[The article below was published in a slightly abridged form in the Post's opinion pages.]

Max Lane – Prime Minister Mohummad Mahathir's speech at the Putra Jaya meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) articulated an anger against the West which is slowly but steadily accumulating, or re-accumulating, around the world.

I use the term re-accumulating because, of course, anti-Western sentiment in the sense of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiment drove most of world politics from the beginning of the century until the defeat of the United States by Vietnam in 1975. Between 1975 and 2005 this sentiment has been relatively subdued, latent rather than active. Now it is on the rise again.

Mahathir's attacks on the West capture a sentiment that is grounded in reality, although his own analysis cuts these sentiments off from parts of this realty. Since the 1980s major international corporations based in the United States, Western Europe and Japan have been facing slowly declining rates of return on their investments. They began a big squeeze on whomever they could to increase this return.

In the rich countries, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher clamped down on trade unions and pushed down wages and conditions. For the rest of the world a policy of enforcing austerity and liberalisation, using the debt leverage as the means of enforcement, started to be implemented. This was given the name "globalisation" in order to hide it under the general process of internationalisation of communication, culture. The term also disguises the fact that there has been no globalisation of investment in the real economy and that such investment continues to be centred in the rich countries.

In this sense Mahathir's criticisms that the Western power cenetres are not interested in seeing the rest of the world industrialise are correct. These governments, spearheaded by the military and economic giant of the United States, envisage a world permanently divided between modern and industrialised and backward, poor, under-industrialised countries under more-or-less colonial domination.

Mahathir is also correct, I think, in issuing a call for those who are the subject of this Western disdain to unite, rise up and fight back, using – as he put it – "brains" rather than "just brawn". He made valid criticisms of those striking out in anger aiming only to inflict pain on the enemy but not winning victory, in fact, providing opportunities for the enemy, as he called them, to strike back. His self-criticism of the leaderships of Islamic countries echoed the calls for an self-educational revolution that were part of the first anti-colonial revolutions between 1900 and 1975.

Mahathir's anger and his summons to action points to a political process that is now in gestation around the world: a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions, against the new-style colonialism of the IMF and of Iraq-Afghanistan-Solomon Island style re-colonisation.

However, Mahathir reads the West's political tactics too narrowly. He sees, or at least on this occasion, he portrayed the West's globalisation aggression as aimed against Islam and engineered by a Jewish conspiracy. Of course, at one level this is an understandable mis-reading of what is happening. It is true that since the September 11 suicide attack on the World Trade Center, propaganda against Islam in one form or another in the Western mainsteam media and by Western politicians has increased. This is usually disguised in carefully worded statements about respect for Islam, but there is no doubt that the number of times politicans and newsreaders use the term "Islamic terror" and "Islamic violence" has increased dramatcially. Meanwhile US and western support for the Zionist state of Israel remains solid.

But Western elites have no interest in Islam. To start with, figures such as George W Bush and John Howard are too culturally stunted and ignorant to have any interest in religious and cultural affairs. They will and can mouth anything about Islam or any other religion depending on the electoral and general tactical needs of their narrow power and economic interests. For them and for the myriad of backward commentators and politicians that now back the US so-called "war on terror", Islam is simply a code-word for everything that is "non-western". From the point of view of the political economy of the US-IMF led globalisation of austerity and liberalisation, the non-western world happens to equate with the Third World, the ex-colonial world which is now slated for deepened exploitation and re-colonisation.

Mahathir's picture of a Jewish – Moslem conflict actually narrows the possible anti-globalisation, anti-recolonisation alliance that is needed. Globalised re-colonisation is not targeting just the Moslem world but all of the former colonial world: Asia, Africa, the Arab world and Latin America. At the moment some of the most daring and strong new initiatives are coming from Latin America, with the drive for political and economic sovereignty by the Chavez government in Venezuela, not to mention the longer historical struggle for such sovereignty that has been waged by Cuba.

Mahathir is vying for a leadership position that Indonesia once held under President Sukarno. General Suharto and his Golkar government of 33 years turned its back on the principle of sovereignty allowing Indonesia to be re-colonised by stealth through the instrument of debt and through cultural take-over.

This policy is being continued by President Megawati Suakrnoputri and is supported by most of the current Indonesian elite, whose economic fortunes are now so tied to accepting subservience to Western institutions. Mahathir is attempting to fill the gap left by Suharto's coup against Sukarno in 1965.

But his vision is not as far-sighted, humanist or radical as that of Sukarno who, 39 years ago, spoke of the need for a united resistance to policies of exploitation and dominance from the West that included not only the progressive states of the ex-colonial world, but also their peoples and all the progressive minded people in the Western world itself. The anti-globalisation and anti-war movements in the rich countries are also part of this resistance.

[Max Lane is a visting fellow from the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Australia.]