From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Ladstone is away this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

This week at a summit of Islamic nations in Kuala Lampur,

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Muhammad shocked his audience with a long-screed condemning Muslims for self-defeating behavior

and for being overmatched at every turn by the Jews, whom he said run the world by proxy.

The speech was an attention-getter, prompting yelps of outrage and not a little sympathy from the press around the world.

Joining us once again is Martin Walker,

senior correspondent for United Press International. Martin, let's start with the reaction by the Arab and Muslim press. Shock, affirmation, what? Well, what I was really struck by was that most of the

Arab and Islamic press seemed to agree that Mahatir was speaking some blunt

truths.

But they also seem to think that he made a great mistake to say it, that he was misunderstood,

that the rest of his message was not taken seriously and so on.

So for example, in Al-Quds al-Arabi, which is one of the better London-based pan-Arab

papers,

Mohammed generalised and condemned Jews when he probably meant Israelis.

And this is the kind of generalisation we complain about when we are Arabs are described as terrorists,

because only some of us refuse to refrain from killing thousands of civilians and hijacking planes.

Al-Ahram of Egypt ran an editorial,

saying that the problem with Mahdiah's statements is that they were ambiguous.

The Malaysian Prime Minister didn't mean the Jews as people.

What he wanted to show to Muslims

...