Quotes from Michael B. Oren

unfeeling tyrants" who cared no more for their subjects' lives "than…so many caterpillars upon an apple tree.

Viewing an American University art exhibition dedicated in my honor, the last thing I expected was to be accosted by a ninety-year-old Jewish woman whose head barely reached my belt. "I like you, but I don't like everything your country does," she growled. "Excuse me, ma'am," I courteously replied, "but do you like everything your country does?" "No." She wagged her finger in my face. "But your country must be perfect.

the conclusions reached in the Goldstone Report are not worthy of consideration by people of goodwill.

In a controversial talk with Jeff the previous March—conspicuously made when Netanyahu was in flight to Washington—the president again warned Israel of its growing isolation in the world and vulnerability to boycotts. "I took it to be a little bit of a veiled threat," Goldberg later told Charlie Rose, interpreting Obama's remark as "nice little Jewish state you got there, I'd hate to see something happen to it.

an angel sent on this business…could have done nothing

such banditti who might for half the sum that is paid them be exterminated from the Earth.

In the Middle East, no one gets credit for a preemptive cringe.

None of the Western-oriented armies wanted to standardize their arsenals with Soviet arms, and nobody wanted to take orders from Egyptian generals. Except in Egypt, Shuqayri was universally despised and the PLO in constant arrears, as the Arab states uniformly defaulted on their pledges.42

And while generally loyal to the United States, ibn Saud displayed no reservations about negotiating with Britain and France in order to extract higher contract fees from the Americans. Indeed, when asked by American negotiators why he favored the United States over the Europeans, ibn Saud candidly replied, "You are very far away!

The Arabs always seem to accept yesterday's formulations too late

detested the missionaries who made people "permanently miserable by telling them…how blissful a place heaven is, and [how] nearly impossible it is to get there.

At the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln pledged that he, too, would work to restore the Jews to their homeland once America was reunited.

Negotiating with a representative of the Libyan pirates in 1786, Thomas Jefferson was told that the Quran commanded the destruction of all nonbelievers, Americans included. And yet, when President Thomas Jefferson later made war on Libya, he dreamed of transforming it into a democracy.

The secretary quoted the Middle Eastern axiom, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," to which Netanyahu replied—"acidly," according to Gates—"No, in the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my frenemy.

The violent tension between honor and shame, so central to Middle Eastern cultures and tragically familiar to Israel, was alien to most Americans.

Obama declared, "The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.

Being Palestinian," I said, "means never having to say you're sorry.

attitudes toward America. Vainly, I scoured Dreams from My Father for some expression of reverence, even respect, for the country its author would someday lead. Instead, the book criticizes Americans for their capitalism and consumer culture, for despoiling their environment and maintaining antiquated power structures. Traveling abroad, they exhibited "ignorance and arrogance"—the very shortcomings the president's critics assigned to him.

Israel sells. Arabs massacring Arabs in, say, Syria, is a footnote, while a Palestinian child shot by Israeli soldiers is a scoop.

his strongest desire was to return to farming, but Weizman had insisted that Hod replace him as air force chief early in 1966. Since then, he had concentrated on refining Focus, reducing the turnaround time for refueling and rearming jets to less than eight minutes. The Egyptian turnaround rate, by comparison, was eight hours. "He may not be able to quote [the Hebrew poet] Bialik or Shakespeare," Weizman said of Hod, "but he will screw the Arabs in plain Hebrew.

stated, "Israel is a strong ally of the United States [and] will not stop being a strong ally. And I will continue to believe that Israel's security is paramount." There would be friction, I assumed, but the alliance would ultimately hold.

We were always the ultimate Other—communists in the view of the capitalists and capitalists in communist eyes, nationalists for the cosmopolitans and, for jingoists, the International Jew.

Those who tried to escape received the customary punishment, as Nicholson harrowingly described: After they had stripped the sufferer naked, they inserted the iron pointed stake into the lower termination of the vertebrae, and thence forced it up near his back bone, until it appeared between the shoulders, avoiding the vital parts. The stake was then raised in the air and the poor sufferer exposed to the view of the other slaves, writhing in…insupportable agony.

Call them, tell them I never said it," he urged me. Contacting the White House Situation Room for the first time, I reached Rahm and David. Their response