Quotes About Middle East

There is very little hope that the United States or anyone else can do much to stabilize Iraq, Libya, Syria or Egypt. Stabilizing Iran, and bringing it back into the family of nations, is much more possible. That would be a 'win' for both sides.

Hamas is a Palestinian political party with an aggressive militant wing.

What you have in the Middle East is tension not between Jews and Arabs, not between Israelis and Palestinians, but between the radical wing and the moderate people.

The Middle East Media Research Institute has spent decades detailing the diseased messages emanating from Palestinian TV and textbooks, instructing children in the glories of suicide terrorism against innocent Israelis.

And by the way, a piece of news, Israel is the one country in which everyone is pro-American, opposition and coalition alike. And I represent the entire people of Israel who say, 'Thank you, America.' And we're friends of America, and we're the only reliable allies of America in the Middle East.

The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.

The whole of the Middle East, up to the River Tigris, was returned to Roman rule.

Too often in the past, U.S. leaders have forced Israel to pay the price for American strategic interests in the Middle East - through concessions in the peace process as well as passivity in the face of Iraqi attacks.

We know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution. (On Muammar Qaddafi of Libya)

The Holocaust began to represent more than the horrific suffering of the Jewish people in the past—now it also signified an imminent threat to the future of the Jewish state. A past atrocity in Europe came to foreshadow an impending apocalypse in the Middle East.

The line in the sand that Carter drew along Iran's Zagros Mountains now stretches from Central Asia through the Middle East and across the width of Africa. That the ongoing enterprise may someday end—that U.S. troops will finally depart—appears so unlikely as to make the prospect unworthy of discussion. Like the war on drugs or the war on poverty, the War for the Greater Middle East has become a permanent fixture in American life and is accepted as such.

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago—and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since—is no one to consult on questions of ethics.

What did you do in the military?" "How'd you know about that?" "The man I called for a reference told me. He said you fought in the Middle East." "That's right." "What branch of the service?" "Army. Special Forces." "What was your specialty?" "Killing the enemy.

For fifteen years the Soviet Union has been supporting the Arabs against Israel in the Middle East and all they have to show for it is the humiliation of their protégés and the capture and destruction of their equipment by Israel. The Arabs have shown no inclination toward Communist ideology and their oil continues to flow to the West.

Reading Sartre on the Middle East, I wonder whether he really knows what he is saying.

Between Sartre and any given problem in politics there has always stood the United States. There are in the world two superpowers, but only one has seemed to him positively evil. When he discussed the Middle East, his first concern as a friend of Israel was to dissociate Israel from American interests.

What was wanted was an élite to underpin the rulers, themselves in turn supported and buttressed by a population which presumably understood, approved, and legitimated the aims of such an élite. Whoever knows the Middle East will agree that such a quest was the political equivalent of the search for the philosophical stone.

Iran has long sponsored terrorists who carry out homicide bombings in Israeli cities. However, it is a mistake to believe the danger Iran poses is directed at Israel alone.

Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life.

Peace is important for Israel.

Assad has to be removed, and then you have to actually put someone in that is a qualified leader that can start to build some trust in that area.

The Fayyad cabinet may well be the best the Palestinians ever get. But whatever its good qualities, there is no democracy.

Many occasions I've sat down with Israelis to say, where do you see your country in 10 years time, and work me back, so we can figure out the synergies and the connections between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. No Israeli has ever been able to answer that question.

Our actions in the Middle East over the last 15 years have already guaranteed radical Muslims quite enough ammunition to kill Americans for the next century, even if Guantanamo did not exist.