Although I am Malaysian by nationality, I have studied and worked in Europe for many years, and probably have more close Jewish than Muslim friends.

Unlike much of Europe, Malaysia has no history of state-sanctioned persecutions, pogroms or holocaust against Jewish peoples. Asians necessarily view current world events from a different perspective than either Europeans or North Americans.

I would contend that the state of Israel was in part created to assuage European and American guilt for the unimaginable horrors of the Shoah (Holocaust). Any perceived cultural, political, military or financial assault on the state of Israel is therefore unlikely to be viewed dispassionately by Europeans or Americans.

Instead, unthinking knee-jerk accusations of Jew-bashing have been hurled at our prime minister from abroad by those who have not even bothered to read the full text of his Organisation of Islamic Conference speech .

I am immensely proud of the fact that there has been far less anti-Semitism in Asian than in European history. The cruel prejudices, tacit complicity, and active participation of individual European whites and their anti-Semitic governments in history, leading to a series of murderous pogroms over many centuries that culminated in Holocaust, has left an enormous gaping wound in the European and American psyche.

Hence their knee jerk tendency to offload their (well-deserved) guilt onto (undeserving) others.

The fact is that the rest of the world is waiting for Europe and America to get sick of the killing of Palestinian civilians euphemistically referred to as "collateral damage" in Israel.

With kill ratios exceeding five to one, a clear reminder of state-sanctioned lethal military force used deliberately against an unarmed civilian population, there is no question about who is doing the shooting, and who is doing the dying in Palestine.

As part of an ethnic minority, I do not always agree with my prime minister, but I think he is certainly right about one thing.

Violence and brute force will fail to subdue the spirit of the (minority) Palestinian peoples, and it will surely win Israel nothing but condemnation and revulsion.

If the policies of Ariel Sharon or Netanyahu are to be pursued indefinitely (I do not know which is worse), later generations of Israelis will one day come to ask themselves this: how did they come to have so much Palestinian blood on their hands?

One day in the not-too-distant future, Israel will view the Palestinian Intifada in the same way that Germany today views its role in the Warsaw ghetto and Holocaust of World War II.

The present policies of Sharon cheapen the significance, and insult the memory of those who perished in the Shoah . If Israelis today choose to forget, and hence depart from the great moral and spiritual precepts of Judaism, then they will have awarded Hitler a posthumous victory.

If Israel rejects the universal ideals of the European Enlightenment - that is, of liberty, equality, fraternity, inalienable human rights, and democracy - then the wrong lessons will have been learnt with disastrous consequences for both Jews and Gentiles.

We must give peace a chance.