Western Bias Quotes

We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we've treated the Arab world as just an oil field.

The Times and the Guardian accuse us of operating a police-state. The BBC Persian programme has made similar allegations, saying that countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia should be denied access to Western military technology. What are the bloody fools on about? Do they seriously regard Iraq, or Algeria, or Libya as liberal regimes?.

The medieval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history.

Much of the prejudice against Islam in the West stems from a lack of understanding of the true nature of Islam as a religion professed by 1.4 billion people in the world. Westerners tend to view other peoples and other cultures only from the perspective of Western benchmarks and philosophy.

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.

Western media present events in Russia in a thoroughly negative light. Yes, we have problems, and these need to be covered. But the fact remains that there is a propaganda campaign being waged against Russia. And this is disturbing.

To me, both the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto contain underlying truths, but the West doesn't permit a middle road.

In the calculus of western interests, there is no suffering, whatever its scale, which cannot be justified. Chechens, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis are of little importance.

European authors often write books about the rest of the world that profess a vision of shared humanity but fall far short, casting the other as exotic or dangerous.

I'll probably lose every friend I've got, but I think the Russians are about the only people who have behaved decently in the conflict with the Ukraine. All the evidence to the contrary seems a bit bogus to me. NATO is trying to use Ukraine to isolate and cripple Russia, and that's completely crazy and very cruel. It seems to me that our side, the English and American people, really want it to go bad there. But there's no need for it to have done so. At least that's what I think. You won't hear a lot of that on Fox News.

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

Our ascendancy of the past two centuries - first Europe and then the U.S. - has bred a western-centric mentality: the West is the fount of all wisdom. We think of ourselves as open-minded, but our sense of superiority has closed our minds. We never entertained the idea that China could surpass the U.S.

I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.

More often than not, Americans and Westerners overestimated the power and capability of the Soviet Union.

It was the East that should have sent us missionaries.

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.

The reason why China forecasting has such a poor track record is that Westerners constantly invoke the model and experience of the West to explain China, and it is a false prophet. Until we start trying to understand China on its own terms, rather than as a Western-style nation in the making, we will continue to get it wrong.

In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.

Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran, no matter how benign their intentions, present a condescending view not just of the religion but also of women living in Muslim majority countries, as if the desire for choice and happiness is the monopoly of women in the west.

I was raised Catholic, and I remember in all the pamphlets and pictures we'd look at, Jesus was basically blonde with blue eyes. He kind of looked like Jared Leto.

In the West, people demonize Putin. They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.

Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East - the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.

Journalists don't sit down and think, "I'm now going to speak for the establishment." Of course not. But they internalize a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity. This leads journalists to make a distinction between people who matter and people who don't matter.

If there is a single power that the West underestimates, it is the power of collective hatred.