. I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.That the cultural representations of the Eastern world that Orientalism purveys are intellectually suspect, and cannot be accepted as faithful, true, and accurate representations of the peoples and things of the Orient; that the history of European colonial rule and political domination of Asian civilizations, distorts the writing of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Orientalist. . Edward Wadie Said was born on 1 November 1935, to Hilda Said and Wadie Said, a businessman in Jerusalem, then part of British-governed Mandatory Palestine (1920–48). The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is, to say the least, out of date and widely speculative. U.S. Israel is certainly pleased that it can take the credit for having made peace, and at the same time continue the occupation with Palestinian consent. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What Edward Said predicted in the 1990s came to be. Afterwards, that war-time military service earned American citizenship to Said père and his family. We don't want anybody's history of suffering to go unrecorded and unacknowledged. At the end of one of these essays, he asked: "Is the current Palestinian leadership listening? They kept feeding this delusion for 27 years, refusing to admit the economic, political and even physical impossibility of establishing a truly sovereign Palestinian state amid an active colonisation project and lack of territorial contiguity. "In the event, despite being sick with leukemia, as a public intellectual, Said continued criticising the My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof, in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East, and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike, and install régimes friendly to the United States. "Said became an established cultural critic with the book So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. I don't think the planning for the post–Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East [studies] field to adopt the word Said's friends and foes acknowledged the transformative influence of As such, the investigation and analysis Said applied in In the essay "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims" (1979), Said argued in favour of the political From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the Said disliked the Oslo Accords for not producing an independent State of Palestine, and because they were politically inferior to a plan that In 1995, in response to Said's political criticisms, the In the mid-1990s, Said wrote the Foreword to the history book In all my works, I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism. ... For anyone to deny the horrendous experience of anti–Semitism and the Holocaust is unacceptable. The same is true about their views of the [Iraqi] army. He's a well-known, great linguist. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.By the late 1940s, Edward's schooling included the Egyptian branch of The moment one became a student at Victoria College, one was given the student handbook, a series of regulations governing every aspect of school life—the kind of uniform we were to wear, what equipment was needed for sports, the dates of school holidays, bus schedules, and so on. Edward Said's spectre and the end of Oslo. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on; and, to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise; of course, the model is Afghanistan. . Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Culture condemned the storming of the Yabous centre and Edward Said Institute, calling it an attack on 'Palestinian national culture and cultural heritage' The PLO's two-state project has failed. "What he found particularly "mystifying" at the time, was "how so many Palestinian leaders and their intellectuals can persist in speaking of the agreement as a 'victory'". Neoliberalisation and Imagining the 'Savage Other' in Post-transitional Cambodia", Edward Saïd, "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims" (1979), in Julian Vigo, "Edward Saïd and the Politics of Peace: From Orientalisms to Terrorology", 'A Late Style of Humanism', Field Day Review 1 (Dublin: 2005), It could not back then and it cannot now. It is high time that the Palestinian people move away from the illusion of the two-state solution and try a democratic approach, one that can guarantee their basic rights - freedom, equality, and justice.