Malaysia's former angry young man is about to end his political life as an angry old one.
"I like to speak my mind. Sometimes people don't like it," Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told an interviewer this year as he prepared for retirement on October 31 after 22 years in power.
On the eve of retirement he did it again. Hosting an Islamic summit, Mahathir drew howls of protest from Western governments and Israel by saying: "The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy."
His real message, that the Arabs should stop fighting a losing battle and sue for peace, was drowned out in the furore over his assertion that a Jewish lobby controlled Western powers.
Born in 1925, Asia's second longest serving elected leader had his world view shaped by life under British colonial rule. Mahathir has been haunted ever since by fear that Malaysia could slip back into economic re-colonization.
He set out to pull Malays up from their agrarian roots so that they could stand as equals not just with Chinese compatriots but also with other races in a rapidly globalizing world.
Last year, the "Old Man," as he is commonly known, apologized to Malays and said he had failed. Some say he is being too hard on himself.
Mahathir saw enough during his two decades at the top to fear Western domination would last well into the 21st century. In September, he told the UN General Assembly: "Today we are seeing the resurgence of European imperialism."
Imbued with notions of social Darwinism, he warned his ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) of the warlike ways of the white "European race."
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bosnian civil war, the Palestinian struggle, the Asian financial crisis and the damage done by globalization all raised his ire.
Diagnosis and prescription
Adversarial qualities made Mahathir's career.
Expelled from UMNO in 1969 after accusing the "Father of the Nation" -- first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman -- of losing touch with the people, he was rehabilitated and promoted three years later.
In 1981, he became the country's fourth prime minister, but the first commoner after a trio of blue-blooded patricians. Mahathir's father was a provincial headmaster, of Indian descent.
A doctor before he became premier, Mahathir cut his political teeth as a newspaper columnist under the name C.H.E. Det, chronicling the life of agrarian Muslim Malay society.
Those thoughts reached their apotheosis in his 1970 book The Malay Dilemma a biting critique of a backward people who form the country's ethnic majority.
He later applied his analysis on a global scale, winning some reputation for statesmanship.
"But the Malay world of C.H.E. Det never left him," political scientist Khoo Boo Teik wrote in a biography of Mahathir.
"It was superimposed on the world of Islam and on the world of developing countries so that his Malay dilemmas continued to resonate but as Muslim dilemmas and as the dilemmas of the Third World."
For Mahathir, a man who saw himself on an historic mission to elevate his race and build a nation capable of reaching First World status, the end disappointed.
He was criticized for autocratic ways, and vilified after the sacking and jailing of his former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, in 1998.
"I don't hate him. I just feel very, very hurt," says Anwar's wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, leader of the Keadilan (Justice) party. "He used to be a father figure."
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