#cult

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

#analogies #arabs #colonialism #crusades #europe

There was still food rationing in England and life was difficult all through my 2 year stay in Oxford. ↗

— Sydney Brenner

#england #food #life #oxford #rationing

The provocation with Holmes is the fact that he's described by Doyle as a man without a heart - all brain... and that's very difficult to play, or even indicate. ↗

— Jeremy Brett

#described #difficult #doyle #even #fact

Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. ↗

— Oriana Fallaci

#colony #cultural #does #europe #invasion

The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization. ↗

— Oriana Fallaci

#culture #duty #i #impose #muslims

The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period. ↗

— Oriana Fallaci

#culture #dead #give #moment #period

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us. ↗

— David Brin

#civilization #could #culture #down #feed

It strikes me as hubris that Universal will buy EMI. What it will do is create a super-major that will have far too much power... I think when Universal goes up over 40 percent market share, I don't see how reasonable regulators can countenance. It will impact not just labels, but artists and cultural diversity. ↗

— Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

#buy #countenance #create #cultural #cultural diversity

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate. ↗

— David Brooks

#causes #comprehensible #confront #cult #death

It is just not enough to strengthen the secret services for the fight against terrorism but it's also necessary to advance dialogue between cultures. ↗

— Horst Koehler

#against #also #between #cultures #dialogue