For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Instead of trying to bring freedom to the Arab world, couldn’t we just concentrate on trying to fend off the European Union and defending our own porous borders?
Israel is shutting out the Arab world and shutting itself in.
As you know with the Arab Spring, there were no dividends.
Even non-democratic allies no longer trust America. Barack Obama has alienated our most important and longest standing Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both the anti-Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Iran Arab states have lost respect for him.
In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.
The issue of Palestine has been there since more than 60 years. But more important since 1967 when the war was, ended in the defeat of some Arab countries.
Good music is good music no matter what language you’re singing in. I think my fans appreciate the fact that I’m not afraid to be myself. I’m proud to be an Arab.
I do believe – I very strongly believe that the Arab nations would be willing to put together an Arab NATO-like structure.
Somebody was asking me the other day – President Bush is now talking about freedom for the Arab world. I say, well, that’s great. I was talking about that fifty years ago.
Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself.
It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce the policy of strength toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.
Politicians pose and grip and grin, and mouth blandishments, and, like the beloved Arab leaders, are careful to say nothing. The prime photo op directive, it seems, is to say absolutely nothing.
It’s not for the president to determine the arrangements between Israel and the Palestinians, and the Arab world, but to be the bridge between opinions and to facilitate dialogue and understanding.
I was one of the first people in the Palestinian world, in the late 1970s, to say that there is no military option, either for us or for them, and I’m certainly the only well-known Arab who writes these things – and who writes exactly the same things in the Arab press that I say here.
Few, if any, political analysts predicted the Arab Spring. The raw energy of millions of protestors in the streets of Tunis and Cairo came as a surprise to many who believed that Arabs were essentially reconciled to their governments and non-democratic rule.
Several hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs live in slums known as refugee camps in Gaza, Judea, and Somalia. Attempts by Israel to rehabilitate and oust them have been defeated by Arab objections. Nor has their fate been any better in Arab states.
We all should respect Chris Stevens, who dedicated his life to trying to improve relations between the Arab world and the western world.
Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men’s minds.
To this day the Arab influence is evident in southern Italy, northern Africa and, above all, in Spain.
No matter what’s happening in the Middle East – the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment – the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.
The Trump administration always says it wants to correct Obama’s mistakes. It should add his mishandling of Arab democracy to its list.
Everyone knew that Saleh and the Houthis were a marriage of convenience. He was a dictator; the Houthis are ideologues who want to impose their fundamentalist vision. Neither cared for the core values of the Arab Spring – representative, accountable governance.
A free and democratic Arab world aligns with America’s security interests.
I grew up in Jerusalem and went to school here. I studied at the Hebrew University – mostly Islam and Arabic: Arab literature, Arab poetry and culture, because I felt like we are living in this region, in the Middle East, and we are not alone: There are nations here whose culture is Arab.
The world does not look to us in the Arab world out of a healthy desire for knowledge.
I met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, visited our allies in the Arab Gulf, traveled to Tunisia and Iraq, met with President Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, and visited our allies in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.
Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.
My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the naksa, or setback, as the Arab defeat during the June 1967 war with Israel is euphemistically known in Arabic.
Bringing an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may help the young Arab generation to realise their aspirations. Israel is more than willing to offer our experience in building a modern economy in spite of limited resources to the whole region.
Do not forget that the Arab countries, starting with Algeria and Egypt, are the ones that have paid the heaviest toll because of Islamic terror.
I don’t care about the internal political system of the United States. I want to be a friend of United States, of its baseball, its institutions, its rock and roll, its workers, and its technology because we need it. I want to be friends of the Arab people, of the Persian people, of the Asian people.
With the common Iranian threat bringing the Sunni Arab world and Israel closer together, an Israeli-Palestinian peace would go a long way in improving relations and rebuffing Iran’s regional ambitions.
Our ability to effectively engage China and the Arab world rests on shared economic and political interests and mutual understanding.
Look at what has occurred in history. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was not surprising, but it was unexpected. Who predicted the Arab Spring? Nobody expected it, but all the ingredients were there. I think all the ingredients are also there for Quebec to become a country. But when? That’s another question.
Thanks to Twitter, I learn about the revolutions in the Middle East via Arab activists and writers, not just from American foreign correspondents.
One sure way to ruin American credibility in the Arab world is to sit silently in Damascus and look like you’re part of the Assad show.
Israel expanded beyond its original boundaries only because the Arab powers attacked Israel and the U.N. demarcation unsuccessfully in 1948. The endless caterwauling about the 1967 borders is rubbish.
There can’t be real peace without improving the integration of Arab society and making it part of the political game.
Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart.
What we need to do is we need to come to grips with this cancerous form of the Islamic religion that is breaking down the Arab world order, and that is very clear.
Israel is now sustaining a war for its own existence. A nation defending its citizens against terrorist bombings and a military and diplomatic onslaught by an array of Arab foes is practicing survival, not genocide.
We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.
It’s interesting to me that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, and in the marches, people were singing ‘Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.’
The world is lousy with Arab princes. And if we could have got Osama bin Laden, and saved at some point down the road 3,000 American lives, a few less Arab princes would have been OK in my book.
The biggest aggravation in the Arab world, the biggest reason for their anger toward us and the creation of those suicide terrorists, is Israel and the difficulty with the Palestinian issue.
The Arab Spring is a powerful and compelling response not only to an age of tyranny but also to the remnant chains of imperial influence.
Everything that could produce a clash between the Arab world and the West seemed dangerous to me.
The failure of Christianity in the areas west from Sicily was even greater, and was increased by the spread of Arab outlooks and influence to that area, and especially to Spain.
Successful nations make a point of trying to learn from their neighbors. The Arab world has been taught over generations only to hate theirs.
Mubarak would meet with me when I was at Central Command. He would lean and put his hand on my knee, as if a father figure, and say, ‘General, don’t ever forget the Arab Street. Listen to the Arab Street.’ I’d like to go to him now and say, ‘Mr. President, what about that Arab Street, what’s that all about?’
It’s particularly incumbent in the Middle East on Sunni Arab nations to fight for values, to fight for the protection of innocent life, to fight for the principles of civilization and stability and order itself.
We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.
