Tariq Ali Quotes

If every single Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to become an Israeli citizen, then all the Palestinians who were chucked out of Palestine by the Zionist Government should have the same right, very simple.

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.

People are increasingly beginning to feel that democracy itself is being destroyed by this latest phase of globalization and that politics doesn't matter because it changes nothing.

The U.S. should come out openly and say to the world, "We are the only imperial power, and we're going to rule you, and if you don't like it you can lump it."

To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence.

The sobbing of the weak today is the sobbing of the victims of neoliberal policies. They consist of billions of people all over the world.

As for ISIS, we know where they come from. We know who has used them in the past. We know their sectarianism leads to killings. Here the Turkish state, like its NATO bosses, has helped to create a monster that it now claims to oppose.

Journalists go to press briefings at the Ministry of Defense in London or the Pentagon in Washington, and no critical questions are posed at all. It's just a news-gathering operation, and the fact that the news is being given by governments who are waging war doesn't seem to worry many journalists too much.

Continuous wars - which we have now had since 2001 - starting with Afghanistan, continuing on to Iraq. And even since Iraq, it's been more or less continuous. The appalling war in Libya, which has wrecked that country and wrecked that part of the world, and which isn't over by any means. The indirect Western intervention in Syria, which has created new monsters. These are policies, which if carried out by any individual government, would be considered extremist. Now, they're being carried out collectively by the United States, backed by some of the countries of the European Union.

The extreme center is the political expression of the neoliberal state.

Basically, we are witnessing the twilight of democracy.

After flirting with neoisolationism, the U.S. is now deciding it wants to run the world.

The war in Afghanistan, the first war of the twenty-first century, shows the United States doing what it wants to do, not caring about who it antagonizes, not caring about the effects on neighboring regions.

All these wars are similar in the way ideology is being used. It's the ideology of so-called humanitarian intervention. We don't want to do this, but we're doing this for the sake of the people who live there. This is, of course, a terrible sleight of hand because all sorts of people live there, and, by and large, they do it to help one faction and not the other.

Even if you reject everything, it is always better to know what it is you are rejecting.

There are different versions of Islam... it is meaningless to claim to speak in the name of a ‘real’ Islam.

American imperialism has always been the imperialism that has been frightened of speaking its name. Now it's beginning to do so. In a way, it's better. We know where we kneel.

Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

In many parts of the Islamic world, secular forces, where they exist, tend to be so unsure of themselves, so lacking in self-confidence, that in many cases they line themselves up fairly squarely behind the imperial project and that then creates a big vacuum in which the Islamists become the dominant power because they are the only ones then who are seen as resisting.

The main implication is a remapping of the world in line with American policy and American interests. Natural resources are limited, and the United States wants to make sure that its own population is kept supplied. The principle effect of this will be for the United States to control large parts of the oil which the world possesses.

If you see what passes as the news on the networks in the United States, there's virtually no coverage of the rest of the world, not even of neighboring countries like Mexico or neighboring continents like Latin America.

Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of 11 September 2001 are not exception.

The real problem is the total capitulation of German social democracy to capitalism, reflected and symbolized by actual extreme center coalition governments in Germany, which have been in power for a long time and still are even as we speak. That is the real problem: that there is no serious opposition in Germany at all. And the Left party is divided.