"You know what I just realized? At this very moment, there are [Islamic Fundamentalists] exploding in the Middle East, and not in the way they like to explode - strapped with bombs and shrapnel on a bus full of children. - "Anonymous" on Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003.
"It is considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, but I will make an exception for Yasser Arafat, the pathetic embodiment of all that went wrong in the Third World after the demise of the European empires." - Max Boot
"And, hell, even if Sept. 11 never happened and Osama bin Laden had followed his true calling and became a cross-dressing apple-bobber in Amsterdam, we would still have a legitimate reason to have "negative views" toward Arab countries. You know why? Because they are undemocratic stagnating cultures lead by tyrants who drink daily from a heady cocktail of brutality, corruption, and crapulence. I am so fed up with the criticism that it is "arrogant" to express such opinions. Fine, it's arrogant. I plead guilty. That doesn't mean it's not true, does it?" - Jonah Goldberg
"The aim is to mark the respect and love the UAE have for the camel" - Faraj bin Hamouda, on the first annual Camel Beauty Pagent (why a "Beauty Pageant"? Why isn't it just called a "camel show" like a dog show or cat show?)
"The catastrophe of the Muslim world is also explicable in its failure to grasp the nature of Western success, which springs neither from luck nor resources, genes nor geography. Like Third World Marxists of the 1960s, who put blame for their own self-inflicted misery upon corporations, colonialism and racism--anything other than the absence of real markets and a free society--the Islamic intelligentsia recognizes the Muslim world's inferiority vis-à-vis the West, but it then seeks to fault others for its own self-created fiasco. Government spokesmen in the Middle East should ignore the nonsense of the cultural relativists and discredited Marxists and have the courage to say that they are poor because their populations are nearly half illiterate, that their governments are not free, that their economies are not open, and that their fundamentalists impede scientific inquiry, unpopular expression and cultural exchange." - Victor Davis Hanson
"Two striking themes--one overt, one implied--characterize most Arab invective: first, that there is some sort of equivalence--political, cultural and military--between the West and the Muslim world; and second, that America has been exceptionally unkind toward the Middle East. Both premises are false and reveal that the temple of anti-Americanism is supported by pillars of utter ignorance." - Victor Davis Hanson
"The "street" in any given Arab country consists of 278 state-sanctioned mullahs already preaching death to the Americans and the Jews, five state-controlled newspaper opinion columnists preaching ditto, 577,000 state security officers making sure nobody says anything to the contrary and 73 million people who would very much like to be living in New Jersey. " - Michael Kelly, on "The Arab Street"
"I think [Edward] Said would be a good nominee for depolymerization, at least his carcass could be used to extract hydrocarbons for gasoline useage. That's about the only value he's ever had, he's responsible for spreading hate and violent lies nearly his whole life which has caused many deaths." - Maggie
"Abu Nidal was found shot to death last year in his Baghdad apartment. Police suspect fair play." - Dennis Miller
"The [Wall Street] Journal ran a little chronology of Baath-party rule in Iraq. The first line said, "1947: Arab students, influenced by the national socialist movements in Europe, founded the Baath party." That's what they are, isn't it? National socialists. Nazis. Arab variety. And the Iraqis have lived with Hitlerism for all this time, longer, now, than the Germans did." - Jay Nordlinger
"To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing." - General George S. Patton
"It is an irony that the only Arabs who experience democracy live outside Arab polities. The honor of the Arab nation is manifested in the autocracy of its oligarchs. The relative prosperity of the Arab masses under non-Arab rule is irrelevant in tribal thinking." - Razib
"Why do Arabs have so little credibility? Maybe it's trying to kill people for making porn, and then threatening to sue them for "insensitivity"? Jeez, this is beyond pathetic. It's evidence of a deep-rooted cultural sickness in Arab society today -- one that is ignored by many westerners who would have no trouble recognizing it for what it is if it appeared in, say, Mississippi." - Glenn Harlan Reynolds on the reaction to the West Bank's first porn movie.
"The liberal tradition in the West tries to impute to the behavior of the native or the underdog an idealist position which is not really there. They want to think of the peoples of [the Middle East] as "noble savages," as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it. Instead of saying, what we have here is an outmoded form of thinking clashing with an attempt to construct modern states.... When it comes to thinking about Middle East politics, the American liberal mind is often chasing rainbows. They are living in a world of delusion." - Kemal Salibi, Lebanese Historian
"In most parts of America, we will be setting our clocks back an hour tonight. As Egypt airs the Protocols of the Elders of Zion series on state television, they set their clocks back a few hundred years." - Lawrence Simon, 10/26/02
"Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism go hand in hand, even if my friend doesn't recognize it. It doesn't pay to stand out. Losers envy winners. Citizens of former European imperial powers are ashamed of their current decadence; so how can they be expected not to turn up their noses and shudder at our power and vigor? Pathetic, ragged Islamic societies see how we live on television and hate us for it. They see how Israelis prosper without petrochemical trillions and hate them for it too. Hate them for winning wars. Hate success because they are failures. And so, when the Trade Center towers collapsed, Muslims cheered and said we had it coming. When suicide bombers kill Israelis in buses, in markets and at a religious celebration, Europeans can say, "The Jews had it coming." They've said it before, haven't they?" - Raymond Sokolov
"One thing we should do immediately is drop the lazy concept of "the Arab street": it means nothing, it doesn't exist. Like most formulations beloved by the left, it's an excuse to avoid having to learn anything hard or specific - facts, dates, trade patterns, economic relationships. The Bahraini street has nothing in common with the Ramallah street. The "Arab street" is as useless a notion as the "European street": Americans should compare, for example, France and Belgium with Kuwait and Qatar. Who are the real allies? The difference at Arab League meetings henceforth will be between those members of a moderate, modernizing tendency and a dwindling number of decrepit thug states who prefer to carry on taking refuge in pan-Arabism's perversion of traditional Arab fatalism and celebrating their failure." - Mark Steyn
"The British aren't anti-Semitic, but they're hot for Arabs. The British ruling class looks at the Arab and sees a desert version of his own most cherished myths: look at the Prince of Wales all togged out in his Lawrence of Arabia get-up just to have dinner with one of bin Laden's brothers. The Continentals are something else. Some just don't like Jews and resent having been unable to express that opinion honestly these last 50 years. But with the others the psychology's a little more complicated. Almost every European country was tainted by the Holocaust and Nazi occupation, but for the sake of the post-war settlement the world agreed to pretend only Germany was to blame. Not so. In France and Holland, the locals eagerly herded Jews onto those eastbound trains. In Belgium, industrial production went up under the Nazis. After half a century, the Continentals are sick of this guilt trip. They need to see Israel as the aggressor for their own psychological health. That's why that wacky Dutch broad who's married to the big Eurobanker keeps comparing Sharon to Hitler and Likud to the Nazis. It's a way of evening the score - "Sure, we had Hitler, you have Sharon; we have Auschwitz, you have Jenin." It's their way of belatedly taking a moral shower, a way of saying, "See, the score's one-one now. You're as bad as us. Let's just call it a draw and move on." - Mark Steyn
"Americans and Jews are to the governments of Syria and Saudi Arabia what blacks were to segregation-era Southern Democrats. They're a way for despots and kleptocrats to focus the hatred of the people they oppress away from themselves and onto a convenient target, to keep those people so focused on hating and anger that they're unable to think clearly about how the real cause of the mess they're in is their own governments." - Bryan Trosko