaysia was the only Muslim country in the world which lived at peace with large non-Muslim minorities. Under his stewardship relations between the Malay, Chinese and Indian communities were excellent. Dr. Mahathir also oversaw Malaysia’s transition from a rubber and tin backwater into an economic hub of south-east Asia. His refusal to allow the IMF veloci raptors into his country during the 1998 Asian economic crisis was particularly laudable.

His personal style also endeared him to many in the west. Speaking fluent English in the calm and authoritative tones of the doctor he once was, Mahathir would regularly lampoon western states for their cultural and economic greed. John Howard's Australia was a particularly common target for Mahathir's well-aimed jibes.

But for all his achievements, there is an underlying nastiness about the man. He displays an old-fashioned social Darwinism which went out of vogue in Europe after the war. He often derided his own Malay people as lazy in contrast to the more successful Indians and Chinese. He lamented the failure of decades of positive discrimination to reverse what he saw as his own people’s weakness. His was a harsh judgemental worldview, quite out of sync with “nice” western liberals like me.

It was this social Darwinism which was on display in his last major speech as president to the Organisation of Islamic States in late 2003. The speech made headlines around the world and earned him a censure from the US Senate. In the speech Mahathir lambasted Muslim states for their economic and intellectual backwardness. By contrast he praised “a few million Jews” in Israel who, he claimed, held back a billion Muslims. How did they achieve this? They invented ideologies like socialism and human rights to undercut western anti-Semitism. They also, he claimed, kept Muslims down by getting others to fight wars for them (a none too subtle reference to Iraq).

What could have been a brave and visionary speech on the parlous state of Islam instead descended into the kind of gutter-level anti-Semitism “worthy” of Hitler. In a way his last speech summed up the man, both good and bad.