Abu Bakar Ba'asyir Quotes

I think we're entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it's in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind.

Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

O Muslims! When a Muslim blindly imitates the West, he turns into a loyal supporter of their beliefs and customs; he is like one who tries to reform something but spoils it while he is unaware. He is just like a defeated follower, like a baby who bites and severs his mother's breast while it is in his mouth. Such a person does not know that blind copying of the West involves hidden hazards and that our rights, honor and dignity are violated by such imitation and imbecilic pride.

There are some in our region, especially among the Arabs, who do not respect their own identity and culture, and who are dazzled by the West in an unlimited and unobjective manner

Domination of Africa [by the West] is not so much because of the foreigners – it is more because of the indigenous forces that were weak and not organized.

This deep-rooted view [of the American government] is based on the view that the West not only seeks to continue geopolitical expansion in its classical form but also wants to make everyone do things it's way, by persiusion and example when possible, and by force when necessary.

We cannot just ape the west. What may be good in an alien country may be unpalatable in India.

We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting.

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.

As a black woman who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood, you learn how to perform a 'good' version of yourself. And then when you're with your home girls, you're saying all kinds of stuff that sounds all kinds of crazy, but you understand each other because you're speaking the way that you're comfortable with.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the West towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.

Want to depose the government of a poor country with resources? Want to bash Muslims? Want to build support for American military interventions around the world? Want to undermine governments that are raising their people up from poverty because they don't conform to the tastes of Upper West Side intellectuals? Use human rights as your excuse!

The Muslim leaders swallow the advice of the Western powers and bodies like the IMF and World Bank, even when it is bad for their countries and they know this.

We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too... When my father's brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather's name as surname. Wainaina.

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

As it is, the grotesque distortions of the global market mean that for every dollar the West dispatches to Africa in the form of aid, two dollars are clawed back through subsidies and tariff barriers: a monumental rip-off by the rich as they instruct the poor to accept 'free' trade or else.

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

As teenagers, a lot of us just did not want much to do with Arabic culture - we looked to the West.

Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries' failure to advance.

It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.

While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.

But the West is trying to weaken Islam from outside and inside. They attack our people and invade our countries from outside, and they weaken us from within with ideas like secularism, liberalism and democracy. This is all designed to contaminate our pure Islam.

After WWII .... the West exchanged the old racist coinage for new currency. "Uncivilized" became "underdeveloped". "Savage people" became the "third world". There was a genuine change of heart away from racism and toward respect for equality, but a paternalistic and coercive strain survived.