"Economists say the main reasons for wealth are institutions, culture and geography, location and weather. Given the vastness of the Middle East and the fact that it is not afflicted by tropical diseases, geography cannot still be a major factor. Hence the failure lies mainly with Middle Easterners themselves, not, as in previous ages (such as the Colonial Age), with external causes."

"[C]onsumerism is suicidal because the earth—or rather the environment on the surface of the earth—cannot sustain throw-away human consumerism by 7+ billion human beings..."

"Western Democracy is bust in the Middle East. By this I mean not what you might like to believe, i.e. that it has failed to be implemented. What I mean is that the very idea is at its root a failure and is rejected by most people in the Middle East."

"‘Freedom of religion’ which means freedom for Western-funded Christian missionaries to re-invade the Middle East as they did in the Colonial Period."

"[F]rom Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt until the 2006 Israel-Hizbollah war and especially the current war with DAESH, the history of Western-Islamic military encounter is basically a two century-long ‘duck shoot’."

"Twenty-five years ago the joke was that the MENA region was populated with as many leaders’ pictures as people. Now, thanks to social media, personality cults are easily deflated by any 13-year-old with a smartphone. The Westernised elites of the post-Colonial Age have, like the proverbial Jack and Jill, ‘fallen down, and broken their crown’, and the financial oligarchs have (socially at least) come ‘tumbling after’. This may be a good thing, but how will the proverbial water now be fetched—what will be the new engines of the economy?"