Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, under attack for telling a gathering of Islamic national leaders last week that "the Jews rule this world by proxy," has defended himself by saying that this and other remarks he made about Jews were taken out of context. They were.

Out of context, they reminded educated people in Western and non-Islamic countries, rightly, of the chilling rhetoric of traditional European anti-Semitism. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the tissue of lies and forgeries that fed Adolf Hitler's murderous paranoia, had propagated the view that "the Jews" ruled the world -- and not by proxy. Mr. Mahathir detoured even further into that dark territory when he said, ludicrously, that the Jews "invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong." The first part of that statement would be news to many non-Jewish Greeks, French, Russians, Britons, Americans and others who had a hand in "inventing" and promoting those ideas. And the second part is just plain hair-raising.

But Mr. Mahathir was not talking in a Western and non-Islamic context. He was talking to a Muslim audience primarily about the crippling feelings of anger and hopelessness that beset so many Islamic countries today and, to the extent that he referred to Jews, about the small nation that serves as a bitter daily reminder to Muslims of all their accumulated frustration and humiliation. He was talking, in short, about Israel.