Quotes About Middle East

T. E. Lawrence was far more than a glamorous, swashbuckling, heroic figure in flowing robes mounted on a camel, leading the Arab tribes against the Turks in World War One.

The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: 'The Great Loot.'

The whole kind of post-World War I settlement that formed the modern Middle East is in danger of collapsing, and we can - we, the United States, you know, the preeminent power in the world - we can say that we want to ignore that, but how long can we avert our gaze? And how long can we stay out?

As long as the United States - and the world - gets its oil from the Middle East, we will be drawn into the endless crises that seem endemic to the region. American energy independence would not only liberate us, it would also drive down the worldwide price of oil.

BDS is not a typical act of political correctness, undertaken by radical academics whose usual prey is the youth of America. This is a worldwide movement designed to destroy the one democracy in the Middle East and the hopes of people who have occupied that land for over three thousand years.

American Christians are quite able to organize around issues that concern them. Yet religious persecution appears not to have grabbed their attention, despite worldwide media coverage of the atrocities against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.

I'm worried for a war to break out between Saudi Arabia and Iran, even though I rule it out.

Sometimes it seems that what really worries the Israeli governments, even more than the Muslim Brotherhood, is the real Egypt.

If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam.

It is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called 'Islamic regimes' such as Saudi Arabia, Iran - and the worst case was the Taliban in Afghanistan - they are pretty authoritarian. No doubt about that.

I've always thought that if Israel really wanted to solve the problem, they'd just start tomorrow and push right to the Jordan River, and anything in their way goes. They don't need America or someone else to help.

Reasonable, even intelligent people can, and frequently do, disagree on how best to achieve peace in the Middle East, but, peace must be the goal of our foreign policy tools, whether they be by the stick or by the carrot.

In 2014, topics like Black Lives Matter, the Middle East, and Ebola were prominent in the national discussion, with mentions of then-President Barack Obama making up a relatively small slice of the discussion on news twitter.

There was no terrorism in the Middle East until Washington brought it there with invasions, bombings, and torture.

Straussian ideology outfits its adherents not with specific policies but rather with grandiose ambitions, like "democratizing" the Middle East. The achievement of bringing Straussism to bear upon political actualities belongs unquestionably to Harvey Mansfield, Jr. Mansfield has sought to demonstrate, not so much how, but why power and virtue should be combined so that politics can again be a great stage for heroic action and noble deeds.

We in the Middle East like to talk politics, we like to argue. Just look at the three prophets - Moses, Jesus and Mohammad. They are all from this small region which creates problems all the time.

Iran stands behind a substantial number of terrorist actions against us, together with Hizballah and the Islamic Jihad. It pretends to care for the Palestinians.

Why can't the Jews and the Arabs just sit down together and settle this like good Christians?

Genetic differences in thermoregulation—efficient/inefficient, left side/right side, you name it—are surprisingly large and well worth paying attention to, given our seemingly permanent posture of fighting extremism in the Middle East. Dianna

Irritable bowel syndrome is a well-documented, little-publicized aftermath of diarrheal infections—especially severe or repeated bouts. If you talk to people who've recently been diagnosed with IBS, about a third of them will say that their symptoms began after a bad attack of food poisoning. Defense Department databases reveal a five-fold higher risk of IBS among men and women who suffered an acute diarrheal infection while deployed in the Middle East.

a report would surface from the Pentagon or Langley, recommending that U.S. policy pay more attention to human rights and governance issues when dealing with our Middle East partners. But then the Saudis would deliver a vital tip that kept an explosive device from being loaded onto U.S.-bound cargo planes or our naval base in Bahrain would prove critical in managing a flare-up with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, and those reports would be relegated to the bottom of a drawer.

Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.

Maybe nothing would come of my Cairo speech. Maybe the dysfunction of the Middle East would play itself out regardless of what I did. Maybe the best we could hope for was to placate men like Mubarak and kill those who would try to kill us. Maybe, as the Pyramids had whispered, none of it mattered in the long run. But on the only scale that any of us can truly comprehend, the span of centuries, the actions of an American president sixty-five years earlier had set the world on a better course.

the months to come, I'd think back often to my dinner with Abbas and Netanyahu, Mubarak and King Abdullah, the pantomime of it, their lack of resolve. To insist that the old order in the Middle East would indefinitely hold, to believe that the children of despair wouldn't revolt, at some point, against those who maintained it—that, it turned out, was the greatest illusion of all. —