Arabs Quotes

“...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.”
― Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Our shouting is louder than our actions,
Our swords are taller than us,
This is our tragedy.
In short
We wear the cape of civilisation
But our souls live in the stone age”
― Nizar Qabbani

“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace.

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.”
― Eric Hoffer

“المجتمع العربي مشغول بفكرة النمط الواحد، على غرار الحاكم الواحد والقيمة الواحدة والدين الواحد، لذلك يحاول الناس أن يوحدوا أشكال ملابسهم وبيوتهم وآرائهم، وتحت هذه الظروف تذوب شخصية الفرد وخصوصيته واختلافه عن الآخرين، أعني يغيب مفهوم المواطن الفرد لتحل مكانه فكرة الجماعة المتشابهة المطيعة للنظام السائد”
― نوبوأكي نوتوهارا, العرب: وجهة نظر يابانية

“Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“We are a thick skinned people with emtpy souls. We spend our days playing dice, chess, or sleeping - and we say we are the best people that ever came to mankind?”
― Nizar Qabbani

“The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: "Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time.”
― Tony Horwitz, Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.

I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“سماعاً بني العرب الاكرمين ... اُباة التواني حماة الذمم
أفيقوا فمن نام عن حقه... عراه الأذى ولواه العدم
رعى الله شعباً يريد العلى... ويطلبها تحت خفق العلم
إذا لم نقم قومة حرة... ونرجع عهدا طواه القدم
فأين الفخار الذي ندعي... وأين الإباء وأين الكرم
فتى الشعر هذا مجال قرير... فنادي الإباء ونادي الشيم
ونادي الشباب كبار النفوس... ونادي الشباب عماد الأمم
فلا أمل اليوم إلا بهم... لأن الشباب عماد الأمم
وقل لبني العُرب لا تيأسوا... فإن الهموم ستحُي الهمم
وإن المقام على الضيم عار... ولا يغسل العار إلا بدم
ولابد من نهضة للعلى...بها ترفع العرب ذاك العلم”
― عمر حمد, ديوان الشهيد عمر حمد

“Arab children,
Corn ears of the future,
You will break our chains,
Kill the opium in our heads,
Kill the illusions.
Arab children,
Don't read about our suffocated generation,
We are a hopeless case.
We are as worthless as a water-melon rind.
Dont read about us,
Dont ape us,
Dont accept us,
Dont accept our ideas,
We are a nation of crooks and jugglers.
Arab children,
Spring rain,
Corn ears of the future,
You are the generation
That will overcome defeat. ”
― Nizar Qabbani

“We killed you and it was not new for us, we killed the companions of the Prophet and the friends of God. O how many Messengers did we slay? O how many imams? We killed you and you prayed the night prayer, as all of our days are struggle - and all of our days are Karbala.”
― Nizar Qabbani

“Who said the Arabs are incapable of breaking world records? Qatar has just set a new world record by becoming the first host nation ever to lose an opening World Cup football match.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“تذكروا أنكم أبناء من خضعت ... لسيفهم دول الرومان و العجم
و الشرق دان لهم و الغرب دان لهم ... و تحت أخمصهم كم طأطأت قمم
سل أرض ” أندلس ” إن كنت تجهلنا ... و أهل أندلس عنا بما علموا
آثارنا باقيات في مرابعهم ... و علمنا ناطق و الفضل و الشيم
أن يزعموا أننا لسنا نماثلهم ... في كل مكرمة – يا كذب ما زعموا
تنبهوا و انهضوا فالحق مهتضم ... من نام عن حقه أودى به العدمُ”
― عمر حمد, ديوان الشهيد عمر حمد

“Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.”
― Naomi Klein

“يا طير هجت الطائرينا ... و فتنت لب العالمينا
لله درك ساحرا ... أبطلت كيد الساحرينا
أظهرت معجزة العلوم... لنا و كنا كافرينا
إنا لقوم يعشقون... النابغين الباسلينا
يتسابقون حفاوة ... بالأقربين الأكرمينا”
― عمر حمد, ديوان الشهيد عمر حمد

“I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed yeshivah students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.”
― Nick Cohen

“Let’s stand against the killing of innocent civilians. It is time to make the future better than today. Together we can bring peace and unity to our communities.”
― Widad Akreyi

“Based on the considerations of history, ancient history, and international axioms, the logic of following up a citizen with his shadow for the purpose of the demarcation of political frontiers of any state has been discounted for international conventions. For example the Arabs cannot ask Spain just because they were there some time in the past nor can they ask for any other area outside the frontiers of the Arab homeland”
― Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein on Current Events in Iraq

“Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too 'Western.' It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably 'extreme' nationalists—and Marxists—were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh used to be celebrated examples of this phenomenon, long before anyone had heard of the cadres of Hamas, or Islamic Jihad. There was an element of overcompensation involved, or so I came to suspect.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instigated by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of 'ending' the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda. Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person, let alone printed by a civilized publication.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward's moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about 'The Chairman' was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father's Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. 'The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it's such a great idea, why isn't Said signing off on it?' When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. 'The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.' Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“It is time to recognize the past and ongoing genocides to prevent new ones. Together we can build a better world!”
― Widad Akreyi

“Time doesn’t change anything; that is why we still worship asshole Arabs.”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“In Arabia - Arabia Desert - at the time of the prophet Muhammad, other prophets also preached: Maslama of the tribe of the Banu Hanifa in the Yamama, the very heart of Arabia; and Hanzala ibn Safwan; and Khalid ibn Sinan. Maslama's God was ar-Rahman, 'the Merciful'; today Muslims pray to Allah, ar-Rahman. Khalid ibn Sinan was sent to the tribe of 'Abs; for a time, he was followed, but then he was lost. Prophets are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history. Men of worth have always roamed the desert.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“From the eighth or ninth centuries, Muslim Arabs have been politically dominant in the Islamic world and have grown accustomed to that position; the notion of sharing power or being a minority in a non-Muslim Arab polity is alien to the Muslim Arab mentality.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“At the time when the Arabs were ruling our country, they were taking us, our wives and children, as slaves. They burned our villages. The white man never burns villages and when we bring him hens or bananas, he pays us well. He also pays us fairly for the mupira (rubber) that we collect. The white man has put an end to slavery… But we, black people, nevertheless wish that the white men go home, since we are forced to maintain roads and may no longer fight neighbour tribes and eat our prisoners, because if we eat them, we are hanged!”
― Manangame of Avakubi

“The Israelis think they are not Arabs, but they are very similar to the Arabs. They are human beings. They don't want to die, and they want to live in safety.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Begins Here: Palestinians and Israelis Listening to Each Other