A Quote by Michael Bloomberg
I'm worried about the world because there's chaos in the Middle East, and I think the Iranian deal [to lift sanctions] is going to continue the Shia-Sunni battles, the Persian-Arab battles.
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The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they refused to adopt the Arabic language, and it's a great point of pride to them that Persian culture and the Persian language and Persian literature survived the conversion to Islam. And the conversion to Islam also was for most of them not the Sunni majority form, but the Shia one. So there's a great discrepancy between Iranian society and many other of what we think of as Arab Muslim States and systems.
The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.
This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias, or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight.
I'd like to think that I'm a calm and sweet person. I tend to be very playful at home with my children, but in life... we have to fight our battles - our work battles, our political battles, our personal battles - and we're focused.
Religious distinctions are deeply important for many of the problems in today's Middle East, particularly between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Syria and Iraq.
I think it's time we start chipping away at the stereotypes in Hollywood about the Middle East, and the Arab World, because it's one of the most beautiful regions in the world.
Iran of course is Shiite, while the bulk of the Arabs are Sunni, that is a problem or could be a problem. Also, there is the simple fact that Iran is non-Arab and most of the Muslims in the Middle East are Arab.
We're involved right now in some very significant legal battles and it would be the wrong thing for me to do to step out in the middle of those battles.
There are going to be a lot of questions, not just in my country, but across the Middle East. Is Israel going to continue to be "Fortress Israel"? Or, as we all hope, become accepted into the neighborhood, which I believe is the only way we can move forward in harmony. And no matter what's happening in the Middle East - the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment - the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.
So much of what we see and hear about the Middle East focuses on what we call politics, which is essentially ideology. But when it comes to the Middle East, and especially the Arab world, simply depicting people as human beings is the most political thing you can do.
Intelligent martial arts is not getting in battles and winning them. Intelligent martial arts is avoiding battles because battles use up energy, and you can get hurt no matter who you are.
I believe that the Iraqis have an opportunity now, without Saddam Hussein there, to build the first multiconfessional Arab democracy in the Middle East. And that will make for a different kind of Middle East. And these things take time. History has a long arc, not a short one. And there are going to be ups and downs, and it is going to take patience by the United States and by Iraq's neighbors to help the Iraqis to do that. But if they succeed, it'll transform the Middle East, and that's worth doing.
We want to be, I think, an example for the rest of the Arab world, because there are a lot of people who say that the only democracy you can have in the Middle East is the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Middle East is not part of the world that plays by Las Vegas rules: What happens in the Middle East is not going to stay in the Middle East.
It's particularly incumbent in the Middle East on Sunni Arab nations to fight for values, to fight for the protection of innocent life, to fight for the principles of civilization and stability and order itself.
There has always been a confusion in the West about -Islam and about the Middle East and the assumption that the countries are Arab. Iranians very much object to that. They are very proud of their own history, but they have this real inferiority-superiority complex thing about the Arabs and the position of Islam in Iran. One of the reasons why Shi'a Islam is so entrenched in Iran is because it has allowed the Iranians to distinguish themselves from the Arabs, who are mostly Sunni.
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