Gary Brecher Quotes

Historically, the Middle East was governed by Empires. The empires drew the lines between nations without paying attention to the ethnicity of the peoples in the nations. Now, you don’t have a single country that is cohesive in the Middle East. For that reason, you see civil wars all over the place.

The Kurds were in the Middle East long before the Arabs.

Live and let live has never been a Balkan rule…. Following five centuries of subjugation the Balkan peoples have had only half a century of freedom for experiment in nationhood,--a half-century, too, which has been distracted by the plots and counter-plots of foreign statesmen.

… half-formed pseudo nations

The country of Iraq is somewhat of an artificial creation going back to colonial days. And so you have the Kurds and then the Sunnis in the north predominantly and Shias in the south.

We must openly call for the establishment of a Kurdish state that separates Iran from Turkey, one which will be friendly towards Israel.

You can't ignore reality. You won't wake up one morning and find that the Arabs of Umm al-Faham have become part of Palestine and are no longer in Israel.

By the reduction of the Arabs on the one hand and Jewish immigration in the transition period on the other, we will ensure an absolute Hebrew majority in a parliamentary regime.

He was driven by the idea that when Milosevic grabs a part of Bosnia, Croatia should get a piece of it, too.

In a much larger sense, the problem of Sabah is directly influenced by the duplicity of imperial Britain. For whatever devious reason, the dismantling of the British empire created divisions and violence due to ethnic and religious differences.

Afghanistan's borders are arbitrary, drawn to meet 19th-century political needs rather than to respect ethnic or religious patterns.

We Bosniaks would for sure fight for integrity of Bosnia.

Let's make a deal with the Serbs. Neither history nor emotion in the Balkans will permit multinationalism. We have to give up on the illusion of the last eight years... Dayton isn't working. Nobody - except diplomats and petty officials - believes in a sovereign Bosnia and the Dayton accords.

As recently as the 1970s, some Pashtun leaders in Afghanistan were pushing to create a new state, Pashtunistan, by joining with Pashtuns in Pakistan.

After centuries the time has come when India has gained independence from foreign rule and it's the time when we all [the Independent Princely States) should unite for our motherland""

Is Turkey one of the Ayrab countries with which you don't get on very well?

the awakening of the Arab nation, and the effort of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Israel…. These movements are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins.

The Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state.

Without Nationality neither liberty nor equality is possible- and we believe in the holy Fatherland, that is the cradle of nationality, the altar and patrimony of the individuals that compose each people.

From Kurdistan to Catalonia to Scotland, from Syria to Chechnya to South Sudan, from indigenous communities in the Andean nations to tribal communities in sub-Saharan Africa, many people are shifting their primary political identities away from the nation-states in which they lived for many generations.

Let us not allow the splits and splintering to frighten us. It is, indeed, a pity, but what can we do, since we are Bulgarians and all suffer from one common disease. If this disease had not been present in our ancestors, from whom we inherited it, they would have never fallen under the scepter of the Turkish Sultan ...

Nationalism is the most powerful force on earth today.

I never am sure what nationality I am as my village [in Alsace-Loraine] is part of different countries from day to day.

Many Germans dream of revenge today.

I think we have to pay attention to the Arab masses not just in the Gulf States, but also in the hinterlands.