QuoteLog

“[W]e kept hearing all this stuff ever since September 11th, you know, the Muslim street is going to explode in anger. Well, it finally did, and it was in Paris, not in the Middle East.”

“The United Nations, the European Union, the ‘peacekeepers’ of all nations had assured the terrified civilians of Bosnia-Herzegovina that the international community was stronger than Milosevic’s depraved regime and the death squads that it had spawned. And those who were so foolish as to trust this pledge were then hideously put to death. On video. In plain sight. Scanned from NATO and American satellites circulating indifferently in outer space.”

“There was no concrete plan to prevent atrocity crimes at Srebrenica. In fact, there was no realistic plan to save any of the ‘safe areas’ from assault or atrocities.”

“Driving by women leads to evil. Can you imagine what it would be like if her car broke down? She would have to seek help from men.”

“The North Koreans have learned how to use irrationality as a bargaining tool.”

“Western Europe is undergoing the largest population shift since the 7th and 8th centuries. This is happening just as the advent of a federal Europe, and the decline of traditional faith, are already straining its old identity.”

“It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

“Look, in my country we have elections that are not perfect, that have been marred by violence and terrible intimidation. But still people go to the polls. And still the results are accepted as legitimate.”

“A close reading of the UK’s Department for International Development’s brilliantly detailed daily reports of activity in the affected regions also reveals that UN officials are working hard at planning to work — and estimating the need for work — rather than actually delivering aid on the ground. All of which is a bit chilling, since the UN is positioning itself as the primary carrier of aid relief to the region and has been critical of the ‘core group’ response led the the US and Australia.”

“If we, comfortably ensconced in the institutionalised Europe to which these peaceful demonstrators look with hope and yearning, do not immediately support them with every appropriate means at our disposal, we will betray the very ideals we claim to represent.”

“In a bureaucracy which has been as isolated as the United Nations from ordinary mechanisms of accountability, one begins to sadly suspect that in the present scandals we might only be seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

“I believe we have been far too tolerant for too long, especially being too tolerant of intolerance, and we only got intolerance back.”

“Bigots who make a nuisance of themselves is one thing; all countries have bigots. What defines a country is the degree to which it tolerates its bigots.”

“Later, I learned that the Rotterdam police had destroyed a street mural featuring the words, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ a picture of an angel, and the date of Mr. van Gogh’s murder because the leader of a nearby mosque reportedly considered it racist.”

“To put it plainly, if European public opinion about the U.S. depends primarily on us electing a president who doesn’t offend their sensibilities, then the Transatlantic relationship may have already become too pathological to repair any time in the foreseeable future.”

“Darfur already has become a synonym for dithering by outside powers in the face of genocide. Soon it may also deliver another grim verdict on the ability of the Security Council to back up its own resolutions.”

“For once, there appears to be the political will among the African nations to do something about a crisis on their own continent. But to make that effective, it needs the UN to flex its muscles. That is something the UN has yet to show it has an ability, leave alone an intention, to do.”

“When the Saudi people finally rise up in revolt and throw out the House of Saud, it won’t be for democratic reform, and it won’t be for an islamic republic. It’ll be about mobile phones.”

“I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lampposts and they’ve got a proper government that represents the people of Saudi Arabia.”

“Instead of shouting and criticizing the American initiative, you have to bring democracy to your countries, and then there will be no need to fear America or your people. The Arabs should either change or change will be imposed on them from outside.”

“I fled home the next week, leaving all my illusions of the Arab world in my Cairo flat. I couldn’t wait to be in America again. On the long flight home, I promised myself I would never accept anything less than full democracy for my fellow Muslims in the Arab world or apologize for the tyranny that now masquerades as Islam.”

“Anti-anybody is dangerous. Anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust. Muslims attacked us but we are not allowed to be anti-Muslim -- nor should we be. That would be a ridiculous, offensive, unproductive, dangerous generalization. Right? Yet anti-American is suddenly OK.”

“With our sermons, our empty gestures and our poetic flights, we [the French] have pissed off the planet. Worse: we make them laugh.”

“Friedman’s first rule of Middle East reporting: What people tell you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public.”

“Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful.”

“Part of the problem is the investment we’ve made in the idea that the Americans had it coming, or at least are only making the problem worse by fighting back. This makes it even more difficult to swallow that we too are targets. The implications are too shattering for our worldview, so we take the easy way out, and downplay the danger. The terrorists will be more than willing to allow us this illusion - up to the very moment they strike.”

“We are very interested in American deaths in Iraq. If we were as passionate about our own elderly, we would have had fewer victims. If the Americans are as moved by our deaths as we are by their deaths, they’ll soon make a landing in France to stop the massacre. It’s just that, and we will never admit it, every American soldier killed in Iraq causes, if not happiness, at least a certain satisfaction.”

“Almost every instance of defeat, retreat or regression is straightaway blamed on a concocted conspiracy - Zionist, of course - which inflicts heavy damage upon a suspiciously helpless Muslim population of over one billion. Is it just me, or is it very strange that so few can keep so many, so consistently, down in the dumps?”

“We want to invest in the New York Stock Exchange. We want to have Pepsi Cola, Coca-Cola. We don’t want confrontation and aggression and, you know, to fight anymore. It’s over. It’s behind us now.”

“You’ll think I’m off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical, in a positive sense, in the approach to Africa since Kennedy.”

“It might seem perverse to seek to spread peace at the barrel of a gun; but the peace we enjoy here in Europe exists only because we (along with the Americans) acted with weaponry to banish tyrants. The Iraqi people want and deserve the same.”

“If Europe were to apply as much pressure on Saddam Hussein as (it) does on the United States and Britain, I think we could prevent war.”

“Chanting death to this and that is not the way to run a country. We have lost our prestige in the world. We are constantly falling behind.”

“Americans have different ways of saying things. They say ‘elevator’, we say ‘lift’ ... they say ‘President’, we say ‘stupid psychopathic git.’ ”

“We’d like to stay friends. But the European and British intelligentsia, by and large, is like a friend who’s been allowed to be condescending for so long that he literally can’t see it any more.”

“France is the insecure girl who mistreats her big lug of a boyfriend in public but always comes back crying when there’s trouble -- car won’t start, Nazis attacking, etc.”

“I agree that the Palestinian people have gotten a raw deal. But let’s not pretend that the Israelis are their only tormentors. The Arab states who now claim to want them to have a homeland weren’t in such a rush to give them one when they controlled the West Bank and Gaza from 1948-67.”