I've taught the Bible all my life and I believe in the rights of Jews to have a place in the Holy Land, and so I have a natural affinity for that right. I believe that the right of Israel to have a place in the Holy Land can be honored by the two state solution, to abbreviate a long premise, and I think the only way to have peace is by following the basic road I've been following for the last 30 years, to try to bring peace to Israel through negotiation.
Reza AslanObama has been the single worst president in modern American history in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Reza AslanWhat's happened in the United States is something that has already happened in Europe and that is that Islam is become 'otherised', it has become a kind of receptacle into which fears and anxieties about the political or economic situation, about the changing racial landscape of this country are being thrown.
Reza AslanThe religiously observant is lumped in with the nominal Muslim, the nominal Muslim is lumped in with the non-Muslim and the radical. If we want to make sense of this mess and stop pushing Muslims into the arms of the extremist, we need to make meaningful distinctions between the religion of Islam that a billion Muslims follow and see as a guidance as a peaceful righteous moral life and the puritanical Islam of a minority which so captures the media's attention.
Reza AslanThe Israelis have not been willing to take the crucial step, and that is to withdraw from the Palestinian territory, the West Bank. And this is a crucial point and Israel has not only kept increasing the settlements in number, but have built highways among all the settlements from which the Palestinians are now excluded.
Reza Aslan