"Let’s assume Iran starts to act out its threats. The whole might of the US air force and navy is brought to bear. Iranian ships will be sunk, missile and army installations bombed. Still the Iranian missiles will come in, making passage through the strait impossible....What next? There will be no alternative to “boots on the ground”. The US army will have to land on the shore and occupy all the territory from which missiles can be effectively launched. That would be a major operation....Such a war would go far beyond the dimensions of the American invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps even of Vietnam....Is the bankrupt US up to it? Economically, politically and in terms of morale?"

"While all parties need these talks for different reasons, the fact remains that they are unlikely to produce any major breakthrough."

"Clearly, sanctions are currently the only available tool in the hands of Washington but behind-the-scene efforts are being made to prove that sanctions cannot mollify the threat in the long run and that the threat of the so-called nuclear Iran will only be eliminated through a war thus justified thanks to the sinister powers long at work."

"One must remember this: We human beings are of nature as well. Accordingly, within us lies an indomitable self, encoded with the grace and fury of the natural world, and, if acknowledged and respected, our authentic nature will awaken and arise. Then the real dogfight begins: The fur will fly, as we fight, fang and claw, to retake the lost landscape of our collective humanity, and, by extension, begin the struggle to restore health, imagination and empathy to a nation of cage-accepting, imperium-countenancing, sick puppies."

"More recently, however, the settlers' attacks have been intended to penalize Palestinians for the smallest political developments in peace talks. The hard-liners, in particular, are so blinkered by their religious-nationalist fundamentalism that they have failed to grasp the reality that Israel's leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, voided the peace process long ago....It was almost certainly not a coincidence that the two attacks inside Israel came a short time after Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application for statehood to the United Nations, in defiance of both Israel and the U.S. The Palestinian Authority president raised the stakes on Palestinian statehood—and so did the settlers."

"It is not about any religion and how much you choose to practice the rites and rituals of your faith – that should always be left up to the individual. It is a matter of imposing this faith or at least one group’s narrow interpretation of it that is so dangerous."

"By claiming the power to interpret a law in line with the Constitution, Bush and Obama have each on numerous occasions asserted the view that the Constitution grants presidents far-reaching powers that cannot be restricted by legislation.  If Obama had wanted to deny that this law could be applied to U.S. citizens (or legal residents), the above paragraph would look very different, although equally unusual in that it would then be rejecting power rather than claiming it."

"What is much more important than excluding “a conflict that can be resolved by means of territorial compromise,” is that the Israeli politics of exclusion in Jerusalem, which could be summarized by Judaization of the holy city, is a roadmap to de-Arabizing, de-Islamizing, de-Christianizing, de-historizing and de-humanizing Jerusalem, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and this could not be anything but a roadmap to hell."