But then we all of us are. As animals with attributes we call human, and thus, more accurately, humanimals, we are forever in two minds about everything. Constantly torn between emotionality and rationality, instinct and intelligence, and every possible other set of opposites.

So it is no wonder that we are so confused and outright conflicted in our attitudes to foreigners. On the one hand rejecting them as interlopers to be feared or invaders to be fought, and on the other more or less happily accepting them as tourists, temporary residents or permanent immigrants.

Of course this dilemma has plagued us ever since our own and other humanoid species emerged from Africa countless millennia ago. But today, with the globalisation of everything from technology to terror, the issue seems more pressing than ever before.

More paradoxical, too, as more and more people appear ready to surrender to their basest xenophobic instincts, and in the process to deny not only their alleged ethical and religious principles, but also their personal and national realities.

For example, the xenophobia that clearly at least partly fueled the majority vote in the recent referendum for the UK to leave the EU was partly led by Boris Johnson, who happens to be of Turkish descent, and supported by a great many more recent arrivals in Britain.

And the hard core of so-called ‘little Englanders’ who campaigned for and supported the Brexit campaign did so in spite of the historical fact that, far from being pure and unadulterated, England is a complex mixture of cultures produced by indigenous Celts, invading Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans, and countless immigrants who have been arriving for centuries from almost everywhere else on earth.

Even in the Battle of Britain, as I was fascinated to learn on a recent visit to the RAF Museum at Hendon, almost a quarter of the famous ‘few’ fighter pilots were foreigners, and the most successful squadron was composed of young men from the country from which people are today most commonly perceived by xenophobes to be ‘flooding Britain’ and ‘taking British jobs’, Poland.

And in my own native country of Australia, the situation is similarly at odds with if not totally denying of history. All non-Aboriginal people here are by definition foreign migrants or descendants of migrants.

Yet after 200 years of such migration, despite lots of fine words and admittedly good intentions on the part of more recent governments, Aboriginal people remain shockingly marginalised, disadvantaged and, witness recent revelations about a now-notorious youth-detention centre in the Northern Territory, abused.

Abused too are many of the thousands of people who have arrived here by boat seeing asylum in recent years, only to be incarcerated indefinitely in high-security so-called ‘detention centres’.

A similarly dark history

Of course the US shares a similarly dark history with Australia of decimating, dispossessing and displacing its native peoples, and additionally of shamelessly exploiting the ‘huddled masses’ that fled there in their millions from Europe and elsewhere.

And now the apparently deranged presidential hopeful, Donald Trump, is striving mightily to win the votes of fellow xenophobes by threatening to build a wall to exclude the Mexicans who illegally enter the US where employers gleefully exploit them as low-cost labour, and to refuse entry to Muslims fleeing terror in their homelands on the spurious grounds that they may turn to terrorism themselves.

As for Malaysia, headed as it currently is by the crooked, self-proclaimed ‘moderate’ Muslim Umno/BN regime, it appears to have learned nothing from the sordid histories of Europe, the US and Australia, in that it not only treats both its indigenous peoples and refugees equally callously, but actively promotes suspicion and mistrust between its main races and religions.

Pretending that it has some divinely-inspired mission to ‘struggle’ on behalf of both the Malay race and Islam the better to conceal or achieve forgiveness for the crimes it ceaselessly and systematically commits against Malaysians of all faiths and ethnicities.

From former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s various slogans like ‘buy British last’ and ‘look East,’ and constant allegations of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ against Malaysia, to claims by cronies of Mahathir’s current successor Najib Abdul Razak that international investigations of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) fraud are also conspiracies against the country, it is xenophobia all the way.

Except, of course, when it comes to spending the proceeds of plunder on foreign-built private aircraft, foreign travel, foreign jewellery, handbags and other high-end luxury goods, and investing in everything from expensive foreign real estate to the production of foreign movies.

In short, the Umno/BN xenophobes of Malaysia are even more mixed-up than most, and by deliberately dividing the races and religions of the nation they so miserably misrule seem to have made themselves quite safe in their homeland.

But now that they’ve taken to committing their crimes on foreign soil, let’s hope that at worst they’re forced to curtail their foreign jet-setting and shopping sprees, or at best that they’re destined to spend lots of time in foreign courts and foreign jails.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.