Quotes About Middle East

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 are aware of the strategic location of Kuwait, besides the stable region.

Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became 'pro'-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.' s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.

There isn't a doubt that Iran constitutes the single most important single-country strategic challenge to the United States and to the kind of Middle East that we want to see.

Iraq is not about oil.

Although most Americans don't know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East.

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.

The world's oldest Christian populations have been driven from their homes and have become nearly extinct in the Middle East.

What is the one country in the Middle East that has not been attacked by ISIS? One. That is Iran. That is more than happenstance, I'm sure.

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.

There is a new crisis in the Middle East. A report from Beirut, via Cairo, says that Syrian tanks of the most modern Russian design have crossed the Jordanian frontier. This is undoubtedly a threat to Israel. At the same time Damascus charges that Turkish troops are mobilizing…." Florence

By the time Mansa Musa left the Middle East, he had put so much gold into circulation, its value fell sharply. A reporter in the service of the Egyptian sultan reported that the Cairo gold market had been so saturated that it still had not fully recovered twelve years after Mansa Musa's fabulous hajj.

An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members "say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments." These are not empty boasts. Arms supplied by US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to anti-Assad forces in Syria have been captured regularly in Iraq.

Of the nineteen hijackers that day, fifteen were Saudi.

There it is. That is the source of women's inequality in the Middle East, the Western world, and every country infected with biblical belief. In the New Testament, Paul (or someone pretending to be Paul) pounces on this pretext for patriarchy:

Getty's 55-cent-a-barrel royalty to the Saudis loomed over Aminoil's 35-cent royalty to Kuwait, the roughly 33-cent royalty that Aramco had just been compelled to pay the Saudis—and far overshadowed the 16½ cents that Anglo-Iranian and the Iraq Petroleum Company were paying in Iran and Iraq respectively, as well as the 15-cent royalty that the Kuwait Oil Company was paying.

Saleh had his own battles to fight, most notably with a rebellious group called Ansar Allah ("Supporters of God"). Its base were the Zaydi tribes in the rugged mountains of northwest Yemen (with some spillover into the very south of Saudi Arabia). The Zaydis represent about 40 percent of the Muslim population of Yemen. They are considered close to Shia, though with doctrines different from those of Iran, and with some affinities to Sunni.

the Houthis captured Sanaa, Yemen's capital. They wasted no time in establishing direct air service between Sanaa and Tehran.

Yemen may be a prototype for a chaos nation. It has also, because of its strategic location, turned into a critical battleground in the great rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the modern Middle East. "From now on, we can't speak about [the] Syrian army, Hezbollah, Yemeni army, Iraqi army, and Iranian army," Hezbollah television announced. "We must speak about one resistance axis operating in all theaters.

The Iran-Iraq war began the same year that I went to primary school, at the age of six.

Mddle Eastern history is filled with minefields, not because of what actually happened in the past, but because of how people read back the present into the past.

The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.

The Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to—but broader than—Europe's pre-Westphalian wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological, and traditional national-interest disputes merge. Religion is "weaponized" in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation.

But raw numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland of Islam, the Shia are closer to fifty percent, and wherever oil reserves are richest—Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia—they are in the majority.