Original blog posting

Daniel Pipes' Weblog

"Caught My Eye - Noteworthy Quotes" 
        (partial - "targeted" - quotes for this web page - especially*)

April 18, 2004

Samer Tayesh, a Christian Palestinian who owns a café in Bir Zeit, West Bank, and supports Fatah: "We Palestinians are not civilized. That's why we chose Hamas. Today, I'm ashamed to say I'm a Palestinian. We don't even deserve a state." (Quoted in Isabel Kershner, "The Losing Battle," The Jerusalem Report, November 27, 2006)

Kazmi, of the al-Khoei Foundation, London: "There has always been this triumphalism in Islam. There is an imperialistic arrogance to it. It is a theology of empire. But when you don't have an empire you have something that has gone seriously wrong." (Quoted in Heidi Kingstone, "Foreign Bodies," The Jerusalem Report, October 30, 2006, p. 24.)

Hassan Hanafi, professor of philosophy at the University of Cairo: The Koran "is a supermarket, where one takes what one wants and leaves what one doesn't want." (Alain Navarro, "Egypt professor compares Koran to supermarket," Middle East Online, October 2, 2006).

*Efraim Karsh, historian at King's College, University of London: "the Islamic connection to the Palestinian problem is … not out of concern for a Palestinian right to national self-determination but as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the ‘House of Islam' that Islamists inveigh against the Jewish state of Israel. In this respect, there is no difference between Palestine and other parts of the world conquered by the forces of Islam throughout history. To this very day, for example, Arabs and many Muslims unabashedly pine for the restoration of Spain, and look upon their expulsion from that country in 1492 as a grave historical injustice,  as if  they were Spain's rightful owners and not former colonial occupiers of a remote foreign land, thousands of miles from their ancestral homeland. Edward Said applauded Andalusia's colonialist legacy as ‘the ideal that should be moving our efforts now,' while Osama bin Laden noted ‘the tragedy of Andalusia' after the 9/11 attacks, and the perpetrators of the March 2004 Madrid bombings, in which hundreds of people were murdered, mentioned revenge for the loss of Spain as one of the atrocity's ‘root causes.' Within this grand scheme, the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is but a single element, and one whose supposed centrality looms far greater in Western than in Islamic eyes." ("Pan-Muslim Fiction," The New York Sun, August 29, 2006)

Annabel Crabb, journalist: "The difficulty faced by Britain's 1.6 million Muslims is that they do not want Islam to be identified directly with terrorism, as most view the actions of extremist terrorists as a corruption of Islam. But those who kill and maim do so in the name of Islam, and so those arrested are invariably Muslims. So Muslim leaders are the advocates who tend to plead loudest publicly for the civil rights of the detained. In turn, this reinforces a public view that the Muslim community gives comfort to terrorists." ("Britain's religious tensions gain a high profile," Sydney Morning Herald, August 19, 2006)

Mumin Salih: "history will acknowledge the contributions made by the Americans, Europeans, Russians and other nations to [aviation]. History will also record the only contribution made by Muslims to aviation, which is to crash the planes and kill their passengers. Muslims happen to be the only group to perfect this art of crashing commercial planes to kill innocent, helpless civilians. Their list of achievements includes:

• "In 1967 they introduced to the world professional hijacking; a Palestinian group hijacked an Israeli Boeing 707 to Algeria.

• "In 1970 they introduced multiple plane hijacking when they hijacked, then exploded four commercial planes in a Jordanian desert.

• "In the 1980s they perfected the art of planting explosives in electronic devices such as cassette players. They successfully exploded a jumbo jet over Scotland killing hundreds of civilians.

• "In September 2001 humanity witnessed with disbelief how a group of dedicated Muslims hijacked four commercial planes and crashed them into buildings killing thousands of innocent civilians.

• "[In December 2001, they introduced the shoe bomb.]

• "In 2006 they introduced the use of liquid explosives

"As the world continues improving in aeroplane designs to give us even better, more reliable and safer aeroplanes, Muslims work in the other direction and continue their own destructive innovation." ("Muslims and Air Travel," islam-watch.org, August 11, 2006)

Lee Smith: The "Arab habit of blaming everything on the United States, or Israel, or the West in general, strikes many observers as evidence of faulty logical processes, or an abdication of basic political responsibility. But it is also part of an unspoken ceasefire pact--a reminder among Arabs that they have agreed not to attack each other and will focus their energies on external enemies in order to keep the peace at home." ("Sects and Death in the Middle East," The Weekly Standard, June 26, 2006)

Mark Steyn, columnist, referring to the war on terror: "in a conflict that's already lasted longer than America's participation in World War II, Hollywood still can't bring itself to make a film in which America's heroes whump America's enemies." ("DreamJerks," National Review, December 31, 2005)

Mustapha Akkad, a Syrian-born Hollywood producer, complained in 1998: "in Hollywood, Muslims are only terrorists" (Quoted in Laurie Goodstein, "Hollywood Now Plays Cowboys and Arabs," The New York Times, November 1, 1998). Today, at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, he and his daughter Rina, 33, were killed by Muslim terrorists. (November 9, 2005)

Fatemah al Katib, a student from Lebanon, about being a Muslim in London post 7/7: "We feel different when we walk the streets now. When you sit down on a train, people move away." (Patrick Barkham, "‘The main thing we feel is fear, 24/7'," The Guardian, July 23, 2005)

Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism: "Islam is like Communism and sex. Only people who've done it really know about it." (Sherrie Gossett, "NY group linked to Bin Laden," Insight Magazine, July 18, 2005)

Spanish attitudes to Al-Qaeda: "Inmates at a Spanish prison yesterday beat up a suspected al-Qaeda cell leader being held on charges that he helped plot the September 11 attacks, an official said. Imad Yarkas, 42, a Syrian-born Spaniard, was attacked at a jail in the eastern city of Castellón. He was sent to hospital." (David Sharrock, "Victim's father ‘helped bomber flee'," The Times (London), July 16, 2005)