It's very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It's very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers.

But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.

The just response to this terrible event should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it's probably too late because the United States has never done that; it's always gone it alone.

Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

Ironically, many of people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.

[One task of intellectuals is] to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are . . . limiting to human thought and communication.