None of us and none of the Arabs trust Israel.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

If there is something that I respect about the Arabs, it's the fact that they never change their position.

Israeli independence - what we Arabs call al-Naqba, 'The Catastrophe' - it created Palestinian identity more than anything else.

Don't misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I'm talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what's going on.

None of us and none of the Arabs trust Israel.

I wrote those poems for myself as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

Arabs respect only the language of force.

The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if sufficient numbers of Palestinians were not content to be used as cannon fodder in fruitless assaults on Israel even as the surrounding Arab powers distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel while retarding their countries with their repression and corruption.

Were there peace and justice in the Middle East the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes.

I think that a strong Israel is the only Israel that will bring the Arabs to the peace table.

Bahrainis are better off than many other Arabs. We have a welfare state everybody gets a salary whether they have a job or not. Electricity and food are subsidized school and healthcare are free. And we don't differentiate between Bahrainis and foreigners. We are very proud of that.

It has never made any sense to argue that unique among the people of the world Arabs are more concerned on a day-to-day basis about the treatment of people they don't know than they are about how they're going to put food on their own tables or whether their sons will ever find a job.

I have no doubt that given a real choice the vast majority of Muslims and Arabs like everyone else will choose a free society over a fear society.

We believe that Lebanon has been the first real experience for all the Arabs.

But there is a difference here: When Jewish children are murdered Arabs celebrate the deed. The death of an Arab child is no cause for celebration in Israel.