Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's this constant narrative of anxieties: Is the U.S. in decline? Is China rising? People forget... no other country is trying to play the role we play. They're not signing up to be responsible for security in the Middle East, responsible for the global economy, responsible for enforcing international norms.
I kind of think that if you show conspiracy theorists a photo of the dead Bin Laden they will come up with an explanation for why it's really a Photoshopped picture of Bin Laden asleep. Or his dead cousin Fred. Donald Trump apparently believes that Bin Laden is dead, so that ought to be enough for the Middle East.
After I made my tour in the Middle, into the Middle-East and Africa and visited Mecca and other places, I think that the separation [ from the Black Muslim movement] became psychological as well as physical, so that I could look at it more objectively and - and separate that which was good from that which was bad.
...if [the 9/11/01 attacks] had happened to the Russians, about three major cities in the Middle East would have been parking lots in twenty minute and they wouldn't have worried about the consequences because there would not have been any because the remaining terrorist states would have said 'we get the message.'
Governments can no longer control 100 percent of the story. Time and geographical boundaries disappear. In places like China and all over the Middle East, social-media outlets are being used to expose and hold accountable public officials that don't want to be held accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.
While sanctions against Iran and Syria are intended to constrain those countries' governments, they have had the unfortunate side effect of constraining activists' access to free online software and services used widely across the Middle East, including browsers, online chat applications, and online storage services.
We come from an abundant, endlessly providing, always forthcoming, always giving source. If we would just stay like that, if we would be forthcoming and giving and sharing and allowing, excluding no one, then it wouldn't be possible to have wars in the Middle East, or poverty in Africa, or any of these kinds of things.
The message films that try to be message films always fail. Likewise with documentaries. The documentaries that work best are the ones that eschew a simple message for an odd angle. I found that one of the most spectacular films about the Middle East was 'Waltz With Bashir,' or 'The Gatekeepers,' or '5 Broken Cameras.'
The fact that we walked away from the Middle East, as distasteful as it was for us to stay involved and prevent wars, based on our long involvement there, we have helped to create and provide a foundation. Obviously for ISIS and also for the absolute barbarianism and human catastrophe that Assad impacted on his people.
I am a standup comedian who has performed comedy in the Middle East in front of thousands of Muslims. And believe it or not, they laughed at plenty, especially when we poked fun at local culture. The Lebanese loved it when you would make fun of their driving and how, in Lebanon, a red light is just a suggestion to stop.
The tactical issue is ISIS or ISIL in the greater Levant area, which is essentially Syria, and Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, et cetera. But the wider problem is not just trans-regional in that part of the world, but it's also global. I mean, 40 to 50 countries supplying fighters to this current fight in the Middle East? Come on.
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
As the CIA tried to find itself, the threat of international terrorism emanating from the Middle East, Africa, North Africa and Central and Southeast Asia grew with each strike: the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.
We're not going to cure terrorism and spread peace and goodwill in the Middle East by killing innocent people, or I'm not even saying our bullets and bombs are killing them. The occupation that they don't have food. They don't have clean water. They don't have electricity. They don't have medicine. They don't have doctors.
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The 'mot juste' unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
In the Middle East - and this is prior to the migration - you had almost no chance of coming into the United States. Christians from Syria, of which there were many, many of their heads ... chopped off. If you were a Muslim from Syria, it was one of the easiest places to come in (to the U.S.). I thought that was deplorable.
For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories, however bloody and brutal. That gives both the Middle East and the West a small and distant hope of security.
We always say Jordan is not rich in natural resources - we don't have oil or gas like some of our neighbors do - but I think in terms of human resources, we are quite lucky and we are really trying to foster an environment of innovation and technology. I think Jordan will emerge as a center of innovation in the Middle East.
Israel's pro-American orientation exists not just among Israeli elites but also among the whole population. Come what may in Israel, it's inconceivable that this fundamental orientation will change. Combined with its overwhelming military power, this makes Israel a unique and irreplaceable American asset in the Middle East.
It has been an honor to work in the Obama Administration and to serve this President, particularly during a period of unprecedented change in the broader Middle East. Obviously, there is still work to do but I promised my wife I would return to government for only two years and we both agreed it is time to act on my promise.
We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.
Look at all the misery in the Middle East, for example. All these countries have Islam in common, and far too few dare to criticize Islam as an ideology, and what it's doing to these countries. I know I might get punched in the face for saying these things, but my conviction is that less religion in the world would be better.
Hot, dry katabatic winds, like the south foehn in Europe, the sharav in the Middle East, and the Santa Ana of Southern California, are all believed to have a decided effect on human behavior and are associated with such health problems as migraines, depression, lethargy, and moodiness. Some scientists say that this is a myth.
The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person.
The Middle East is a very difficult stage to play upon. Without doubt, it is a good drama. And on occasion, there are situations so unimaginable, if not ludicrous, as to make them almost comic. But the cast is constantly changing, the audience is often disengaged, and it seems at times that no one is actually running the show.
In his final year in office, Clinton decided that his contribution to Middle East peace would lie not in the removal of Saddam Hussein but in a grand attempt to resolve the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. With this, he missed his last chance to deal forcefully with the man he was publicly committed to overthrowing.
Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. All of that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth. If women had been in charge, would they have been more sensible? It's a theory.
Thanks to Hillary Clinton, Iran is now the dominant Islamic power in the Middle East, and on the road to nuclear weapons. Hillary Clinton's support for violent regime change in Syria has thrown the country into one of the bloodiest civil wars anyone has ever seen - while giving ISIS a launching pad for terrorism against the West.
I come from an African-American family that is predominantly Muslim. I have had to covertly operate in parts of the Middle East and Africa. I've lived a Muslim life and prayed in Mosques, Husseiniyahs, and shrines where needed. One must respect Islam to understand Islam. I've read the Quran through and through a half dozen times.
The world has grown increasingly dangerous, with a nuclear madman in North Korea testing an ICBM a month, mullahs in Tehran plotting the takeover of the Middle East, Russia engaging in 'frozen conflicts' in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, a very hot civil war in Syria, and China appropriating a vast swath of the Pacific to itself.
To be sure, many of the Sykes-Picot borders reflected deals cut in Europe rather than local demographic or historical realities. But that hardly makes the Middle East unique: Most borders around the world owe their legacy less to thoughtful design or popular choice than to some mixture of violence, ambition, geography, and chance.
I'm not an expert on the Middle East or terrorism or the use of military force or politics. It's all I can do to know a little bit about how to help people raise their kids and what to do when they get sick. When a war happens, I just hope it gets over with quickly so that how we take care of children becomes more important again.
On Putin's order, Russia intervenes in Syria not to fight terrorists but to abet the war crimes of the Assad regime. Russian bombers deliberately target aid workers and hospitals. They threaten Syrian freedom fighters trained by the U.S. They are allied with our enemies in the Middle East and trying to weaken our friendships there.
In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand.
I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.
Most Israelis have a sense, 'We just don't want to live in the Middle East anymore. We don't want it to be the Middle East. Were going to just build a wall or operate unilaterally' - not try to even use force as used to be the case to convince Arabs to accept Israel by convincing them that Israel is here to stay and then negotiating.
All over the Middle East, we face difficult challenges: the ongoing tragedy in Syria, the instability in Iraq, and the jihadist terrorism which dares to speak in the name of Islam, brings so many to seek refuge. The Hashemite Kingdom is facing all these challenges with honor, with dignity, and with great national and human solidarity.
I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.
I have studied the details, listened to Ohioans on all sides of this issue, and consulted with nuclear experts. This deal is not about trusting the Iranian regime, but instead working with our allies on comprehensive, verifiable restrictions to block Iran's pathways to a nuclear bomb without precipitating another war in the Middle East.
A decade ago, I lived in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh, as the treasury attache to our embassy there, and I was, of course, on the ground in the Middle East whenever the Arab Spring started, and it's fast-forward a decade later, nine years later. It's hard to believe that I am still working on this issue. You know, here in the State Department.
I've just finished my 20th book this past year and I'm working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I'll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I'm an artist too.
As young West Point cadets, our motto was 'duty, honor, country.' But it was in the field, from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the sands of the Middle East, that I learned that motto's fullest meaning. There I saw gallant young Americans of every race, creed and background fight, and sometimes die, for 'duty, honor, and their country.'
The first series of 'McMafia' is very Alex Godman-centric and could continue to be, but we haven't even begun to explore the Middle East or Africa or even South America in detail. One of our ambitions would be to drop into some of these other places and, by doing so, bring the audience into a world that they wouldn't necessarily have been in.
Britain, along with the U.S.A., is war weary, and after the travesty of Iraq and Afghanistan, has grave misgivings in any future involvement in the Middle East. The ghost of Tony Blair and his single-minded determination to attack Iraq, at any cost, has cast a long shadow over British politics. The British public have a long collective memory.
When we strengthen our relations with the Gulf states, when we cooperate with the Arabs, everybody asks if we are looking for a new geopolitical place. But in the Middle East and the Gulf, you can find German, French and British goods everywhere. German relations to these states are very good, as are English and French relations. Does this make them Arab-oriented?
We have for decades now, and I've dealt with the Russians for 35 years, we have from time to time been able to, even though we have different interests, to align them. That alignment has become more and more difficult under Putin. You see that in Ukraine, you see it in the Middle East. To an extent where he actually defines Russian success as thwarting the United States.
As I searched the atlas for somewhere to run to, Hugh made a case for his old stomping grounds. His first suggestion was Beirut, where he went to nursery school. His family left there in the midsixties and moved to the Congo. After that, it was Ethiopia, and then Somalia, all fine places in his opinion. 'Let's save Africa and the Middle East for when I decide to quit living,' I said.
What is likely to happen? Either an escalation of violence or an entire change in the whole Middle East theater. It may well happen, and I say this to my Palestinian friends, that the Palestinians have in a certain way missed their hour. They had their moment when the world's public opinion was behind them, and a considerable part of the Israeli public was willing to compromise with them.
The Russians are succeeding in continuing their dismemberment of Ukraine, they're succeeding in exerting enormous influence in the Middle East, which they never had before. They are succeeding - they have succeeded in interfering with our election, and we know that they continue that in the French elections and other elections. And so far they have paid a little or no penalty for all of this misbehavior.
The whole point of anti-Semitism has been to create a vulnerable buffer group that can be bribed with some privileges into managing the exploitation of others, and then, when social pressure builds, be blamed and scapegoated, distracting those at the bottom from the crimes of those at the top. Peasants who go on pogrom against their Jewish neighbors won't make it to the nobleman's palace to burn him out and seize the fields. This was the role of Jews in Europe. This has been the role of Jews in the United States, and this is the role of Jews in the Middle East.