LEE KUAN YEW ON THE JEWISH LOBBY

American journalists Tom Plate and Jeffrey Cole interview Lee Kuan Yew, the man who created Singapore. As part of the interview they ask him what advice he would give the US (note that they try to endear themselves to him by putting down their fellow American reporters):

Q: If we could move to the other superpower, the United States. I know you're reluctant to give out advice, unlike American journalists who always try to tell you what to do, but for America, since you've been a friend of America and you've seen it over decades, what are two, three things, that you worry about in America?

Lee: I think in the next 10 years you have got to extricate yourself from these problems in the Middle East. It may take you five years to get it stabilized and then after that, you gradually have more time and energy to think about the other big problems in the world. This is sucking up too much of your resources. To solve this, you have got to tackle the two-state problem in Israel because as long as that's festering away, you're giving your enemies in the Muslim world an endless provocation from which they can get new recruits for crazy adventures to try and knock you down, to blow themselves up and blow the world up. How you're going to do that, I don't know.

Plate and Cole now try to hint at the right solution:

Q: Did you follow the Israeli lobby debate in the U.S.? Two professors -- from Harvard and the University of Chicago -- did this paper about the alleged extreme influence of the Israeli lobby in American foreign policy . Even if the paper overstated or used some unwise language in making its case, is there something to this?

Yew immediately gets it. He may know nothing about that lobby (note the conditional formulation) but he knows how to give the desired answer:

Lee: You have got to settle this issue with the Jewish lobby. If you have this as a festering sore, you get Muslims entangled in hate campaigns. I'm not saying if you solve this, everything will be sweet and harmonious -- but if you solve this you will remove a cancer in the [international] system. Then you can better tackle the other problems. You are alone in this [Middle East policy] because the Europeans are not with you. Nobody helps you, but everybody doesn't want to openly oppose you.

Ganesh Sahathevan (of terrorism finance) who brought this interview to my attention also notes that"Singapore has been actively marketing itself as a centre for Islamic finance:see for example Singapore to cultivate Islamic finance sector and DBS Bank and prominent Middle Eastern investors launch The Islamic Bank of Asia

Worrisome.