Muslim brothers be damned; they're our greatest enemies. You know yourself that I'm a Muslim, even a fanatical Muslim. But that does nothing to alter my opinion of the Arabs.

I am convinced that the majority of the religious hierarchy today deplores the hardship inflicted on our people. I am referring not only to the martyrs but of the families who have been dispersed and terrified, who have no resources, and to the four million unemployed who are suffering from the economic chaos of a country which only a year earlier was giving employment to a million foreigners. Those who have chosen to serve God must feel profoundly sad at seeing ridicule poured on the most sacred principles of our religion.

Nixon would like to consign us to to the level of the most backward countries in the whole Middle East. Why lower us to the standard of the Saudis rather than raising the Saudis to meet us?

Yugoslavia is, with Iran, the only country which under difficult, not to say agonising, circumstances stood up to Joseph Stalin. It was not easy to unite ethnic groups or to modernize a country like Yugoslavia, and it must be acknowledged that Marshal Tito achieved something extraordinary. May God grant that his successors be as capable as he.

How can you hope to build up a nation by fragmenting its politics into opposing camps? Whatever one group builds, the other will endeavour to destroy.

You approach the Mullahs as if they are normal people. They are not. You see them in your own image; you should not.

The great powers claim that whatever they possess is theirs by right, but whatever we, the smaller countries possess is negotiable.