Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad predicted Wednesday that the United States might use Israel as a proxy to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, the official Bernama news agency reported. North Korea, however, would be spared an attack over its nuclear programme partly because it is not a Muslim country, said Mahathir, a fierce critic of Israeli and US policies who retired in 2003 after leading Malaysia for 22 years.

He noted that Israel had attacked a nuclear plant in Iraq in 1981, adding that "the US seems to want other people to fight for them," Bernama reported.

Mahathir said Washington had only attacked Iraq because it knew deposed leader Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, suggesting that the United States would be more wary of North Korea, which claims to have produced nuclear arms.

"North Korea, the agenda is different. It is not just weapons of mass destruction, there is also this element of hatred against Muslims.

"There is a religious element in this thing. If it is non-Muslim, the US will not attack," he said.

Mahathir has regularly charged that US foreign policy, under the cover of fighting terrorism, has a strong anti-Muslim bias.

He said one of the root causes of terrorism was the dispossession of the Palestinians in the creation of Israel but the problem would not be addressed by powerful countries because Israel had a strong hold on them, he said.

His remarks are an echo of a charge he made shortly before retiring that Jews rule the world by proxy, getting others to fight and die for them.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2005