The poster girl for Stockholm Syndrome, Yvonne Ridley, interviews the incredibly vicious former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohammad [lgf: search], discussing the best ways to harm: 1) Israel, and 2) America, not necessarily in that order. From Islam Channel in Britain, August 23, 2006. (Courtesy of MEMRI TV.)

Mahathir Mohammad: What enabled the Israelis to do what they are doing now is the United States, so the main culprit is the United States, in particular the present government of the United States. I wouldn’t blame all the Americans. A lot of Americans do not like this war, but their leadership advocates war, as a solution - not only to major problems, even minor problems - we have to kill people. These are really war criminals. That is why we think that something has to be done against the United States.

Yvonne Ridley, Interviewer: What can you do against the United States? It’s a very big country, and it has an arsenal of weapons greater than the next collective 27 armies.

Mahathir Mohammad: Yes, there is of course, to this thing. When you do something to the United States they are going to retaliate. But the United States is not as powerful as it’s made out to be. It is, for example, a bankrupt nation. It owes the world 14 trillion dollars, and it is truly able to finance itself and the war and the supply of arms to Israel, through the money that is lent to the United States by rich countries, some of which are Muslim countries. And if you stop using the U.S. dollar… Even if you want to sell oil, you can continue to sell oil, but insist on being paid in euros, or yen, or whatever… If you do that, then the U.S. dollar will not be half the value that it has today, and if it doesn’t have the value that it has today, it cannot spend money producing arms and supporting aggressive actions by the Israelis.

Yvonne Ridley, Interviewer: So do you really think that there are Arab leaders who, if they had the will to change currency, that they could bring America to its knees?

Mahathir Mohammad: There may not be anybody who is willing to be high profile in this matter, but they can do this quietly. There are ways of doing this which would be just as effective, not sounding very belligerent.