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Amir Taheri Quotes
born 1942 Iran
Amir Taheri (born 9 June 1942) is an Iranian-born conservative author based in Europe. His writings focus on the Middle East affairs and topics related to Islamist terrorism, and have been the subject of many controversies involving fabrications in his writings.
Random Amir Taheri quote
17 quotes
The Islamists killed Benazir Bhutto as they killed her father. But they shouldn’t be allowed to kill Pakistan’s hopes for democracy.
Islam in its most violent form is already part of Europe just as much as a cancer belongs to the body it attacks.
No nation can plan its future without coming to terms with its past.
Poetry interprets the chaos of human life and tries to bestow meaning on it. Without imagination there could be no poetry; and imagination chained by ideology produces only propaganda.
Syria these days reminds me of an orphan surrounded by real enemies and false friends, forming a club of cynics, and trying to seize control of its destiny.
It’s unfair to blame Pakistan for keeping the Taliban alive... but there’s no doubt that Musharraf has done less than his share in fighting them.
Clinton saw the Khomeinist regime as 'progressist'; a view shared by many American liberals who think anti-Americanism is the surest sign of progressive beliefs. That's a lie.
The Arab League was a British colonial creation to perpetuate despotic regimes in the context of the Cold War. The world has changed since then, and new Iraq could become a symbol of that change. Apart from a few thousand bureaucrats, nobody wants the Arab League.
It’s unfair to blame Pakistan for keeping the Taliban alive – it also gets support from the mullahs in Tehran and Islamists throughout the world – but there’s no doubt that Musharraf has done less than his share in fighting them.
If Islam is no longer a religion but a political ideology, why shouldn’t it be subjected to the same treatment, including criticism, as any other political ideology, and, if it poses a present and clear danger, face outright suppression?
From 1860 to 1977, a string of Afghan monarchs imposed effective rule throughout their realm. But the monarchy was never absolute, if only because the loya jigrah, a high assembly of tribal and religious leaders, would restrain a despotic king or help a weak one.
Some poets still write about the hair and eyes and body of a beloved and depict scenes of joy when lovers meet to drink and dance and be merry. But that is not the kind of poetry that the Islamic movement, grown on the concept of jihad and martyrdom, wants.
Yes, Afghanistan is composed of 18 different communities marked by ethnic, linguistic and religious differences. But ask any Afghan who he is, and he won’t hesitate to reply: an Afghan! The national identity has taken shape over 300 years — after all, as a state, Afghanistan is older than America, Germany and Italy. It is also one of the oldest Muslim nation-states.
Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, has declared the lifting of sanctions on the country as his top priority — even as he also insists that he won’t budge an inch from the Islamic Republic’s positions on key issues, including the controversial nuclear program.
The core of the Syrian tragedy consists of the fact that Assad and ISIS represent the two faces of the same coin. Both want the Syrian people, or what is left of them inside the country, scripted out of the equation. Both have enough of a popular base to hang on for some more time even if they did not receive succor from the outside which they regularly do. At the same time neither is strong enough or is ever likely to have the popular base to impose its agenda on Syria.
The Syrian Ba’ath Party claims to have 2.3 million members — but most of that consists of people who need membership to get a job or be promoted. Leaving aside a few thousand top cadre (mostly from the Alawite minority to which Assad belongs), the Ba’ath Party is no more than an empty shell.
The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl; he was twenty-eight at the time. She became pregnant at age eleven, although that pregnancy ended with a miscarriage. Khomeini called marriage to a girl before her first menstrual period “a divine blessing,” and advised the faithful: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.”
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