Since his death in September, tributes have poured in for Edward Said, perhaps one of the world's best-known intellectuals and certainly, even by his own claim, the Middle East's most renowned intellectual. Said was also known as a humanitarian, and an unflinching backer of the Palestinian cause (and the cause of colonial people everywhere).

Recently several Asians, particularly some Malaysians, took up Said's name and reproduced his 'thinking' in calling for the end of American-backed Israeli aggression and 'imperialism' against Palestinians and the seizing and occupation of their lands. Some even claimed Israel hasn't the right to exist, thus calling for its annihilation.

These people have a right to free speech, but they should also be open to challenge and criticism. For the most part their 'speech' is riddled with sublime ignorance; ignorance because I dare say they haven't read much of Said's voluminous work; ignorant about Israel and Arabist Middle Eastern politics; ignorant about Arafat and his representation of Palestinians; and ignorant about what Said had in fact said, or not said, of his support for the creation of a Palestinian state. I have been reading Said for almost 15 years every one of his books, essays and media columns. Said's works are provocative and intelligent. But they're not so accessible for the complexity of their (post-colonial/literary) theories and arguments that he had advanced.

The main problem with Said's works is that they are also full of inconsistencies, contradictions and distortions, despite his fighting for international justice and freedom for the Palestinian people, that supporters of Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian cause, and indeed of Said, make at best only pedestrian comments about the volatile situation between Israelis and the Palestinians. Mostly they fail to focus on a common enemy: terrorists, who kill innocent civilians in the name of their religion, religious fundamentalism, even fanaticism, all of which breed degrees of hatred of other races and religions. This is what Said would have wanted, although it took him over 28 years to get the point across. And even then it's not certain that he had succeeded.

Riddled with errors

Said's work was routinely riddled with errors of historical fact, most of which were probably innocent. But in academic scholarship such mistakes are unacceptable, particularly as someone of Said's stature had made them. Often his work and arguments would be littered with rash generalisations, even over-generalisations. At other times one finds wilful misreadings and, like Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's ex-premier, peculiar if not deliberate omissions that could be read as intentional distortion.

Yet nowhere in Said's work, or in the many interviews that he gave, or in the media columns that he wrote, did he postulate that Israel had no right to exist, that it ought to be destroyed, that the problems faced by Palestinians are the direct result, or fault, of the Israeli Jewish state and the support it gets from the World's Jewish community and the West. Much of secular Arab nationalism, even the Palestinians, including the atavistic Islamic jihadism, all of which target Israel and the world's Jews, have over the years come to increasingly rely on anti-Jewish inventions that are rooted in the tsarist Russian Orthodox police state.

And here's the 'Asian' hypocrisy: several Asian states in fact have diplomatic ties with Israel today. Singapore has trade ties with Israel and military training and weapons procurement programmes with the immensely powerful Israeli armed forces. Though I can't prove it, for such is the nature of the beast, I've seen and heard (from well-placed Singapore sources) of anecdotal evidence of Singapore's intelligence agencies being trained by Israel, especially Mossad.

Moreover, many Jewish companies operate in several Middle-Eastern states, making profits and offering Arab-Muslims jobs and incomes. All of which point to the hypocrisy of Malaysians, other Asians, and Middle Eastern Arabs that the Jews and their proxies are angling to take over the non-Western world, colonise these parts for their own ends, or, chauvinistically, claim they seek to conquer Islamic civilisation.

Next they'll point to Israel building a long wall as proof of conquest, the deliberate acquisition of Palestinian lands by Israel. They forget the Great Wall in China was built by the northern war-states to defend themselves from the Mongols. Israel's doing the same thing against murderous Islamic terrorists supported by Arafat and other Middle Eastern states, principally Saudi Arabia, which finances Hamas, among others.

Vague mumbling

In the two most profound and early works by Said Orientalism (possibly Said's best-known work), followed 15 years later by Culture and Imperialism Said's contention has always been, at least in so far as theory goes, of making the link between knowledge and power as central, almost in a Foucauldian sense. But Said never made it very clear just how the relationship between knowledge ('culture') and ('imperial') power has manifested in concrete empirical terms.

All we get from Said are vague mumblings and formulations of a general relationship between 'culture and empire', of the link between "the pursuit of national imperial aims and the general national culture", of "the interpellation of culture by empire", and such prolixes as "the literature ... therefore creates what {Raymond] Williams calls ''structures of feeling'' that support, elaborate, and consolidate the practice of empire."

In all of Said's "self-posturing verbiage", as JH Plumb called it, just about everything is asserted; little or nothing is ever proven by him. Which makes me wonder just what the anti-Israel crowd, especially the likes of Mahathir and Arafat, are claiming about the imperialism juxtaposed by America and the world's Jews as doing to Palestine in its bid to become a sovereign entity. True, Said saw western aggression everywhere, but strangely he didn't see eastern aggression as also having existed. You get the feeling that Asians and Arabs often tend to dream up 'structures of feeling' that for the most part don't exist while claiming they exist in Said's works. They don''t.

Said packaged Orientalism as something homogenous from only which imperial and anti-imperial discourses can be justified. But this is voluntarism at best. This is what neo-classical economists do when bashing Keynesians and neo or post-Keynesians, and even those Marxists still harping on a flawed dependency theory. Conversely Said made no clear distinctions between historical epochs or genres or even cultures (if 'culture' exists).

So, in the culture versus imperialism determination of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, how would it have been possible to champion Said as defender of Palestine, according to his supporters, when even closer to his death he seemed confused about his support for a single state solution versus a two-state solution? The latter, after all, had long been Said's own preference.

This is where the political Said becomes a different intellectual to the cultural theorist Said. Supporters who use the cultural Said to champion Arafat, and those Muslims who think the Palestinian problem is the direct fault of the United States and the world's Jews and their culture and imperialism, come unstuck.

Arafat condemned

For starters, Said had sought the restoration of citizenship rights for those Arabs in Israel who he said don't want to return to the West Bank and Gaza, regardless of the resolution between the Israelis and Palestinians ending up in a two-state result. That's a damning indictment on Arafat. That view by Said may have something do with how ordinary Palestinians themselves see the Oslo Accords vis--vis the Palestinian leadership and its supporters elsewhere.

True, Said had condemned the Oslo Accords. But he had in fact condemned Arafat specifically, and his bunch of incompetent negotiators who hadn't the foggiest idea about what was before them, who didn't speak much English let alone understand it. Nor did they understand what had lain before them and what could come to lie after the Accords were signed.

Said condemned the weakness of the Palestinian leadership for being intellectually weak, and for lacking the intelligence and honesty to acknowledge from the outset that it was simply out of its depth. Said condemned the Palestinian leadership for the pitiable judgements that, after Arafat's agreement to the Oslo Accords, would prove to be even more catastrophic for the Palestinian people and for the creation of a sovereign Palestinian nation-state.

That's because Arafat, according to Said, had put his own self-interest in the Oslo Accords ahead of the Palestinian nation. But that's what tyrants do. Arafat was more concerned about his status, not about the distraught Palestinian people who were becoming increasingly homeless and jobless in their own homeland. While that's partly because of the conflict with Israel, it's mostly the result of Arafat having failed them miserably.

Said condemned Arafat for not representing all Palestinians, only those on the West Bank and Gaza. Why? Because it's from these regions that Arafat's Islamic fascists hail, suicide bombers are recruited, children are trained to kill Jews, and others hired to protect Arafat, to kill and die for him. When Arafat is criticised he jails Palestinians, closes down newspapers, and bans books. That's why 50 percent of all Palestinians are refugees.

Those who run with Said simply fail to understand, in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that in all the translations and interpretations of such works that Said had undertaken, interpretive texts and sub-texts are crucial. In this case, interpreting what and to whom, and indeed why. There are many interpretations of the Orient in the west by the west. But Christopher Hitchens reminds me: "It's also true that Arab, Indian, Malay and Iranian societies can operate on a false if not a deluded view of the west."

Said probably knew this but never admitted it in his works. And he railed angrily (he had quite a temper) against those who challenged him. Arafat, like Mahathir, has been distorting these to suit his own cowardly agenda. And Arafat's supporters, who claim to have read Said, and that they know all about the west and the Orient, ought to be seriously challenged.

Here's what one malaysiakini reader wrote recently: "Study in the West, not the West." No doubt the world is up against such puerile minds.


MANJIT BHATIA is managing director of AsiaRisk - a political and economic research and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. The writer specialises in international economics and politics and the Asia-Pacific region.