I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.
Luckily, I have been offered the chance to play a South American, Hispanic and even a character from the Middle East in films. There are also a lot of TV series in the U.S. that have a strong presence of actors from India.
Grasping the realities of the Middle East is never easy. This is not primarily because they change quickly, but because so much time, effort, and money is spent to prevent reality from breaking through.
One of the dreams of Zionism was to be a bridge. Instead, we are creating exclusion between the East and the West instead of creating bridges; we are contributing to the conflict between East and West by our stupid desire to have more.
When the U.K. or U.S. government issues bonds to fund a deficit, the buyers are not solely in the U.K. or the U.S. - they're in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Investment banks provide direct access to these buyers.
I have a background and an understanding of what's happened in the Middle East that a lot of people don't have, because there's been no interest.
Israeli Arabs have more political rights than any other Arabs in the Middle East, including their compatriots in the Palestinian Authority.
There is no question that al-Qaida operatives are currently active in Iraq. A premature exit before the threat they represent has been dealt with would endanger America and the prospects of eventual peace in the Middle East.
The emotive power of hummus all over the Middle East cannot be overstated, being the focus of some serious tribal rivalries.
I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.
Iraq has the most extensive petrochemical industry in the Middle East and a wealth of vaccine factories, single-cell protein research labs, medical and veterinary manufacturing centers and water treatment plants.
I am pleased to see that many of the world's leaders have publicly recognized that the crisis in the Middle East was deliberately incited by terrorist organizations.
People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.
Columbus: You know there's a place untouched by all this crap? Tallahassee: Back east, yeah? Columbus: Yeah. Yeah. You heard the same thing? Tallahassee: Out west, we hear it's back east. Back east, they hear it's out west. It's all just nonsense. Yo...
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.
The longer you live, the more dreams you should have to keep you occupied.
Without action, we are going to continue to allow Iran to be a safe harbor for terrorists, see its economy further deteriorate, and see the Middle East further destabilize.
Similarly, it is argued that the culture of Islam is incompatible with democracy. Basically, this conventional perspective of the Middle East thus contends that democracy in that region is neither possible nor even desirable.
I am aware of the thesis that the United States has long since invested exclusively in stability and this has obviated democratic transformation in the Middle East.
I regard the endorsement of both the objective and a method - which can differ from one country to another- of democratization by the parties in the region as a basic requisite of democratization in the Middle East.
Anyone who follows the Middle East and Islamic world in general can't deny it is often a very violent place, that a band of instability now stretches from Algeria to Pakistan.
