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Monday, September 3. 2007Multiculturalism: "Arabs don't think like us"To new visitors: Thanks for stopping by, and check us out if you have a minute. You might enjoy our uniquely eclectic (or so we claim) and generally friendly site - even when there is disagreement. In fact, we welcome disagreement and lively but civil debate. Re the topic of multicultural understanding, this commentary which we erroneously attributed to William Haynes, but which is actually from Rants and Raves in 2006 (thanks for the correction, readers). Please read it, friends, and discuss politely:
1) They don't think the same way we do.
No, I mean THEY REALLY DON'T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO. Yes, yes, I know we are all human and share the same human nature (perhaps the most disastrous mistake of Marxism was the denial of this elementary fact). But within the scope of that shared human nature, there are a lot of different ways to be human. We Americans have a basically open attitude to our fellow human beings and sometimes forget this. Combined with the fact that most Americans are linguistic idiots, we tend to assume that anyone who learns to speak English learns to think like us.
2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.
Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect - as opposed to Israelis, who are often difficult to like but impossible not to respect. From their nomadic heritage they have a tradition of generosity and hospitality to guests that warms the heart. Arab shopkeepers have a talent for making you feel guilty that you didn't buy anything (once you get past a dislike of having them lay hands on you). Haggling is a social grace with them and when you ask the price, and agree to the first one quoted, they will often come down on the price just out of pity for your social ineptness. This does not in the least affect the fact that no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe or the community of the Believers.
3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.
And you know what? Theirs is PHONY. Yes I know, I'm making a cultural value judgment, the cardinal sin when I was a grad student in Anthropology. With us, the most important sources of self-esteem are useful work and the love of a good woman. Being good at something that requires skill (even a hobby) and being of primary importance to somebody just because you are who you are. Work for them, is something to be avoided. The basic forms of work: making stuff, growing stuff and moving stuff around, is taken care of by a class of indentured servants, usually non-Arab Muslims from the Third World, and even today, by outright slaves. The Kingdom is a modern country; they abolished slavery in 1967, but old expats have reported seeing slave auctions as late as 1981.
On one occasion a student of mine asked me, "Teacher, what do you call a man who can be sold?" (Excellent use of the passive voice, I was proud of him.) I explained, "He is called a slave, the condition is called slavery, the verb is to enslave." Later I had occasion to ask them about the headsman, the fellow who cuts heads and hands off in chop-chop square in front of the mosque on Fridays. The reason I asked was that from my studies I knew that in tribal societies converting from a tribal or feudal system into a system of common laws, a man condemned to death by a court of law must often be executed by a member of his own tribe, or a complete outsider so that the execution does not spark a blood feud. In the Kingdom the headsman is usually a Sudanese. My students explained, "Yes teacher, he's a slave." i.e. he's a person of no importance and therefore outside the web of obligations of vengeance.
The point being, in a slave society, work is not honorable (as De Tocqueville pointed out) and cannot be a source of self-worth.
In Tunisia I saw a population doing their own work and I have worked with a fair number of Jordanians engaged in skilled labor and the professions. Note that neither is an oil state and I believe their contribution to the ranks of terrorists is far less than the oil-rich countries. It is difficult to argue that poverty is the driving cause of terrorism.
"Of conjugal love they know nothing." (Thomas Jefferson on the French aristocracy.) In a land of arranged marriages, where the whole society is geared towards a strict segregation of the sexes and women are at least semi-chattels, romantic love is rare - and greatly desired. In the Kingdom I found a few students with a consuming interest in romantic poetry, whom I had to teach very discretely. Most of them were just obsessed with sex, however. And interestingly, when visiting the West or the fleshpots of Bahrain, they are said to have a tendency to fall in love with the prostitutes they patronize.
Without honorable work, romantic love or any accomplishments not overshadowed by those the West, their sense of self-worth comes from being the possessors of the One True Religion. And Allah doesn't seem to be delivering on his promises of being exalted above the unbelievers these days.
On the plus side, they are willing to spare you and absorb you into their community as a respected member - if you convert to the One True Religion. The Brotherhood of Believers is a reality in the lands of Islam, and while it sometimes falls short of the ideal (as does our democratic ideal) it is a reality, and in its way admirable.
4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can't maintain it either.
The very concept of "maintenance" is foreign to them. This is what drives the foreign instructors in the Gulf absolutely mad. The per capita richest countries in the world resemble Eastern Europe or Latin America in the tackiness and run-down appearance of the buildings and streets. An electronics technician new to the Kingdom once told me how his first job was to inspect a junction box in the desert. He had to pry it open with a crowbar as it had evidently not been opened since it had been installed several years earlier.
This is expressed in the inshallah philosophy, "If God wills it." A Palestinian friend of mine explained to me that even the weather forecaster will qualify his prediction, "It will rain tomorrow. Inshallah." Or, "I will meet you tomorrow, inshallah." (But God understands that I am a very unreliable person.)
I remember giving a pep talk to my students before a crucial exam, "You are all going to pass the exam, right?" "Inshallah teacher." "No, no!" I shouted, "No inshallah. Study!"
This was once also characteristic of the former communist countries. Work was indifferently performed and maintenance was a real problem. A factory owner in Poland told me that machines he bought from Sweden lasted only half as long in Poland as they did in Sweden because of poor maintenance. However as soon as people were assured that they could keep a reasonable amount of what they worked for, people reverted to their true cultural patterns, worked plenty hard and started to take care of their tools and the public spaces.
5) They do not think of obligations as running both ways.
With us, contractual and moral obligations tend to be equal and reciprocal. They don't see it that way. The obligations of the superior to the inferior do not equal those of the inferior to the superior. Obligations within a family or clan outweigh all others. That is why we had to take care not to sit members of the same clan near each other during exams. If one asks another for help, he has to give it, in spite of promises to the school and even when the clansman is a total stranger. Obligations to other believers outweigh all obligations to unbelievers and especially when the believers are fellow-Arabs. And in contracts with unbelievers, the obligations of the Believer to the kaffir are not equal to the obligations of the kaffir to the Believer.
Consider that Muslims in England have quite un-self-consciously demanded that a pub near a Mosque be shut down as offensive to their religion - in spite of the fact that the pub had precedence by six hundred years! Or that they demanded the right to broadcast the prayer call on loudspeakers in London, while it is illegal to have a church at all in the Saudi Kingdom.
6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.
In our civilization, when two men get down, either seriously or just "woofing", what do they say? Some variation of "I'm going to kick your ass." Am I right? Here's what I heard in the Kingdom, "Hey, don't f**k with me, or someday you get a knife in the back." I'm not saying that wouldn't happen to you in the West, but most men would be ashamed to make a threat of that nature. We don't understand that direct shock battle is not necessarily the law of nature. When overwhelming force is brought to bear on them, they become cringing and obsequious. To put it bluntly, they lie their heads off to get you to turn your back on them. Try to see it from their point of view - how else do you expect them to act when you have the overwhelming force? You expect them to meet you on equal terms when the situation is so unequal? What other tactics are available but prevarication and delay followed by a sneak attack?
Folks, what we call "terrorism" is quite close to the historically normal way of warfare among these people.
7) In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do.
Thus an ultimatum is often not taken seriously and the reality comes as a surprise. Remember the "Mother of all Battles"? Like many other Mediterranean peoples, Arabs don't seem to mind making a scene in public and have a high blown sense of drama. Paul Harvey once described how he had spent the Suez Crisis hiding under the bed in his hotel room because of the blood-curdling radio broadcasts, before he learned that Arabs talk like that when they're arguing over a taxi. "This is my taxi and I will defend it to the death!" "You lie, it's mine and rivers of blood will flow in the street before I give up my taxi!"
An Arab will scream at you, get into your personal space and sometimes kick dirt on your shoe - and they react with utter surprise when an American up and decks him. "What did I do?" To say the least, this makes negotiations difficult.
8) They don't place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, and they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.
I cannot begin to tell you of some of the things I've heard from Gulf Arabs or read in the English language press in the Kingdom. "The Jews want Medina back." (Medina was a Jewish city in the time of the Prophet.) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been turned into an immensely popular miniseries on Egyptian TV. The Blood Libel (the medieval myth that Jews need the blood of non-Jewish babies to celebrate Passover) is widely reported in the Arab press, and widely believed. Allah will replenish the oil beneath Arabia when it runs out.
I've been assured, by well-educated and otherwise sensible people that Winston Churchill was Jewish and that Anthony Quinn had been blacklisted and would never work again after making Lion of the Desert (just before he made that turkey with Kevin Costner).
9) They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.
This involves some seriously weird stuff about other people being responsible for their misery because they ill-wished them. I've read in the English-language press of the Kingdom serious admonitions against using Black Magic to win an advantage in a dispute with a neighbor. The columnist did not deny the efficacy of Black Magic, he just said it's forbidden to use it. On one occasion I was trying to explain the concept of "myth" to them and I used the example of the djinn. I wasn't getting through to them at all and was concerned that I had mangled the pronunciation of the word, when it dawned on me that the reason they didn't understand what I was getting at was that they had no doubt that the djinn were real.
10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.
Anyone who looks at the surviving architecture of Moorish Spain can tell that Islamic civilization has seen better days. There was a time when cultural transmission between Islam and the West went overwhelmingly from them to us. (Note the recent discoveries of Sufi symbols engraved on the structural members of European cathedrals.) Now the situation is reversed, and it is humiliating for them.
11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.
In the West, and America more than anyplace else, we have internalized the notion that everyone has a right to their own opinion, and that said opinion is perfectly valid for them. When we meet a people who think that that idea is insane and evil, we are sometimes left in the absurd position of defending their idea as "perfectly valid for them". Doesn't work that way for them; God's Truth is laid out in some detail in the Koran, and not to believe it is a sin. I know, I know, in America you can find lots of Christian Fundamentalists who believe that God will cast you into hell for holding the wrong opinions about Him, but even those who would make their religion into an established church seldom desire the level of enforcement in such detail as the Kingdom does or the Taliban did.
12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.
Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it. Can the subjugation of women coexist with Western Civilization with Western media ubiquitous throughout the world? Can a pluralistic and tolerant society be governed by Islamic law? Can a modern economy exist where interest is forbidden and many forms of business risk-taking are considered gambling, and thus forbidden? Can a society that educates its young men by a process of rote recitation produce critically thinking, technically educated men to build and operate a modern economy? Can you even teach elementary concepts of maintenance to a people who believe that anything that happens is inshalla (As God wills it)? To compete, or even just survive in the world they must become more like us and less like themselves - and they know this. Saturday, September 09, 2006 Comments
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I’ve yet to meet an arab that I liked. I say this as an Israeli. :)
Many of the specifics in this piece were helpful, which does not mean we will all arrive at the same conclusions about the war. The general thrust of the view espoused here is consonant with the reasons some of us thought that Cheney-Rumsfeld's plan for a quick war and replacement of the dictatorship with a modern democracy (or any kind of democracy) were doomed to failure. There were a small but significant number of conservatives who disagreed with the war (e.g., Stephen Chapman), not out of naiveté about Arab-Islamic culture or a liberal world view, but out of morally based realism. Personally, I strongly suspected that the only way the Iraqis would be "pacified" would be to crush them with heavy civilian casualties (essentially, terrorize them) and install a strongman capable of keeping the civilian population under control by relying on unpleasant methods, to say the least.
Some people understood this and thought it was acceptable, but without a more direct threat to the US, others among us thought this was not a morally acceptable course for the United States to take. I know that many people opposed the war for different reasons, and I remember joking with a like-minded friend about some of the liberal opposition to the war, saying that it almost made me want to support the invasion simply because of some of the characters who opposed it. I was equally disdainful, however, of authoritarian conservatives who were all too gung ho for retaliation against the “bad other.” Too, many people, it seemed to me, were embracing positions and simply rationalizing those positions to justify the expression of their own base tribalistic impulses. Rationalization is part of human nature. I don’t see any point in debate with people when this is where they are coming from. They don’t know it is where they are coming from and they are data immune when they are coming from such a place. But for those open to dealing with the data, I know that almost everyone believed that Saddam had WMD. Although the administration essentially equated possession with use, possession is not the same as believing that Saddam would use WMD against the US or an ally, except perhaps defensively. And, in fact, he didn't do that when he had his best opportunity to do so in the first gulf war. And, if one thing was clear even before the invasion, it was that since the previous war, his WMD stocks were substantially degraded. If the risk of retaliation was apparently too great for him to use these weapons in the first gulf war even when he was under attack, it seemed mistaken to believe that he would place his fate at risk by getting behind a WMD attack on the US or Israel that would surely be followed by his annihilation. Though clearly not in the majority, there were some liberals and some conservatives who shared this view in common. I believe we were correct. And, to some of us, the plan to transform the Middle East via a democratic domino-effect seemed ultimately flawed because few Arabs are interested in their own freedom. Widespread [accepted] corruption coupled with a moral culture of tribal and clan loyalty trumps any aspiration for individual liberty in the primitive cultures that dominate the region. If there is some evidence of a desire for freedom (other than, perhaps, in Iran) I’d be interested in hearing about it. At the core, human beings tend to be conflicted about freedom and restraint. In many cultures, control and restraint are managed in deeply pathological ways. I believe this is very much the case in Arab culture and in cultures historically influenced by that culture. Personally, I know more than a little bit about the Southern Italian and Sicilian culture of my recent ancestors – a culture that was heavily influenced by the Moors. There is another side to the hospitable, family-oriented Sicilian culture that is not pretty. Indeed, much if not all of what the author of the article described is found in that culture and is quite familiar to me. But, while the culture of the region is associated with a different way of thinking, we shouldn’t conclude that we are incapable of understanding anything about the way people in the region think. And in the case of Saddam specifically, we were dealing with a full-on psychopath whose grandiosity and lust for power may have been boundless, but his visions for his own grandiose legacy were narcissistically expansive and romantic rather than apocalyptic. He showed no evidence of a wish to have Iraq annihilated by the US in retaliation for a WMD attack on Israel or the US. And, conducting an invasion that seemed doomed to failure on the small chance that Saddam “might” do something to hurt us, or alternatively, conquering Iraq with a reign of terror followed by the installation of another tyrant, were paths too far removed from what I, as a Christian, could support in good conscience. I say this as a WASP. There is no reson to like Arabs. They are Islamic and want to wipe Israel off the map and they must, according to their ideology and religion kill infidels....how can you possibly like people like that.
It is they who need to be culled to about 50% of their size. All good points, and well-taken.
The piece wasn't about Iraq, though - just about Arab thinking in general. One thought, though. How can you give patholological labels to people from a culture in which, for example, brutal leadership is the norm? So you're saying that "civilized noms" recognosed since the Enlightenment are really just relative things.
I mean 9-11 was just Islamic free expression, right? We have wars to clarify whose "norms " will be the ones we all acknowledge as superior. If we could agree on them before wars occur there would be no need for war. That is not how history has worked, like since forever. So we have wars. In war the idea is to win at all costs. Unconditional surrender. Anything less and you have capitulated to those whom you warred against and are in essence saying, "OK we'll allow you to live,grow, and remain a problem another generation will have to deal with in the same manner. This is especially true in the case of Islam which cannot be incorporated into enlightened western thought as the twelve points illuminated above so clearly point out. Kill'em..kill'em until their numbers are insignificant to the world and kill them until their civilization is only something cultural anthropologists study. They are trying to do no less to us. I am deathly afraid that Islam will conquer us from the womb.We have to fight this war to win ,as if our lives depended on it ;witch it does.No hesitation ,no remorse ,and above all no regret. It means alot of dead people, we have the capability.I dont think we have the will!!!
One of the mandatory works for understanding Arab culture is de Atkine's Why Arabs Lose Wars ( http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_17/articles/deatkine_arabs1.html ). The telling thing about military affairs is that the military culture tends to reflect the overall culture from which it comes.
Cultures which factionalize its armed forces because they are not trusted to integrate, generally come from societies in which, yes, factions are played against each other. 'Combined Arms' as a concept is almost unknown in the Arab world as it would require allowing different armed forces to regularly train together to operate effectively. In such cultures rank comes from social status or from direct payment for rank Cultures which place low value on its citizens will treat conscripts and draftees poorly. Almost without exception in Arab cultures, that is the case, in which Officers are more than just priveleged, they treat the regular soldiers as sub-human. All incentive to foster initiative is replaced with a highly controlled system of 'who does what' that trying to do anything, like on-the-spot repairs by those in a combat role, is punished, not rewarded. Any society which has these characteristics would tend not to treat human rights as something of value, that ethnic and other discriminators are more important than capability or ability, and that adherance to those in command of the government. Such governments tend to create multiple divisions within society so as to create distrust amongst those factions by a system of dramatic rewards and punishments. By doing that and switching who gets rewarded and punished on various outlooks, an atmosphere of conspiracy is generated as, surely, someone had to be behind a seemingly random punishment or reward... instead of it being random. Those are not anything close to modern views of society or culture as the West understands it. These come from partially amalgamated tribal cultures that have multiple social, ethnic and religious affiliations within their tribes. Arab governments, by and large, have used those divisions, added in extras, and then have tired to use not only Nationalism but 'Pan-Arab' concepts that have fallen flat on their faces due to the multiple divisions keeping anyone from doing anything in a united manner. Thus it must be a '*conspiracy*' stopping it from happening! Yes! A conspiracy of power-hungry individuals and groups keeping everyone at each other's throats so that they can survive in power! Do that in a blatant and obvious fashion and no one will believe it is happening, because no one would do such daft things on their own if they were the least bit civilized... Yes, that is a cultural judgement! Civilization has a meaning to it, and getting folks organized to common goals and ends in a unifying fashion is highly civilized. When you start to do things to reward yourself at the cost of society, nations and individuals, that is uncivilized. And when organizations start to wage personal and predatory war to bring all Nations down so that they may rule and exploit the chaos they have caused, they are waging predatory warfare. Internationalism hasn't found a way to deal with that while the old fashioned law of nations *does*. I really and for true do not care if folks wind up with a horrific government over them, because they are not smart nor wise enough to figure out that good government requires keeping such government in check from becoming authoritarian and tyrannical. So long as their Nation or parts of it do not threaten or attack other Nations, fine with me! Their right to have society and be utterly dysfunctional internally. That is what the Nation State system is all about. This is not something seen only in the Arab world, either. If you want to see a highly dysfunctional set of Nations with multiple factions, high numbers of religious differences, affiliations by ethnicity and regular killings because of all of those you do not have to go one step out of Europe! Just go to the Balkans and you can see that at work. This has been at work in the area we call Ethiopia, to include Somalia and some neighboring regions since the dawn of time. Likewise in Asia where actual recorded family histories in Korea go back over 5,000 years and the first thing they record is the horrid activity of the ethnic Chinese overlords. Read the Chinese and they will tell you about the primitive Koreans and Vietnamese. The Vietnamese don't have much good to say about the really nasty Thai, perhaps one of the most militaristic of the primitive societies. Head on over to Afghanistan and see the fun between the Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Baluchs, and their mutual dislike for each other only trumped by their hatred of Persians, which goes back before Alexander the Great went through the region. Some of these places haven't changed much since records were kept, either. A few extra ethnic/religious/cultural/tribal enmities have gotten thrown in due to migration and warfare. This concept of accountable Nation States that contain their ehtnic problems is a step up from that. Getting a good understanding of how that system works took nearly 1,000 years if not longer. The concept that Nations should actually allow their own folks to have some choice in religion only started in 1648 with Westphalia... and the lovely, benighted Left wants to toss that out! Westphalian Nation States are highly civilized so long as you don't forget that the majority of other Nation States *aren't*. The West and the elites have forgotten that. The Left castigates us because we have bias, of all things. Of course we have BIAS. I am extremely biased towards civilized outlooks so that Nation States should be encouraged to not force religion upon its people nor have that view towards the rest of humanity. It is extremely biased to have that viewpoint. How do I know that we have forgotten that as a cultural and historical lesson? Did we seek to get Afghanistan and Iraq out of the business of deciding religion for their people? In the case of Afghanistan that is *no*. Why? Because it is a 'Western Bias'. Damned straight! Gets you away from Nations run by religions that tend to use warfare to force itself on its neighbors. Took the West 15-20% of Europe dead in the 30 years war to come to that conclusion. If you don't want to see that on a global scale, then a bit of bias is not only necessary it is *required*. We seem to be doomed to repeat that lesson, but somehow I don't think it will be repeated as 'farce'... it will be repeated in blood and maybe permanently for the race of man. Because we have some folks who think you shouldn't judge others because of *bias*. Without some bias there is zero difference between mass murderers and those who spend time to help the poor and downtrodden. But then I am biased and see a difference in those things... others may not... I do agree with Buddy on this... save the law of nations is a bit older than the 19th century... and it does have remedies for many of our problems. ( http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2007/08/piracy-terrorism-and-wider-view.html ) But to do that requires that we unlearn that bias is bad and that discrimination means to discriminate amongst things. That is not of necessity prejudice: one may use those things to judge but not pre-judge. Those are the meanings of the words: bias, discrimination and prejudice. They are not the same thing. And those who try to make them out to be are debasing the language, the culture and our civilization in an attempt to subvert it to their authoritarian views on the world. That is an activity that I do not like. ( http://thejacksonianparty.blogspot.com/2006/12/if-it-sounds-like-duck.html ) Thus ends rant #2, variant 7, sub-class C. Excuse any repetitions between the major variants and sub-classes. They are the same general rant, after all.... A wonderful piece. And this is definitely not a knock on it but what you so eloquently said is lost on about 98% of the population.
Still those of us who read and comprehend it's meaning and value are appreciative, for at least in my case it reinforces the thoughts I have always had on discrimination. People must discriminate to have order in their lives and societies. It is not a punitive thing but rather a measure by which good and evil are measured. Good stuff. This is elementary multiculturalism: if we pretend everybody is just like us, we'll get it wrong every time. Different cultures live in different realities.
Yes, they live by different codes which are alien to us. I am happy to have them live by their own codes, in their own places, just as I do. All I want is for them to keep their stuff far away from me and my life.
how sad, what a frightened people you are.
everyone is different, why do we have to act/think the same and why do we want them to. I love travelling, I like the fact that if I'm in an arab country I have to take care as to not leave the house with wet hair (a sign that you've just had sex) or in a Buddhist country take care as to not touch my hair in public, the list goes on. multiculturalism is the future, instead of attacking why don't we just embrace the colourfulness of it all? Sure there are always extremists, like in any country. And please please stop quoting 9-11!! I know an arab who is an atheist, and a non-arab who is a muslim.
Explain that. This has nothing to do with Cheney and Rumsfeld. Please understand not all the world cares about US politics. Stop trying to change the subject. The point is these people are backward and not at all like us. Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush/Clinton (sorry thats all I can think of) and all your other idiot politicians mean basically nothing to the rest of us. This post is about the ME, not oyu and your political bullshit.
It's important to recognize Iranians are not arabs. They are Islamic, and surely share a little mindshare with those in the middle east who are arabs, but they have a very different culture with its own bumps and warts, which would be its own thing to analyze. That means this analysis works well for Israeli/Palestinian conflicts and Iraq, but not for the possible next war.
I applaud that you writing this, even if I disagree with what we have to do to deal with it. We do embrace the colorfulness of it. We just happen to value our own culture. When we want different, we travel.
Well written. Basically these people have nothing to offer us except oil. But they will gladly take our technology and use it against us and each other. I mean jesus, they hate each other - how do they expect any of us to tolerate them? And yeah, it is an us and them thing - because we are different.
You are whats wrong with this world. Why embrace stupidity? Any culture that forbids me from touching my own hair is just fucked up. Wet hair means you just had sex? So fucking what (apart from the stupidness of that assertion)? Hiding your face is ridiculous too. Why do you defend these backward people? Does it make you feel good knowing full well these people will never respect your culture whilst they demand total devotion to theirs? Wake the fuck up.
We site 9-11 because the Islamofacist attacks continue and will continue until we deal with the problem. See the article on MEMRI Aug. 31, 2007:
------------------------------------------ On August 26, 2007 Islamist websites hosted in Minnesota [SiteGenie, LLC, Rochester, MN] posted an item titled "How to Join Al-Qaeda." It is not clear when the item was written; it was produced by the website Al-Thabitoun 'Ala Al-'Ahd, which is affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Egypt and is currently inactive. The item calls on every Muslim to regard jihad as a personal duty and to take initiative to establish a jihad cell without waiting for recognition from Al-Qaeda. It goes on to elaborate on how to form and run the cell, how to raise funds, and how to select a target, "for example, assassinating the American ambassador," which, it states, "takes no more than a gun and a bullet." The following are excerpts from the item: "You feel that you want to carry a weapon, fight, and kill the occupiers, and that it is our duty to call for jihad as much as to call for prayer... All that is required is a firm personal decision to fulfill this obligation, and participation in jihad and the resistance... "Do you really have to meet Osama bin Laden in person in order to become a jihad fighter? Do you have to be recognized by Al-Qaeda as one of its members to become a jihad fighter? If Al-Qaeda commanders should be killed, would the jihad be eliminated? What would you do if Al-Qaeda did not exist today? How is Osama bin Laden different from you? - [yet] he managed to establish the world jihad organization. Who provided training to Osama bin Laden and Abdallah 'Azzam when they went to Afghanistan to become the first Arab jihad fighters? "The answers to these questions are the following: I don't have to meet Osama bin Laden to become a jihad fighter. Moreover, there is no need to meet even one jihad fighter to become one. Neither do I need recognition from Al-Qaeda... "As the first step, imagine that Al-Qaeda does not exist and that you are interested [in waging] jihad - what would you do in this case?... If you know any young people - whether one, two, or more - in your area, mosque, or university who are as dedicated and enthusiastic about jihad as you are, come to an understanding with them, and together form a cell whose objective is to help Islam and only Islam... "At first, your cell should have no more than five members, all absolutely trustworthy... The cell must have a commander and a shura council... The commander must clearly realize that he is Osama bin Laden to the cell members... "Each cell should have a source of funding... When you have several members, you will [surely] find the funds for your cell... Then you should buy weapons, make plans, brainstorm, plot your plans, monitor your enemy's important objectives, and study its moves. Set a goal; for example, assassinating the American ambassador - is it so difficult? Is it [indeed] difficult for someone who has already crushed America in her own home? "What is the difference between you and the hero of the New York attack, Muhammad Atta, who planned an action which even today shakes the world every time it is mentioned? Assassinating the ambassador takes no more than a gun and a bullet. One could disguise oneself as a peddler in order to tail [the target], which shouldn't cost a lot of money... "The cells must maintain contact among themselves, but by no means in a direct or conventional way. The contact must be spiritual: What will unite you is the love of Islam and the motto "There is no God but Allah." Even if the contact between [your] cell and the rest is indirect, it will be close... You must meet once a month... You must not meet in the same place twice... Personal meetings with a small number of people [must take place] once a week... "From the moment the cell is established, its members must be divided - into secret members, members who do not [act] openly and are not wanted by the authorities, and members who are wanted (who have been arrested in the past or on whom the intelligence apparatuses have a file)... The secret members must perform intelligence tasks, collect information, raise funds, recruit [new members], and assist in [actual operations]. Those who act in the open must perform the primary military operations, such as assassinations, firing at enemy facilities, etc. "You must be aware that you have brothers everywhere, and that they are expecting the actions of you and your friends even if they don't know you in person or by name... "Every jihad cell is a microcosm of the world jihad organization." ---------------------------------- http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD170207 An excellent description of the Arabs.
I find it interesting that nobody can actually gauge the culture until he has lived in that culture for about a year and seen what transpires again and again and again. From that, one can start to draw real conclusions about the nature of the culture. It is impossible to develop these conclusions though from simply reading about them since many default to the "common man" that they know and refuse to believe that such conclusions are based on a solid and factual foundation. In America they call this racial profiling as if it's a bad thing. Any expat can accurately describe the anticipated behavior to a given stimuli of any race among whom they live and get it right 99% of the time. The culture exists and manifests all by itself and anybody who has lived in Arabia or Korea or Mexico can justly assert that these people are very different from your 3rd or 4th or more generation American. Me, I'm looking forward to revisiting Arabia after the oil runs out and watching the 'civilization' there totally collapse. I admire the emirs in Bahrain and UAE who have made plans for surviving the collapse. Hope it works out for them. "On one occasion I was trying to explain the concept of "myth" to them and I used the example of the djinn. I wasn't getting through to them at all and was concerned that I had mangled the pronunciation of the word, when it dawned on me that the reason they didn't understand what I was getting at was that they had no doubt that the djinn were real."
How many modern day American fundamentalist christians believe real world events are the works of angels and demons? How many think there will be an endtime with all sorts of Halloween monsters? How many think things happen because of prayer? The piece seems to have originated here:
http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2006/09/observations-on-arabs.html I think you criticisms of Arab culture have some legitimacy, actually, and I think it's healthy to speak frankly about our differences. But I also think you're committing a whopping fundamental attribution error in the process. (Deliberately exaggerated example of this error: "When I bitch people out in traffic, it's because I'm stressed out and had a bad day. When an IRAQI does it, it's because their culture only values CONFLICT!")
Do you seriously intend to imply that typical Americans, in contrast, subject their beliefs to rigorous logical analysis... don't believe in invisible helper spirits... have utmost confidence in the continuing rise of their nation... and are quite content to live side-by-side with belief systems that make them uncomfortable, instead of dismissing them as self-evidently evil? Gwynnie, hon, even your own commenters can't seem to live by that last one. Eh, I was under the impression that we were invading their countries, rather than the other way 'round.
I agree with the writer completely. Until we accept that the Arabs will do whatever they like with any civilized concept (ie wipe their ass with it) we should never trust them. The other option of course would be to just let them disintegrate on their own and keep their flawed Islamic laws as far from our civilizations as possible. Sure, it's rough for Israel in their mids but to be honest they haven't had my sympathies for quite some time either. The whole concept of Israel is flawed in my opinion. But giving it to the even more stupid Palestinians would be wrong too.
Please lets just leave the middle east to its own filthy ways and distance ourselves as much as possible. I think this place in the Middle East pretty much disproves all your observations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai A well-written piece; however, I would say that you seem to have the notion (and forgive me if I've misconstrued what you've said) that these cultural issues are fixed, and the only way around them is for one side or the other to be culturally defeated. I would argue that culture is always evolving, and that eventually we'll be able to be on more even ground, more capable of understanding each other.
Speaking of understanding, in my opinion you've got the definition of ?? ??? ???? (insha'allah) all wrong - when I was studying Arabic, my professor (from the Levant) explained it to us as meaning "God willing," which is something that many Americans, at least good Scottish Calvinists like myself, can relate to. I have yet to meet a single Israeli who deserves existing in this planet with man, beast, or the lowest bacteria.
Wow. A whole year in Saudi Arabia and the writer is an expert on Arab culture. More tomes like this and Arabs will think Americans are a bunch of generalizing, ignorant retards. Shame on you.
"The easiest way to lose an argument is to overstate it."
Simply by using the term Arab and making broad generalizations about hundreds of millions of people whose religious, political, social, and economic beliefs lie on an unimaginably wide spectrum you have lost your argument. As an American living in the West Bank I cannot agree at all with your assertions. Spending 1 year in Saudi Arabia does not qualify you in the least to judge Arabs from Morocco to Iraq and everywhere in between (not to mention the various Western countries in which so many Arabs live). Perhaps your article would work better had you asserted your opinions on Saudi Arabs only. Making broad statements about all Arabs is like making huge comparisons between all "Westerners." Congratulations on a year in Saudi Arabia. Thanks for allowing your "open mind" to really absorb everything and leave your preconceived notions at the airport before you left. Re: "more capable of understanding each other"
The Arabs are certainly capable, but the Islamofacsists are most certainly uninterested. Usama bin Laden said, “We love death. The US loves life. That is the difference between us two.” There is little difference between him and Adolf Hitler - the Islamofacsists will continue to attack us; they say so. Our only choice is to play offense or defense. In retrospect, there is a real simple cure to the deficiencies in this article: its author should look up an old essay called "Body Rituals Among the Nacirema," until they understand just how easy it is for an outsider to get an alien culture dead wrong -- and just how difficult it can be to turn the criticism inwards.
So, Gwynnie, here's your homework assignment. Next time, list 12 items for EACH of the following categories "Twelve things that are awful about Arab culture." "Twelve things that are awful about American culture." "Twelve things that Arabs do better than Americans." "Twelve things that Americans do better than Arabs." Perhaps there is some objective metric by which one could prove that the Muslim world is Just Plain Backwards and their values are, um, "phony." (Because, you know, careerism, anoxeria, celebrity worship, and prenuptial agreements are signs of a truly robust and mature culture.) But how could you possibly find such a metric and know you can trust it? History is just not on your side, sugar. History is littered with the ruins of empires whose citizens could see the mote in their brother's eye and not the beam in their own. There's no denying it, I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in most of the Arab world -- just for starters, I'm gay. But to be brutally honest, I don't want to live side-by-side with the American racists and jingoists commenting in your blog, either. I don't think they've really thought their values through very well. I don't think they understand their obligations to their fellow man. They substitute dramatic, swaggering platitudes for real analysis. They don't seem to catch the irony or absurdity in their own, sometimes genocidal, hostility. They're happy to believe in straw-man versions of foreign religions that are conveniently, simplistically, and self-evidently EVIL. And I'll bet at least one of them believes in Jesus, angels, or astrology. So if there's moral high ground here, feel free to point it out, but I just see a bunch of angry tribalistic primates shouting at one another across a plateau. John Smith writes:
“I have yet to meet a single Israeli who deserves existing in this planet with man, beast, or the lowest bacteria.” And that, John Smith, to my mind, qualifies you as an *arab*. Congratulations! Well, I think Islamofascists are of course a problem - nobody's questioning that - but it's important to realize that only a very very small percentage of the Arab population fit into that demographic. This post is talking more about Arabs in general.
I agree with the previous poster, I think that while some of your observations are factual and grounded in truth, others seem bigoted simply because I think that individual people all over the world are different, and that assertions like "Arab's can't maintain modern infrastructure because they say Inshallah all the time" is probably false. If Arab cities need better maintenance, it's most likely a result of other, pragmatic factors that originate in civil government - if you want an example, go look at American public schools. No wait, are those are run down because we say "I'll try" instead of "I will"?
I think it's worth mentioning that (according to a friend of mine who heads up the Persian Student Alliance) the majority of youth in Iran want regime change - they want to see themselves at the helm of a new, fair, democratic state - but don't want it to come at the hands of bloody US intervention. So I think it's an error to say that Arabs are incapable of understanding Americans and vice versa. It might be more correct to say that American youth relate to Arab youth better than American leadership understands American youth, and better than Arab leadership (at least in Iran) understands Arab youth. There's something about global information and communication culture that, I think, appeals to youth on a fundamental level independent of culture and backgrounds. This technology and the freedom to use it represents progress, prosperity, and the potential for self-actualization - and most importantly, independence from the old ways of the warmongers and the oppressors. L:
You got us wrong - or at least our blog contributors. It's not about hatred at all. It's about understanding that other cultures are coming from a different place. It's not about moral relativism, altho we tend to not be moral relativists. But when it comes to different cultures, we only want to be aware of what they are about, so we don't act stupid. We know you cannot judge them by our standards of conduct. Stick around - you'd enjoy our blog - even when you disagree. We are entertaining! Let's be fair. This isn't Arab culture -- this is Saudi culture.
Interesting post. It seems to me that it could have been written by an white American in the mid-19th century about Native Americans, as a justification for their extermination. Or by a German justifying the Final Solution. "These people are Alien, they cannot become like us, so we must, reluctantly, destroy them and their culture."
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at - the idea that culture is unchanging (on both sides of the fence) isn't the best one, and is where (in my opinion) some of the Manifest Destiny writers were coming from back in the day.
You prior two have it wrong. It's about tolerance - at a distance.
To be fair, they’re not even arab. They’re cultural muhmudeans. Ethnic arabs have long vanished and disappeared from this planet, muhmud saw to that.
http://phoenicia.org/panarab.html Progenitor of Wars and Tyrannies: the Falsehood of Pan-Arabism "12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it."
"Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it." The distance it takes to avoid the radioactive fallout from our bombs, I assume? I guess I don't understand what you're getting at?
I'm going to comment on the original post; before I do that I'm going to state my background so you know my biases upfront. I'm Egyptian, raised in the United States, lived a few years in Egypt during my 20s, and am now currently in Saudi Arabia (almost "made my year", borrowing a phrase from the excerpt before the list).
On a whole, the list gives a fair representation of the Arab mindset, however, people should note that each Arab state is vastly different from one another in terms of culture and their views toward other Arab states. For example, Egyptians feel that all Gulf Arabs are corrupt, and only visit Egypt to get drunk and sleep with prostitutes (it happens), while Saudis find that Egyptians are a hopelessly dishonest people who will try to cheat them at every turn (also pretty true, as far as generalizations go). The list given by the author most closely applies to Arabs living in Saudi Arabia; the author gives a brief nod to when discussing Tunisians and Jordanians. However, the main problem with this list and any other observation made by a Western expatriate is that it's from the outside looking in. Western expatriates in Saudi Arabia shelter themselves as much as possible from Saudi society, and there's not much intermingling, nor is there much interest to do so from Westerners. Western expats live in heavily guarded compounds where Saudis are not legally allowed to reside in. While alcohol, nightclubs, etc are forbidden in Saudi Arabia, these creature comforts can be found within the confines of any compound. Granted, the alcohol is moonshine, but it's still a flagrant disregard for the laws and values of the country which they've chosen to reside in. In point#5, the author states that Muslims don't respect two-way obligations. It's true that Muslims are hypocrites for attempting to promote an inherently intolerant worldview onto a tolerant society, and for segregating themselves into ghettos and refusing to integrate into society. But how's that different from Western expatriates segregating themselves when they go off to live in Saudi Arabia? I understand there are security issues, and that terrorists have attacked compounds, but on a whole there's not much out-of-office socializing between Westerners and Saudis. However, the main problem that all Arab states share in their culture is one of hopeless corruption - which comes from the top down. People either thrive or die based on their connections and or use of bribery. These countries can never change until there is rule of law. However, this can never happen as a grassroots movement because these are brutal regimes that have a choke-hold on their people. For all the criticism I've seen of Arabs in the comments on the original post, not once does anyone mention that the US government actively supports these regimes, which in turn influences modern Arab culture. Egypt is the third largest recipient of US foreign aid. No strings attached. It's a dictatorship where the concept of human dignity is a public joke. Everyone in Egypt knows it, is dissatisfied with the status quo, but is terrified of doing anything about it. Then, in 2005, Condoleezza Rice visits Egypt, and gives this speech where she says: "Here in the Middle East, that same long hopeful process of democratic change is now beginning to unfold. Millions of people are demanding freedom for themselves and democracy for their countries. To these courageous men and women, I say today: All free nations will stand with you as you secure the blessings of your own liberty . . . So together, let us choose liberty and democracy -- for our nations, for our children, and for our shared future." Whenever anyone ends a speech saying we should do something for "our children" or "the children" it's usually an instant sign that the person is full of shit, like that Miss Teen South Carolina, but anyway a lot of people believed her. You see, this speech was important because two and a half months later, Egypt was going to have what was promised to be the first free Presidential election the country had ever seen, with actual candidates other than the current president. I know this may not be a big deal to some of you, but for a people living in a dictatorship, this was their only hope for real freedom. So when the US Secretary of State visits your country just 2 1/2 months prior to an election and says that free nations will stand with you as you try to secure your freedom, then to have them deny that there was any wrongdoing in the election, why do you think Arabs can't stand Americans? When people showed up to vote, the police beat them. Non-uniformed officers chased off voters with machetes while police officers watched and did nothing. Ballot boxes were stuffed. Judges protested that they were not allowed to verify election results. All this is observed and documented by US Embassy officials. And the most popular opposition candidate to run against the president has been in prison ever since. Then when an American journalist gets a State Department official to go on record as to the US response on wrongdoings in the Egyptian election, he flatly states that there were no reports of any irregularities. Human Rights Watch, an independent, international NGO documented these abuses in a letter to Condoleezza Rice, stating how irresponsible it was to deny the reality of what happened, especially after making her bullshit speech. Two years later, in an interview that's on the State Department's website, (http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2007/may/84468.htm), Rice (sort of) owns up to her being inconsistent and credibility-impaired: "QUESTION: Madame Secretary, two years ago you gave a very eloquent, well-crafted speech in Cairo where you really laid down the case for democracy promotion in the region. Now, some of your critics now in Cairo and other places in the Arab world believe or get the impression that the United States is now backsliding, backtracking on the democracy agenda because of the fear of Islamists and they point out certain actions or positions by Washington vis-à-vis the Egyptians and other governments in the region. What would you say to those reformers who pinned their hopes on a strong position from the United States on this issue? SECRETARY RICE: Well, let me be very clear. The Cairo speech to me was perhaps the most important speech that I have given. And it to me says what America stands for and what this Administration stands for and we're not going to back off that. Now, it is true that this has to be an indigenous move, that the people in Egypt have to take up the course. America cannot bring democracy to Egypt. That was never the intention. But I can tell you that when I talked to the Egyptian leadership, I bring up issues of what is happening with nongovernmental organizations. I bring up issues of people like Ayman Nour. (the opposition candidate in the presidential election that is in prison, indefinitely) I bring these issues up all the time with the Egyptian leadership because ultimately, Egypt is a great country and Egypt can lead the region to democracy. There have been ups and downs. I think that the presidential elections were a point in time that says Egypt will probably never go back to the kind of presidential elections that it's had in the past. On the other hand, there have been some steps backward. But I'm a firm believer that without democracy in Egypt, without democracy in the Middle East, without moderate voices having a way to express themselves legitimately, the Middle East is not going to be able to defeat extremism." Que? What the hell is wrong with this woman? Dr. Rice is clearly intelligent, so why does she chooses to waste her intellect on being sleazy? Of course Egypt is going to go back to its old, more oppressive ways. Egypt recently enshrined its emergency laws in the Constitution, making it nearly impossible for any opposition parties to be able to put forth a candidate for future elections. This makes little difference, anyway, since the Egyptian government sent its message loud and clear: if you're going to vote, you're going to get beaten. If you're going to run against the President, you're going to be imprisoned indefinitely. The US is complicit in all of this by propping up this corrupt regime with billions of dollars a year. Can anyone rationally justify why the US does this? Most Arabs don't hate Americans for their freedom. Arabs hate Americans because they materially support the thugs that rob Arabs of their freedom. By the way, this blog was not greatly in favor of the Iraq war. But a showdown with Jihad is fine, and that looks like part of what we have there now. If Iraq can get its act together, great.
"Arabs hate Americans because they materially support the thugs that rob Arabs of their freedom."
Exactly. Thank you for that jolt of reality. I do believe that the original post that we are all commenting on is in a way a response to this , in that it posits an Arab world where if that freedom were to become real, we in the West might not like the results. That is the racist core of the argument, I believe, and also a condemnation of Democracy. Some people cannot be trusted with it. "Most Arabs don't hate Americans for their freedom. Arabs hate Americans because they materially support the thugs that rob Arabs of their freedom.'
Poppycock. We are hated because we prove everyday that Arab/Muslim 'superiority' is a farce. We aren't hated because we acknowledge these Arab regimes. After all, we see Arabs march in defense and apology for those regimes and at the same time, excoriate America. Further, where are the alternatives to these regimes? We hated for both liberating and not liberating regimes of tyrants. Here's a bit of reality: Broken societies produce broken people. Broken, racist and bigoted media produce broken people. Broken, racist and bigoted educational systems produce broken people. Broken, racist and bigoted 'religious leaders' produce broken people. Let's be more realistic: The only endeavor in which the Arab world excels is in hating Jews. If there were a Olympic medal for Jew hatred, the Arabs would sweep the medal platform. The Arab world is no position to lecture America, Israel, or the western civilized world. The stench in their own world is overwhelming. The Arab world is not a moral equal to the western world. Simply walking upright on two legs does not mean all men are equal. The leaders of these dysfunctional Arab regimes have a lot to answer for- they have poisoned generations of Arabs, leaving them with no hope and no future. You deny that the United States supports (as in Props Up) the Saudi royal family, the Egyptian government, the Iraqi pseudo-government, to name a few thugs? That we supported Saddam Hussein's regime, and the Shah of Iran's, as long as it was convenient? If so, I can't really take your comments seriously. I would remind you however, that the notion "All men are created equal" is in the first sentence of our Declaration of Independence, and as such would be a prime notion if we were serious about exporting America's values abroad. The only modern political ideology that explicitly rejects that notion is called "Fascism". You want to be part of that?
That article is horrible. He has some factual points, but then the crucial points and conclusions are completely unfounded.
He says Islam completely removed everything uniquely Arab and then provides absolutely no justification. And his conclusion that the only way to have peace in the middle east is to teach children the ancient languages of their area is insane, not to mention (again) unjustified. He just states it as fact. I don't like human beings after reading this post and most of the comments.
"You deny that the United States supports (as in Props Up) the Saudi royal family, the Egyptian government, the Iraqi pseudo-government, to name a few thugs?"
No. Are you suggesting we sever all ties with the Arab world? Where are the alternatives? Where are the brave Arab heroes or patriots? Take a reality pill. The only thing Arabs hate more than the US not liberating from tyranny in when the US does liberate them from tyranny. In fact, all men are indeed created equally. What distinguishes them are their behaviors. While you might be perfectly comfortable with the institutionalized racism, bigotry and hatred, I am not. Lastly, it is you, and not I that is the facist and bigot because it is you and not I that finds that kind of racism and bigotry acceptable. The Germans went to great lengths to mask and hide their evil intentions. Most (not all, but most) of the Arab world cannot be bothered. You remind me of the Nazi that goes to great lengths to assert how 'civilized' he is. Of course, the truth cannot be hidden. Throught the Arab world, promises to 'finish what Hitler started' resonates in schools, in the media and from the pulpit. Like the Nazis, the Hamas too, was democratically elected. Bigots and racists that are democratically elected speak more about the society that elected them than the leaders they elect. Had we marginalized or even eliminated the Nazi leadership, some 50 MILLION lives would have been saved (or does the thought of no Holocaust hurt your sensibilities?). You are a bigot and nothing less. Like I said, the Arab world is on record as supporting some of the most dysfunctional, racist and bigoted regimes in the world. Give us one more racist dance- pretend you really are civilized. I'm a Canadian. Here's a question I have encountered more than once with an American:
American: "How come you celebrate Thanksgiving on the wrong date?" As the article also perfectly illustrates, that's the American mindset in a nutshell; different equals wrong. i have lived 10 years in one of the most liberal of arab countries: bahrain. i can say that this is the perfect description the arab culture.
You seem to be confusing Persians with Arabs. Please be clear when making this kind of statement, as there are, in my experience at least, not many cultural similarities between the two cultures.
Problem is not just Arab, and not just Muslim. Look at the Crusades, the missionaries, etc. Problem is all major religions need to suppress a certain amount of freedom and free thought, or else everybody would realize how silly the belief systems were and the religions and religious leaders would lose their power/influence/money/etc . Some religions need more logic/truth supressed more than others.
And as civilization progresses (?) towards greater logic (we hope), the need to repress freedom becomes greater. We can see this as clearly at work in Christian Fundamentalism as well as Islamic Fundamentalism. The difference is mainly in the degree of political power each flavor of religious fundamentalism wields. There are people in this country who wish for a Theocracy, but luckily they are a small minority.
Well, Parson, seeing as how the Jews amount to almost nothing numbers-wise, yet have contributed a wildly disproportionately large part of civilization's achievements, I can readily see how an envious person might dislike them.
Don't be so sure that fundamentalists are in a small minority. 1. look at popularity/profits of FOX, Limbaugh, televangalist ministries, etc
2. "squeaky wheel gets the oil," and agnostics/athiests/people who don't feel like qualifying themselves in terms of what make-believe stories they do or don't believe in are not as vocal or unified as religious fanatics. “He says Islam completely removed everything uniquely Arab and then provides absolutely no justification.”
No. What the article says is what I said earlier. These people are not arabs. Arabs as a racial ethnic group have vanished and disappeared from this planet. These people are the arabic speaking subjects of the muhmudean empire. (As an analogy, see Russian speaking racial ethnic groups (nationalities) of the Soviet/Russian empire). People who identify themselves as Fundamentalists are many, but that does not mean they are striving towards a Theocracy. Yet...
I think we should go into Iran, take them over, take their oil, and place Israeli/American overlords and forces in place to protect our mutual interests. Ditto for Iraq and Afghanistan. And when the oil and their usefulness is gone, let then have their sand, camels, goats and sack-covered subjugated women back. When I meet a rattlesnake poised to strike me or mine, I care not one iota for understanding its motivation, nor pause to reflect on its place in the grand scheme of things -- I strike its head off. Death to Islam should be the motto on the breath of any American, and all who exist under Western civilization. Any Westerner not understanding this is a bonafide, self-destructive fool. This is war, people.
I believe this was not by written by "William Haynes (Col. USAF Ret)", but by Steve Browne at:
http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2006/09/observations-on-arabs.html Der huh? So, the two alternatives you see are:
1) Support a dictatorial thug (e.g., Saddam Hussein). 2) Depose a dictatorial thug (e.g., Saddam Hussein) and occupy the country. One might say that the reason Americans are so hated is because they only see these two options. Both of which involve sticking their noses into other people's business. Oh, I forgot, one can be a non-anti-semite and still dislike the political entity called 'Israel'.
I tend to forget that critical (for the left) distinction, on the basis that Israel is a besieged state which, should it conform to the left's prescriptions, would cease to exist. And of course then the folks who don't dislike Jews but do dislike Israel would have to feel really really bad when the next holocaust ensues. But nevermind. saurabh, have you ever heard of a "reductio ad absurdum"?
For someone who has lived in Saudi Arabia for 13 years growing up, I have to admit I found the article funny. Reminded me of a few situations I was in years ago, our driver always arriving late to pick us up for school, and him always saying "inshallah" about making it on time the next day. But, as a person of Arab descent I found the conclusions in the article a little narrow-minded and ignorant.
As much as you claim to know a culture, all you know is how that culture relates to you. To a foreigner, who doesn't speak the language, doesn't share the values, and who thinks in a completely different mind-set. I have read previous posts, and will just briefly sum up where I feel the article fell short, here's my reality check: 1- It is very generalized. Not all Saudis are like that, I'd say not even 70% of them are, and for the rest of the arab world, 90% of this article doesn't even apply. (It's like me saying, I went to a small town in the US, lived there for a year, not understanding or speaking english and wrote an article about how the Americans are loud, eat fast food 24/7, they are racist against people with darker skin, ride bulls for fun and call themselves modern, and how strange their local News Stations are for talking about missing cats and stray dogs instead of focusing on more important world issues.) From one small area, from one generalized view, from an outsider, nothing is what it really is. 2- I am not personally much of a fan of Arab culture, being a woman, I flat out disagree with lots of issues, but that is no reason to believe that America is "God's gift to the world". I can't help but laugh when someone uses a phrase such as : "To compete, or even just survive in the world they must become more like us and less like themselves"... They are doing just fine actually, most just want to be left alone, and left to be as they are... but the US's constant need to meddle, get its hands on more oil, and preach the message of "Bush" to all the nations of the world has gotten the US to where it is today. Don't get me wrong, some Arabs welcome change, welcome "modernization", and seek democracy, but others fear that change would lead to complete destruction of their nations, as was witnessed in Iraq. If it is change and reform that Arabs seek, they do not want it from America, and they are trying to be very clear about that. And it is just that which reinforces anti-american extremism and hatred to spread in the region. 3- It is not humilating to not be a "Super power", I think most arabs are glad they don't have Bush as a president. Arabs don't think that way, and they are not after world dominance, like the US is. If the president of Iran wants to play "Who's got a biggger nuke?" with the US, I'm pretty sure 99% of the Persians don't care much about that issue. And maybe the CIA should have thought twice before slipping the blue-prints to the Irani government six years ago! One, lets not mix up Arab governments with their people (as most are not democracies and only represent a few corrupt individuals), and two, lets not get too ahead of ourselves. Just like you might laugh at arab's somewhat "backwards" behavior, arabs too laugh at your naivete; your behavior may seem normal, but to someone from another culture, spending your nights drinking alcohol until you're totally drunk and making a fool of yourself on a dance floor, throwing yourself at women, hoping your gonna get lucky is pretty damn weird if you ask me. That kind of behavior is unheard of in some of the stricter Arab societies, so you can imagine the good laugh they'd get out of witnessing something like that for the first time. People are brought up different, they like different things, enjoy different luxuries. Lets keep an open mind in trying to understand what is foreign to us, because simply deeming it "backwards" is irrational. 4- Some of the posts were very interesting, but to conclude i'll quote RF in post #30 "the American mindset in a nutshell; different equals wrong"... seems too generalized, but this is basically what this article is reinforcing. Thank you, Nord. I was wondering whether anyone else felt the same. At least there's one.
You assume that all Arab states are the same, and from your single-year stay in Saudi Arabia make extrapolations about all Arabs.
You also apparently don't know a whole lot of the history of the region, even the recent history. In point #3, you discuss how Arabs don't like doing work. Well, it would probably interest you to know that the modern situation in the Kingdom, where their society is essentially run by imported labor while the Saudis sit around on their asses, was engineered BY THE UNITED STATES, in the late 70s. We built the housing complexes that those laborers live in. We created the system. We advocated it to the Saudis. We sold them on high-tech equipment and infrastructure, which we built for them. Now you're surprised that they don't know how to maintain it - why would they? It's our stuff. So that lack of work ethic amongst Saudis you hate so much? That's our invention. We sold it to them so we could get their oil dollars back into our own hands. You assert that "'terrorism' is quite close to the historically normal way of warfare among these people" - on what basis? Did you ever read any of the history of World War I? Does that seem like an accurate description of the Iran/Iraq War, which involved huge numbers of infantry, tanks, and other bits of conventional warfare? You poke fun at the Arabs for believing things of "breathtaking absurdity", or for believing in djinn. Do you also poke fun at most Americans for believing in angels and the Devil? Does it strike you as absurd that some Americans believe that all Muslims are on a jihad to convert them, personally, to Islam? There is much that is wrong here. There is some that is right (like the habit of saying "Inshallah" about everything), but in general I think you've missed the mark. As it says in the original post that started all this:
"Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect - as opposed to Israelis, who are often difficult to like but impossible not to respect." Is that anti-Semitic as well? It's specifically about Israelis, not Jews in general. Spike,
It’s called poetic license. The writer was trying to be a tad witty, and most readers (including myself), understand this for what it is. Anyway, what Buddy said (@2007-09-04 14:25), I would think, doubly apply to Israelis. No? Why do Israels hate Arabs so much?
The Germans committed the Holocaust (Ha-Shoah) along with WWI & WWII. Why not wipe the Germans off the planet? Oh ya because they are white and arabs are brown! ================ When talking about the Oil Rich Arab countries (The GCC: Saudi, Kuwait, UAE, etc) you are talking about people who are super-wealthy: the superwealthy worldwide do not value work. I went to a high school full of super wealthy americans and not one of them graduated college and all of them are just waiting for their parents to die so they can inherit the wealth. When your worth $20,000,000 your values are different then someone who goes to a 9-to-5 job 6 days a week. Gee, no, Mr. Larsen, what's that?
The parent comment indicated that we couldn't stop supporting thuggish regimes because there are "no alternatives", and asserts that "the Arab world is on record" as supporting these regimes. I remember when there was an "election" in Egypt in 2005 or 2006, when the ruling party used thuggish violence to intimidate the opposition party, openly beating people in the streets. Laura Bush visited at the time and commented on how great it was that they were making moves towards democracy. So - I would say that there are "no alternatives" because they are put in jail by the thugs (see, e.g., the story of Ayman Nour in Egypt), and the US goes right on supporting those thugs instead of, say, I dunno, withdrawing support. But, perhaps I am mistaken. Would you care to elaborate on where you see a reductio, and break down my argument instead of ineffectively sniping? well i lived in france for a year and i'd say this was a damn accurate description of them as well, especially the thign abotu them getting in your face but if you want them to man up and fight they'll be like huh what did i do? dead on.
Nestle, the Nazis were the enemy, not the Germans per se. And, you do realize, the Nazis *were*, as far as it was possible to do so, wiped off the planet. since the jihadists have faced nothing of the sort, your racial implication is exactly backwards.
i meant by ''them'' the arabs in france, e.g. maroccans, algerians etc; there were loads of them. they fit the description in this article perfectly.
Sorry, I did not find it witty. I understood it for what the writer was trying to say. Having had much personal dealings with American Jews and with Israelis, I understood the comment completely, and at face value.
There's a general lack of humor in this thread, so I don't tend to look out for it. The Germans were definitely the enemy in WW2. The Germans, from their point of view, were not fighting the "Democrats" or the "Tories", were they now?
A Roosevelt once said, "our Germans beat their Germans", referring to the prevalence of ethnic Germans in the upper reaches of the US military. On the other hand, we incarcerated the Japanese-Americans during that same war. Can't find a better example of racist double standards than that; and it's all ours! Spike, my take on that was that "often difficult to like" Israelis refers to a just-below-surface wish on many people's part that the mideast conflict would just go away, and would if only the blasted Israelis would simply give up their country and just, you know, go away. Then, the thinking is, the Jihad would just go away, too.
This of course is classic "blame-the-victim" thinking, a cognitive condition which is not simply emblematic of the left, but actually creates leftist thought. "Why do Israels hate Arabs so much?
The Germans committed the Holocaust (Ha-Shoah) along with WWI & WWII. Why not wipe the Germans off the planet? Oh ya because they are white and arabs are brown!" No, maybe the Israelis are responding the blatant threats of annihilation and extermination- as in the Arabs like to say, 'We'll finish what Hitler started!' During Gulf War one, CNN broadcast images of wild, frenzied Palestinians dancing and screaming "GAS THE JEWS!" as Saddam's SCUDS rained down on Israel. Even today, the Hamas favorite children's ditty du jour is " HAMAS! HAMAS! JEWS TO THE GAS!" These same ideas are taught in schools, broadcast in media and often preached from the pulpit. Maybe that is why Israel- and the rest of the civilized world have a problem with the Arab world. It has nothing to do with beinbg brown- it has to do with beast like behavior. Your homework:
Said, Edward. "Orientalism." "How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one's own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the 'other')?" Thank you. I doubt whether too many people on this post will take your suggestion, but I guess they like re-inventing the wheel.... Edward Said tackled this subject brilliantly, by the way.
I have never been afraid of an Arab for one second in my entire life, yet I'm suppossed to devote my life to fighting a war with them bc they are such a massive threat? Get a life.
Lots of 'ugly American' commentary here, which is fine, opinions are opinions. Several commenters however refer to "why Americans are hated" as if the premise is unarguable.
I'd like to ask, if so, why, in this war-polarized world, so many electorates have recently voted in governments which ran in part on specifically pro-American platforms? I'm talking western Europe, eastern Europe, Asia, the Pacific, north and south America. You know, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, France, Poland, and many other Latin American, Eastern European, and Asia-Pacific democracies. So, since elections are the greatest referendums of all, I think that the "America is hated" line is in truth "America is hated by some". This is some of the worst writing I have ever seen, full of logical fallacies, half-truths, self-contradiction, ever kind of overgeneralization, factual errors...I mean I was just laughing from start to finish. This guys is a TEACHER?!?!
My favorite piece of bull&~^T: ) They don't place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do BUT WAIT: 11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, Obviously, these cant both be true, in generall They are opposites. This kind of really poor reasoning tells us everything we need to know about the author, and nothing in the piece indicates any differently. He is a poor thinker and also a very confused racist. oh well. "Ins'Allah"
"Whatever" "That's the way the cookie crumbles" "Shit happens" "That's the way it is. Take it or leave it" "You gotta do what you gotta do" "Whadda you gonna do?" "You can't fight City Hall" "Either way, we're screwed" "Pissing in the wind" etc, etc.... - We corrected the attribution of the essay. Thanks to those who picked that up. And thanks to all for discussing -
Boy, talk about being self-centered. Does it even cross your mind that people in other countries could hold elections without the US being uppermost on their minds? That they might actually be interested in their own countries? Certainly Americans don't give a shit about other countries when they go to the polls. Are you crediting the French, for example, with a greater sense of international responsabilty than the American electorate? They might share some of our values, and those might be represented in their elections, but to think that this is an endorsement of America's role in the world, well, that's a bit much.
On the other hand, people in countries that are denied democracy by a regime that is actively supported by the US might actually have an opinion about our role in the world, and perhaps not a positive one. The majority of the 9/11 hijackers were well-educated Saudis, by the way. Except that Arabs really do say "Inshallah" about once every four sentences. I don't think it means they have a deeply ingrained laziness or passivity, just that they say "Inshallah" a lot.
Spike,
You being a proponent of the arab propagandist Edward Said, I can see why you would have difficulty with Israelis/Jews, and why they would have difficulty with you. well, Spike, if you'll notice, I said "governments which ran in part on specifically pro-American platforms".
Your rejoinder would be apt had not so many of the referenced political campaigns not splashed so many headlines on how much of the election was a referendum on the war in the mideast --of which, you know, America is leading the anti-jihad, anti-tyranny, anti-totalitarian side. And again, your "certainly Americans don't give a shit about other countries when they go to the polls" would ordinarily make sense, had not the American Democratic party for seven years now not been continually criticizing the Bush administration for having alienated the world (which, in JFKerry's campaign, meant France --which just elected Sarko). "but to think that this is an endorsement of America's role in the world, well, that's a bit much" Again, ordinarily true, but much less so lately. I know, I read Google News every day. "people in countries that are denied democracy by a regime that is actively supported by the US might actually have an opinion about our role in the world, and perhaps not a positive one" So, you're concerned about our attempt to institute democracy in Iraq, but also want to do the same thing at the same time in KSA & the Gulf Kingdoms? I don't get it. Anyway, unless you're being deliberately disengenuous, you'll realize that, even though George Bush says it, it's probably true, that the best way to democratize the mideast, to turn it over to free electorates, is to conduct a successful experiment and show that it is do-able. You really believe that our aim in Iraq is to "institute Democracy"? Get a grip.
"You really believe that our aim in Iraq is to "institute Democracy"? Get a grip."
Oh, I get it. We're not having a discussion, we're parroting conspiracy theories. My mistake. The notion that the United States has no inherent interest in democracy is a "Conspiracy Theory"? What planet do you live on? Plenty of American statesmen have admitted that much in public, from George F. Kennan to Henry Kissinger and beyond.
You really don't think that we aren't in Iraq because it just happens to be sitting on a shitload of oil, do you? Get real. Actually, Spike (aka Ash), the real purpose of the Iraq invasion and deposition of Saddam Hussein, was to institute a new Zionist colonial empire, with Amerikkka serving as the dimwitted agent to the supreme war criminal Ariel Sharon. If you don't believe me, just ask Edward Said.
Spike, no need to get all excited. Just follow this:
1) Iraq is the heart of the mideast. 2) The mideast is the fuel tank with which the world feeds itself, creates wealth, lifts famine, disease, poverty, etc. 3) As the supply of oil decreases, pressures will mount, creating conditions which have always in the past led to wars. 4) A world war over oil would be big --like WWII. 5) The USA military is currently the power which maintains a global auction market with which to peacefully allocate the dwindling resource. 5) This military power is in Iraq attempting to creat a condition wherein OPEC cannot be hijacked, in greater or lesser form, by interests antithetical to the interests of the free world. So, you can easily see, if you follow the bullet points, that your distinction is merely a political spin. Any either/or stipulation about oil or democracy, is just an abstraction, a verbal formula, a political word-salad, with no real meaning in the real world. I mean, I can see where you're going with all this --you think you're on the Peace Train --but the truth is, OIF IS the peace train --a limited war to prevent a big bad ugly one. You're actually on the War Train --you just haven't thought it through yet. you should, you know. History shows that bad thinking yields bad results. One more civil comment: Labelling someone a racist in an argument is dirty pool. This is about culture, not race. And the subject is not Iraq. Being a culturalist, eg preferring and valuing one's own culture highly is not so terrible, is it?
Ooh, Joe Geopolitics lets us all in on the Real Deal. I'm impressed. It's actually a pretty fair assesment of the situation, aside from the "Saving the Free World" bullshit.
"Nations do not have ideals, they have interests." -Bismarck Ahmadinjiahad claims a similar defense. The clique of Naturei Karta.
I think this essay way over-generalizes. First of all, it speaks of Arabs, but seems mainly to be talking about the Gulf States. More broadly, I think it is far more helpful to understand people's worldviews through the lens of history, and how that history has shaped 'culture', economics, politics, etc., as opposed to an idea of 'culture', that explains everything. Inevitably, you oversimplify with culture, and somehow George Bush thinks that people who disagree with him have perfectly valid opinions- that's not the W I know.
Can't hang in there without getting snotty, Spike?
But, please, show us where ""Saving the Free World" bullshit" conflicts with "Nations do not have ideals, they have interests" Saving the free world is not an "interest"? Making wholesale arguments about a culture and its people comes pretty close to racism. The problem also is that racism usually has an agenda, and in this case the difference between honest criticism and propaganda value is very had to distinguish.
We are in a conflict of some sort, although maybe not the world-historical one that some people think it is. There's a tendency to cloak our interests with ideals, almost as if we're ashamed of our interests. Talking about "instituting Democracy" in Iraq is talking about ideals, otherwise we'd just say "crush the infidels!" and be done with it. Oops, we've tried that, didn't we?
Instituting democracy may be an ideal, but it's also the only way to distribute political power to the people, who will presumably act in the interests of a national population--almost always more peaceful (and always more legitimate) than, say, a clique of totalitarian megalomaniacal murderers.
And, re your cynicism, what on earth makes you think it's anything more than your cynicism ? Do you think any ideal is automatically wrong if you yourself happen to not share it? Just askin' You're right. The real plan is to make them ethnically and culturally Chinese.
"There's no denying it, I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in most of the Arab world -- just for starters, I'm gay. But to be brutally honest, I don't want to live side-by-side with the American racists and jingoists commenting in your blog, either."
The world is getting smaller with every passing year and admit it or not, you are effectively living next door to the islamofascists. They are the ones whose countries openly, gleefully, and proudly execute homosexuals...not the alleged howling primates you scorn here. (shhh, don't let Ash see this)
http://instapundit.com/archives2/008942.php "Baird said Iraqi, Jordanian and Egyptian leaders warned him in private discussions that the region would descend into chaos if the United States withdrew its forces from Iraq. Baird also said talk of a U.S. pullout has allowed Iraqi leaders to "retrench" and consolidate their power rather than reach out to competing groups and seek a stable common ground. So much for the theory that talk of U.S. withdrawal would pressure Iraqi politicans to reach a political settlement. posted at 05:42 PM by Glenn Reynolds What about when, say, the democratic government decides that its interests are not in line with the interests of the United States? Not allowing in foreign oil companies or renegotiating the relationship of the country with those companies (like Ecuador in the 80s, for example)? Or nationalizing industries left over from colonial days (like Iran in the 50s, for example). Then what? We should, for the sake of "the free world", then depose those leaders (Iran) or assassinate them (Ecuador)?
Your argument holds no water. If the US were sitting on a critical world resource, and it were using it to decide the way the world runs, would you then say other countries would have a right to come in and tell us how to run our business? Hell, no. You would advocate national sovereignty. National sovereignty is part and parcel with democracy. If you claim to like the latter, you must love the former. The US has no business telling Iraq, or anyone else, what they can do with their oil. If Iraq decides it wants to stop selling its oil, for whatever reason, that is none of our business. We do not have the "right" to go in and liberate that critical resource from the people who live in that country. All i can say, saurabh, is, re your first para, is that both Mossedegh and Allende threw in with USSR back when the cold war was a deadly winner-take-all ideological war to the death. Yes, USA was involved, in reaction to USSR's initiatives.
But let me ask you this --of USSR and USA, which was the aggressor? Which was fomenting communist insurgencies all over the world? Which nation would've been happy to peacefully co-exist had not USSR been on a mission to rule the world? What choice did USA have but to fight back, on the battlegrounds chosen by the aggressor? Bear in mind that in every single nation that had come under Soviet rule, tyranny had become the system. Here, take a read from just today: http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010556 Re your second para, I agree with you. Iraq owns Iraq's oil, and ought to do with it whatever the Iraqi people want to do with it. What I don't agree with is your premise, that the pre-OIF Iraqi people had sovereignty, then USA came in and took it away, and is now running a colony. We all hear that argument from western leftists and pro-jihadists every day --it's a cheap & easy argument, But it's not true. Prior to OIF, Saddam's clan had sole sovereignty, and the oil was being used in part to turn the UN into an organized crime syndicate, and in part to aggrandize the tyrant's organization. Now, during OIF, all combatants are in flux, fighting a war there in which USA is in alliance with the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people. Their sovereignty--of which they've had none for the three decades under Baath--is real, and won't even be subject to propagandist sneers once the war is over and the USA has departed. I don't know where you've been getting your facts, but you need to maybe complain to the management. BTW, saurabh, the Ecuadorean assassination to which you refer occurred in Chile (and Allende was killed fighting against a nationalist coup, rather than coldly "assassinated").
But, if we're being impressionistic with history, then I guess we can mix & match the two nations as well as the circumstances of the struggle, wot the heck. I think the 20th century has proven that past sworn enemies can be close friends and allies later. This doesn't take away from the laws of war. Sometimes co-existing in peace is not an option. When it comes to war, we must move quickly and decisively to crush the enemy's will to resist. But we don't need to annhiliate Arab culture (nor will we, realistically) to move past this stage of war.
Not all Arabs are opposed to us, or at least many Arabs are more opposed to al-Qaeda than they are to us. This is especially true of many Gulf-state governments. We would be wise to differentiate between Arabs (and other Muslims) who are implacable enemies, and Arabs who are relatively pro-U.S. Contrary to Bush theology, it's definitely not "for us or against us." We would be wise to ally ourselves appropriately with those who are "kind of" for us, e.g. the Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar. Finally, I would point out that while in all honesty, modern day Arab culture is rather pathetic, Arab culture in the past was a beacon of advancement and perhaps the most advanced culture in the world (as the author points out). I do not think their culture is hopeless. They are quite backward, superstitious and foolish. But they can grow and improve. And let us not forget that we can devolve, just as they did, if we forget our own principles and values (e.g. torturing captives). Saurabh,
As Buddy correctly pointed out, it’s not just a question “nationalizing” companies or industries. It’s a question of who becomes enfranchised and who becomes dis-enfranchised by such a move. And no, the “legal” self-serving theft and plunder of commercial and private property by a leftist dictator and his clique is not a barometer of national sovereignty expressed by the will of the people. It's just plunder and theft. this writing was pretty pointless...
"they dont think like us" who is "us"? there are so many drastic differences between the way americans think.... Of course there would be difference with a foreign country. "Us" and "Them" may bring you comfort. but it is a false comfort.... as their are many americans who would think that YOU a fellow american think just as differently as "those" People. huh... wasnt israel founded in 1948?
what achievements on behalf of civilization has Israel made in the past 60 years? mustve missed something :P To be honest after reading a few books Why I Left Jihad: The Root of Terrorism and the Return of Radical Islam by Walid Shoeba
Why We Want to Kill You: The Jihadist Mindset and How to Defeat It by Walid Shoebat and the Qur’an. I now understand the West needs to destroy this religion before it destroys us. I suggest some you read these as well and then you will understand there will be no peace until Islam in its current form is destroyed and rebuilt. I chuckle at the Homosexual and Women groups in this country claiming to be oppressed. I fear these groups have no idea of the oppression that will be dealt out if Islam successfully submits the West. On good thought I have is that not to long after I am dead the Islamic Fanatics will kill every Homosexual, Lawyer and Politician. In Islam there are specific ways to deal with your defeated foe, kill them Q8:12-13, ransom them, if they convert to Islam free them or enslave and tax them Surah 9, Q9:29. The Rape and plunder of Non-Muslims is accepted and encouraged in this faith. Muslims who kill Non-Muslims are to not be Punished Q 2:178 I am not calling myself an expert on Islam and Muslims all I am trying to do is to try to get to know more about them so I can make an informed decision when the day comes. That's the principle enshrined by the Nuremberg Trials. What could've become "victor's justice" actually became an asterisk on the definition of legality. Everything the Nazis had done was scrupulously "legal" --their laws had made it so.
It does NOT prove anything! Have you lived there? I lived there for a year, and the authot got it bang-on with all of his observations. I'm not saying they're evil or should be wiped off the face of the earth. Live and let live. Personally, I just can't live with them. Their values are too different. Sure, in my opinion some of them are inferior values, but as long as they don't try to force their values on me I won't force mine on them.
No, the author got it right. I too lived in the ME for quite awhile, and although your exact translation of insahllah may be different ("If God wills it" vs "God willing"), what they mean when they say it is exactly as the author describes.
It means "it's out of my hands" and more often than not "I will make no effort toward it and hopefully it will work out". scope, you're mixing & mismatching posts --the part of western culture originating with the Jews is a little beyond the scope (heh) of a comments column, but you must have heard of the Judao-Christian Tradition, right? The classical western notions of what a human being is? There was Hellenism, and Judaism, there aren't any other foundational sources.
But if you want to narrow down from 5000 yrs to 60 yrs, to what the modern state of Israel has contributed, suggest you do a search around "Israeli patents" --and then look at the number "per capita". Compare and contrast to the world mean. Come back and tell us what you learned. No, I can't say much for the Mubarak gov't except that it isn't sending it's 100 million people to war against us. Hey, that's pretty good for starters, right?
Ok, you saw Laura Bush validating oppression, I saw her trying to help in some small way, by showing distaff interest, the forces of non-violent liberalization. These big continental movements toward freedom and civil rights take a little time, you know, especially if you don't want 'em bloody. If you don't believe that a steady liberalization trend beats the hell out of a violent overthrow of Mubarak by the Muslim Brotherhood, then you must think there's some sort of magic guarantee that the world will be fine no matter what incredible snafus we pull. As far as the reductio, you've posited an either/or without any context, with no element of time, and made the unfounded assumption that because USA is not publicly attacking Mubarak--a la Jimmy Carter and the Shah--that the USA is supporting human rights abuse in Egypt. That's a silly, supercilious argument, made for bumper stickers. Actually, buddy, the Ecuadoran assassination I was referring to took place in Ecuador: Jaime Roldos.
oops--sorry --assumed you'd meant the high-profile Allende case.
First, and I hope you'll pardon me, because your comment provokes extreme anger: eat it.
Colonialism was theft. Foreign oil companies making claims on resources because they were part of a degenerate colonial empire. Then claiming that nationalizing them, so that the natural resources of a country actually belong to its people, is theft is laughable, and is a further indication of why Americans are so hated. Like the post above, you are ignorant of history and what you've done to people around the world. Then, when they respond, you protest innocence and claim YOU are being robbed? Laughable. As to whether Mossadegh was a Soviet puppet - its possible he was, although I think the evidence then, and now, is weak at best. Certainly he wasn't openly declaring himself for the Soviet Union. And still, I don't see how it was any business of the United States' who they allied themselves with. That said, there are many examples of leaders who were NOT Soviet-allied (like Roldos, mentioned above) who went out in a fiery blaze thanks to the CIA. What is your feeling about them? And can you truly believe that stopping the influence of the Evil Empire was such a great need that we could kill, maim, bomb whoever we wanted? That it was appropriate to remove democratically-elected leaders (Lumumba) and replace them with savage dictators (Mobutu)? I think not. Buddy,
I'm not a Marxist, and I have no love for the USSR, and I'll readily agree that they wanted to expand their empire. But you're a blind fool if you believe that the US wasn't expanding its own empire at the same time. It wasn't interested in Indonesia because it wanted to protect it from Soviet influence - it was interested in Indonesia because it wanted to acquire its oil and gas rights and secure them - which, after replacing Sukarno with Suharto, it did. The same is true throughout Latin America, throughout Africa, throughout the Middle East. The Cold War was a cloak - a convenient one, I'll grant, because there was a credible enemy. But it was just a cloak. Ask yourself what influence the Soviet Union had over Guatemalan peasants, over Panamanians or millions of others in Latin America. Was it Soviet influence that made us bomb those countries, and arm right-wing death squads that ran roughshod over them? Or was it the United Fruit Company? That process hasn't stopped now that the Cold War is over. We're still supporting thugs the world over. Why does Hosni Mubarak get our money, tell me? Seems to me that they are invading our countries. In the UK, they demand call to prayer be broadcast and removal of older, established, businesses. Here in the US, they are starting to demand the ability to wear face wraps while taking a driver's license photo, which is completely counter to the intent of the photo.
Someone above said it... they have no respect for anything outside of their culture, but they use our own desire to "multiculturism" against us. Take off her damn veil and smile! Otherwise, I'll just assume your not the authorized holder of that driver's license and haul you in. But of course, they would scream that we were being insensitive or racist if that was to happen. Besides, we do NOT need to understand their culture. If they are coming here to live, they need to understand OURS. If they attack us (and sorry, but 9-11 simply can't be discarded as if it didn't happen), they should know that our culture is to fight back. Until we take too many losses, then the democrats will cry and we'll leave. And, according to THIER culture, that will make them victorious. And embolden them for further attacks. Turn Iraq into a US outpost. You're right that you are not an expert on Islam - you really don't know what you're talking about. Unlike the Bible, the Quran was revealed over a period of many years. Many of the verses (including the ones you mention) refer to specific incidents, and are not general proclamations. Muslims understand them this way; they read them historically, in context, and do not interpret them to mean "Oh, I can kill non-believers willy-nilly."
As to Mr. Shoebat, I know nothing of him. But you should be clear to distinguish between Islam and the terrorists of the ilk of Osama bin Laden, who follow a very particular doctrine that is NOT generally embraced by Muslims. It's influenced (mostly) by this one guy named Sayed Qutb from Egypt. So, relax - the Muslims aren't coming to get you, and they're not in a big hurry to convert you. Muslims don't even proselytize, unlike some other religions I might mention. Well, s, it's late, and I'm not enthusiastic about going into the heuristics of the Great Game in the aftermath of WWII & Korea.
Certainly anyone can cherry-pick inumerable cases where USA can be easily made to look bad. I suppose it would be asking too much to take a contexted overview of the entire globe, and the stakes in play, and the nature of the adversary, when you select events for display. If I'm perhaps guilty of leniency on that count, then you're perhaps guilty of overzealous prosecution. The Shah had his own Iranian royalist following, too, you know--the fall of Moss wasn't a CIA tabula rasa. And Lumumba, I guess he was just too red for the anti-communists--yes, Dulles included-- to abide, tho I agree Mobutu was a horror. Sub-saharan Africa is a heartbreak, and USA should have done better on the humanitarian front, there's no doubt. But re the larger question of how to appreciate American foreign policy vs the USSR, neither you nor I will ever know what the particular stakes really were in any given local conflict circumstance, and at least in giving the benefit of the doubt to my country, I do nothing to corrode, erode, dissolve the sense that we have here something worth defending. And this sense is, you know, among a national population, rather critical to that nation's future. Demoralization is the beginning of the end of something, and whatever that something is, let's be sure we don't want it before we jump through the looking glass on American history and the western canon. I mean, go ahead and study the warts, it's good medicine --but also, study what the world could easily be like today but for USA standing against the 20th century fascisms. And in a dog-fight, both sides are dogs. the thing is, one side wins, the other loses. Losing is not as good as winning --that's why they call it "losing". Read this, from today, by Melik Kaylan (it's Tbilisi but could have been --and still could be --Anytown, USA). http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010556 Shoebat is a middle-aged Palestinian, living now in the west, and has been in the news quite a bit, because of the referenced book.
He speaks English, and was raised from a child to fight the west --in his case, Israel. He has killed. He's an engaging and obviously intelligent guy, and my sense is, the indoctrination over time wore thin, and he left the ranks of the terrorists and is now in the west, speaking out, warning not to listen to westerners who opine such as "So, relax - the Muslims aren't coming to get you, and they're not in a big hurry to convert you. Muslims don't even proselytize, unlike some other religions I might mention." But, of course, Shoebat could be wrong, and you right, saurabh. I'm not suggesting Shoebat is wrong in any way, not having read his work. Of course there are terrorists, and of course they are, in some sense, "out to get you" (although they probably don't give nearly as much of a shit about YOU as you like to think, more about the American government). But you'll note that I said "Muslims", not "terrorists". There is a difference. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. 99.999% of them do not want to get you, and have no interest in converting you.
BTW this is crazy:
"Colonialism was theft. Foreign oil companies making claims on resources because they were part of a degenerate colonial empire. Then claiming that nationalizing them, so that the natural resources of a country actually belong to its people, is theft is laughable, and is a further indication of why Americans are so hated. Like the post above, you are ignorant of history and what you've done to people around the world. Then, when they respond, you protest innocence and claim YOU are being robbed? Laughable." Whoever you're talking to, you gave 'em hell, alright--but it isn't me. Who could defend theft colonoialism? I think perhaps that any criticism at all of nationalization--even when a Saddam is "the people" and the actual people don't count (as was clearly posited in the discussion, see Mika)--must set off some sort of socialist attack reflex? Sorry to ding your stereotype, but I'm not worried in the least about me, myself. And right, the jihadist numbers are small. But the future is long, and you may be insufficiently alert. Any chance of that?
I agree that the Cold War in general is too large to debate freely, but it's a bit tiresome when the Red dye gets thrown around liberally to defend everything we did, even after the Cold War is over.
What about Arbenz? Would you cry that he's a communist, too? There is clearly a case where it was dispossession of United Fruit that caused the uproar, and it was United Fruit's close connection to the Dulles brothers and the CIA that allowed them to provoke a coup and topple Arbenz. That things like that happened is without dispute. You want to give the US the benefit of the doubt - but why? Is it really the country you love, or its ideals? Are those ideals being followed? Was the world better under Mobutu, Suharto, Castillo, etc., than it would have been otherwise? Was there really no alternative to putting these men in power? At least Bush made a commitment to establishing democracy in Iraq - where was this much-vaunted love of democracy throughout the twentieth century? Why did we continually replace democratically-elected governments with dictators? Dunno, s, i'm about to topple over sleepwise so i guess you win the round. I'd have to research the united fruit company before i could debate you.
Would offer that the tiresome red dye slinging couldn't be any more tiresome than the mud slinging on Uncle Sam, and in my case at least there's an enormous volume of indisputable history re the red threat. In your case, much of the anti-american library is rather more impressionistic, as in your apparent assumption that any government the USA ever opposed would've been better for the people than any government the USA ever supported. well, pooped--nite-- one last note, do you see the logic flaw in your "...it's a bit tiresome when the Red dye gets thrown around liberally to defend everything we did, even after the Cold War is over" ?
So, you're free to critique now, in the present, things USA did during the cold war, but I'm not likewise free to defend now, in the present, those very same things? I have to go back in time, and answer you from during the cold war? Oh, jeez, this one is so full of half-stories--I'll catch it in the morning--really--I'll answer it on cup #1, before I begin the day's capitalist exploitation.
This article most effectively demonstrates the extent the author managed to be unable to interact with Saudi Arabs. Most of the responses fall into common logical traps: confirmation bias, foregone conclusions, non-following arguments, and postulates so broad that they can conceivably apply as well to any 2 individuals as they could to 2 allegedly incommensurate cultures.
1) They don't think the same way we do. You don't think the same way I do. You are perfectly content with flimsy arguments while I am not. Obviously they didn't think like you. 2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people. The same could be said of Americans. 3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source. Not too bad, with the exception of the word "fundamentally." Just as American values have changed through time, Saudi Arab values (if they can even be generalized as such) have also changed through time. They may appear fundamentally different now, but are influenced by American values just as American values are altered in the contact with Arabs. "It is difficult to argue that poverty is the driving cause of terrorism" - how do you define terrorism? Is it the same everywhere? If not poverty, gross inequality of the distribution of wealth and a guaranteed lack of promising futures, combined with influential local religious leaders who convince people to "be something" in their lives is certainly a factor that assists some people in choosing to end their lives in a bang. But America has its serial killers who shoot up schools then kill themselves. It's a different style, but not really all that different. Why are they not terrorists? And America has plenty of religious and pseudo-religious leaders who tell Americans to do this or do that - some Americans listen, others don't. That's part of the nature of preaching, broadly conceived, and blind followers. You mean to tell me that none of the Americans who enlisted to serve in Iraq joined because of a religious conviction that they were doing the right thing? (Obviously many didn't, but I've read enough soldier blogs to see the motivation for at least some of the American servicemen). In the case of the American invasion of Iraq, a governmental directive gave the campaign a sense of legitimacy that hasn't been accorded Arabs who become suicide bombers. But people attacking others for religious convictions is nothing new, and not specific to Arabs or Muslims. 4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can't maintain it either. I agree with you on the maintenance issue. It's just not a priority. But do not agree that "inshallah" is connected to that. 5) They do not think of obligations as running both ways. You contradict yourself in your evidence, as certain obligations are more important than others (as you point out). That's true anywhere. "Consider that Muslims in England have quite un-self-consciously demanded that a pub near a Mosque be shut down as offensive to their religion - in spite of the fact that the pub had precedence by six hundred years! Or that they demanded the right to broadcast the prayer call on loudspeakers in London, while it is illegal to have a church at all in the Saudi Kingdom." your evidence and conclusions don't correlate. Let's look at a similar example. In San Francisco (where I'm writing from), people move into lofts next door to long-term music venues and within a week are calling the police department to have the venue shut down for "noise complaints." Yet people love to imagine that they live in a city "of the arts." Does this provide evidence of obligations not running both ways? If it does, it's not a phenomenon specific to places where Muslims live. If not, then my original point about a non-correlation are correct. "Or that they demanded the right to broadcast the prayer call on loudspeakers in London, while it is illegal to have a church at all in the Saudi Kingdom." While both statements are true, you have a fundamental problem with the subject of the argument. The "they" that demand the right to broadcast the call to prayer is not the same "they" that bars churches in Saudi Arabia. There are churches elsewhere in the Arab world. There are Christian Arabs (and no, I'm not talking about Palestinians, but Arabs in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Turkey) who regularly go to well-maintained (!) churches in the Arab world. 6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites. As you point out, "Try to see it from their point of view - how else do you expect them to act when you have the overwhelming force?" - you don't look at if their warfare technique is specific to situations where they are overwhelmed by a much larger force or if it is a consistent property. That would be interesting and valuable. "Folks, what we call "terrorism" is quite close to the historically normal way of warfare among these people." - Terrorism is such a useless term now in the English language. We have no consistency of application. Environmentalists and Arabs can be terrorists, but serial killers and Christian fundamentalists who kill masses of followers are not. Iranian governmental military organizations may become conceived as terrorists, while similar Turkish governmental military organizations are protectors of democracy (though they stage gross assassinations of alleged but not convicted "enemies of the state." Certain groups that fight for freedom are legitimated (such as groups in the Balkans) while others are illegitimated by the term "terrorists" (Kurds). If you want to talk about a relation between current and historical normative forms of warfare in the Middle East, that could be interesting. But if ya have to use the "t" word, define it at least. 7) In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do. This sounds no different than Southern Europeans, Turks, Greeks, and many other people who enjoy passionate exchanges of words. Understanding rhetorical style is essential towards "negotiations." Americans are not good, typically, at the nuances other rhetorical styles. I say this based on observations of hundreds of Americans in Turkey who demonstrated a comprehensive inability to understand how to approach communicating with Turks, in contrast with Koreans, Australians, and Israelis who fared much better. I'm not totally sure why this is. 8) They don't place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, and they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity. There's absurdity everywhere. Dozens of replies above this one should be evidence enough of the universality of absurd claims. But you're probably conditionally accurate about a difference in value on certain kinds of abstractions, "truth" being only one of them. 9) They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do. Just find some American spiritualists, or New Agers, or attend some "faith healing" rituals sometime. They're of increasing popularity in America, too. There are non-superstitious scientifically-minded Arabs, too. 10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids. Re the former, it's always easier to talk about one's own culture. Re the latter, you provide no evidence. 11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil. I don't believe you are accurate in this. Specifically, they believe that the the right to express their point of view is self-evidently absurd. Which is not entirely unreasonable. Americans often believe that the fact they have an opinion on a matter is something of note, something remarkable, and something they have an obligation to express. But take any cross-section of America, and like anywhere in the world, one will find people who are totally stupid and people who are much more intelligent and a lot more people in the middle. Of those in the middle, many will have an opinion based on no facts, and will just be parroting an opinion they heard from someone else. While it seems good on the one hand that America has the "freedom of expression," (which it doesn't, though the majority of its citizens are confused about this matter), it's rarely used to express things of much merit, but rather as a legitimation for people to have stupid opinions and feel proud of them. Of course, freedom of speech has been highly effective in America for accomplishing particular goals, some much more laudable than the expression of stupid opinions like I said above. Not privileging freedom of speech has been equally effective in many places in the Middle East for accomplishing other goals, in particular the preservation of certain aspects of culture despite imposed Western values and political systems. From Arabs, Americans can learn that, you know what, sometimes there is a merit to shutting up and listening to what people who are experienced and/or knowledgeable have to say (and, sometimes, traditions have sound bases). From Americans, Arabs can learn the merit of allowing differing viewpoints and their expression, which can allow for cultures to accumulate knowledge at a faster rate. It all depends on what goals one privileges at the moment. 12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it. Sentence 2 doesn't logically follow sentence 1. There are many ways we could share a world in peace, it's just a question if they would have costs that the two civilizations are not currently prepared to pay. America does not have to be dependent on foreign oil, it chooses to be dependent on foreign oil because it has a short-term financial incentive. That does not make it right. Muslims do not have to impose their religion on public spaces, they choose to do so for similarly contemporaneous reasons. That also does not make it right. "Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it." Finally, a statement I can totally agree with, and one that could easily be supported by a simple trip to any number of utopian websites or taking too many cultural anthropology courses. You do much better when talking about American culture than you do when talking about Saudi culture. However, what you fail to point out is not whether or not two cultures have any inherent basis to get along (which they may not), but why the cultures are forced into an increasing number of situations that test whether or not they can get along. Just as easily as political, economic, and social systems were quickly reengineered to account for contact with people from everywhere in the world, systems could be reengineered again to maximize harmonious contact and minimize harmful contact. It could be done. It probably, unfortunately, won't be done, but that's beside the point... +++++ In sum, If you want people to take your field trip in Saudi Arabia seriously, you have to structure better arguments. Some of us are ready to listen to anything well-informed you have to say about "fundamental differences" between cultures (I'm being generous in assuming you might have something well-informed, but just kinda slipped up when expressing it). You're right, anthropology considers cultural value judgments to be a cardinal sin. I agree, that's a fundamental problem. But value judgments, like anything else, have to be based in sound logic. Every single comment derived from your article is doubly flawed. It takes flawed logic as postulates or axioms. It's cute to watch all the Americans "expressing themselves." Glad they have the freedom to do so, sorry that they do nothing productive with that freedom. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rls=EGLC,EGLC:2006-42,EGLC:en&q=Jaime+Roldos+aguilera
Roldos' "assassination" is highly dubious. He died in an air crash, in the high mountains, during a heavy thunderstorm ("no-fly" conditions). The man who started the assassination story, an "American businessman" named John Perkins, did so in a book he was selling (that ought to raise your 'nefarious capitalist' antenna) claiming that the Americans had planted a bomb aboard President Roldos' helicopter. Later, when the very-telling error (Roldos crashed in an commuter-type airplane, and anyone with such insider info as an assassination would've known that basic fact), he changed his story to the airplane. Assassination accusations are de riguer when third-world pols air-crash, but this one is particularly thinly-supported, if a sensational-book hawker can even be called 'support' at all. Most Ecuadorians believe that if there was a bomb, and it did go off when the weather and conditions alone account for the crash, that it would have been placed by Peruvian agents, due to the border war the two nations were fighting. Now, s, you presented "the USA assassination of Jaime Roldos" as a fact, as an accepted, beyond-dispute fact, in this thread. As if it were history. Given that, would it be rude to ask if there any reason for a reader to not infer from that, that you are shall we say something of a propagandist? This is THE only answer that will end problems from THAT country. If you think otherwise you are naieve and provincial. I have lived among 'em listened closley to 'em and they are telling us what they have in mind. Now how stupid is it if someone tells you they are going to bust open your head not to give some attention to that and prepare to either defend or attack? nothing else will suffice
Matt I'll get a life,if you'll get caught up reading your world history.
"And can you truly believe that stopping the influence of the Evil Empire was such a great need that we could kill, maim, bomb whoever we wanted?"
I don't care much for your phraseology, but Yes. And I don't even need a first cup of coffee to answer that in the most emphatic. That's because I happen to know the answer almost instinctively. A child of what was then the USSR, my parents and grandparents immigrated to Israel when I was still quite a small. I did not experience the horror shows first hand to which they and their generation were privy to. But even as a small child, I perfectly understood Soviet system. All you have to do is understand what is fear and terror. That you fail to understand, is not only a sad commentary on your general intellect, but a sad commentary on your whole moral universe. Well, after rereading that post, I can see where a cup of coffee might’ve helped. :)
"They don't think like us". Hell, we don't even "think like us". Take a look at the disagreements in this "comments" section.
We have some fundamental disagreements here, especially about the need to exterminate others, that are quite as profound as anything differentiating the Heritage Foundation from the ayatollahs of Qum. In fact, those two factions may have more in common than any two people commenting on this post, like Buddy Larsen and me, for example. I certainly don't think like him, and I don't want to. The horror! "Unlike the Bible, the Quran was revealed over a period of many years."
Please explain what you mean. My understanding of the Christian Bible is that it has been "refined" from texts that have been created over millenia. Most of the Old Testament is derived from the Hebrew Bible and deuterocanonical texts that took a long time to compile in the first place. Then there are the 4 gospels relating the life and times of that mysterious prophet "Jesus of Nazareth" that were developed in the two centuries after his execution. Then there are the Epistles of Saul, the Mithraic interloper, as he administered his syncretic ministry amongst the goyim. From somewhere later the fevered hallucination of Revelation are clapped on the end. Throw in some miscellaneous pamphlets by Apostles and brothers and you've got the modern day Bible. A good analogy for the processs of evolution over time due to shifting cultural demands. How many today know Jesus of Nazareth was really an anti-imperial nationalist rabble-rouser? So, are you saying we shouldn't have taken Saddam at his word? In spite of his history? That we should have ignored that fact that he had invaded another country AS HE SAID he would, and was in possession of WMDs, which he had used in a genocidal way before, and, lastly, we should have ignored the fact that by disallowing complete inspections of his weapons systems -- which was a condition of the armistice of the first Gulf War (and THE ACTUAL REASON WE WENT INTO IRAQ, which the media has effectively obfuscated by shouting WMD! WMD!)? Don't you realize that if the idiot didn't have WMDs, and had simply let the weapons inspections continue, he would be alive today and happily torturing and killing his fellow countrymen and women. We went in because Saddam was an egomaniacal dictator who let his typical Arab bragging write a check his ass couldn't cash.
In short, I guess you're saying Saddam was just another blow-hard dictator who we should have ignored, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao . . . etc. etc. etc. Now, just go listen to your IPOD, watch your MTV, get your news from CNN, and vote for the peace candidate of your choice. After all, this is a safe friendly world, and there is nothing polite diplomacy can't resolve. The Arabs just want to be our friends. All that talk about destorying the West is just a harmless form of Arab rehetoric, and we shouldn't hate them because of a slight cultural mispercetpions on things like 9-11, beheadings and suicide bombings. Spike,
I can't speak for Buddy, but just for the record, in the equation of “us vs them”, I’d never consider you part of us. You are NOT part of us. But neither are you part of them. They would reject you, just as I have, and much more violently. You are a lost soul, much like many of your comrades on the left. As for the “extermination” of Islamic society and culture, I’m not in least bit sentimental. I believe it is perfectly warranted and perfectly legitimate. In fact, I believe it is imperative. As I was saying, you and the Ayatollahs have more in common than you and I.
No, Spike. The Ayatollahs would merely cut you up to pieces. I would be much more creative, like feed you to the Ayatollahs.
The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.
-Adolf Hitler This is not what I'm saying. But here's a simple exercise: can you give an example of ANY place in the world where the US helped a struggling democratic movement come to power, hold elections, and prevail against the Soviet Union? And if not, why not?
Good. When the Ayatollahs get their hands on you, you can tell yourself you have nothing to fear but fear itself.
A great strength of a free state is that citizens can freely call it "totalitarian" without it ever dawning on them that what they freely do disproves what they freely say.
No, you don't think like me. But don't give up --if you work at it, maybe someday you can.
I'm calling the Ayatollahs totalitarian. The Bush administration might want to imitate them, and has in some limited ways (wholesale spying on its citizens, degradation of constitutional freedoms) but fundamentally, a free country has much more subtle means of maintaining order. Totalitarian regimes have it easy: they don't really care about what their subjects think, only about what they do, and this is enforced by fairly crude methods (police state, prison camps, torture, etc) at gunpoint basically. A free society, by comparison, is fairly constrained as to what methods it can use to control its citizens. So it needs to control what they think. The management of Democracy has been raised to a high art in free societies. Sometimes this system of control breaks down partially; this is called a "Crisis of Democracy", and needs to be dealt with. Liberals and Conservatives are equally targeted by different sections of the media, for example; there's The New York Times to keep the Liberals under control, and FOX News for the Conservatives.
Nice point, spike. Other than the misuse of the word 'wholesale' (if Bush is 'wholesale', what word will you use for Stasi?).
"It's cute to watch all the Americans "expressing themselves." Glad they have the freedom to do so, sorry that they do nothing productive with that freedom"
Unlike, say, Lawrence, who productively writes much better comments, even tho they're quite unnecessarily haughty & disdainful. I mean, "The Bush administration might want to imitate (the ayatollahs)" ?
How about "The Bush administration might want to eat babies" ? More drama, you see. The East German regime was beyond wholesale; in a way it was like a giant social-networking system. Everybody was spying on everyone else. It was almost charmingly decentralized in its operation, even if the final aim was total state control. In a way, it was too good, too pervasive, it stopped making sense as an intelligence-gathering operation; it did work as a method of social control. Cuba is a bit like that as well. I have a feeling that the Ayatollahs don't have such a total grip; there's quite a bit of dissent that bubbles up from time to time. Their brutality is tempered by a fairly sophisticated middle class that keeps the country running as well as it can. It's the poor peasant girl that gets caught for some morals "crime" that gets stoned to death...
Maybe that's why they're against abortion; it cuts into their food supply. :)
Ok. So Israel doesn't count as a democracy. How about Hamastan?
How about Germany?
How about Japan? How about Spain? How about Poland? How about the Baltic States? How is it that YOU can’t name these countries, yet are able to name some obscure incident in Ecuador? Please keep in mind where saddam got his chemical wepons (rumsfeld- usa) and got tacit approval to use them from us.
Scroll a long inch to 'controversy & criticism' and check out the source for the Ecuadorean assassination theory (remember, this is even a wikipedia article):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man Sorry, that was badly phrased. I mean that, all the parts of the Bible are written post-facto, though by multiple authors: e.g., the Gospels each have a single author describing the past. By contrast the Quran is often conversational, discussing events of the day, rather than describing the past (although it does that, too). Perhaps I should say: the Quran is often in present-tense? Whereas the Bible is, as far as I'm familiar with it, always past-tense.
Now I get it. The best threads are near the naked girl.
Anyways... left schmeft. If presidential polls are any indication, the overwhelming majority of Americans left, right or other prefer effective terrorist ass whippings to screwing around in Allahville without much cost effective result. However, you may interpret this differently:
http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Approval.htm (Doesn’t show the little bump at the end where “the surge is working”.) If I'm disdainful it's because it seems to me there is a large gap between the intention of constitutional provisions for freedom of speech and its demeaned application in functioning as a mediocre shroud of protection for people to express hateful opinions in public spaces. I'm also disillusioned by the effects of the freedoms that Americans like to believe should be universalized - I'm questioning what good the freedom is tangibly bringing today. Objectively, the freedoms would seem like the ideal public good. But how are they used? Do they effectively assure the highest quality of life for the most individuals?
One (highly positive) thing I learned in living in the Middle East was that sometimes it's good to be reproached for behaving badly in public. That way, one learns that one needs to change something to be a good public citizen. That's not done so much any more in America, and many Americans have strange complexes about criticism and permissible public behavior as a result. It is cute to watch all the fervor which is applied towards anonymous rebukes on web boards. People might even say the same thing about what I write, so it's not a particularly haughty statement. Watching all this fervor, though, doesn't bring me any inspiration that democracy, as conceived by American masses, is being put to particularly good uses, or that if it were the system of law for the world the world would automatically be that much better of a place. I would like it to be otherwise, honestly I would. Naked girl? Check this out:
http://tinyurl.com/2cpfvp Are burqas next, in the land of the free? The "Arabs" don't have a lock on irrationality, but at least we don't institutionalize it. Yet. I know in this world there are intolerant people who do not love their fellow man. I just want to say I hate those people. The big problem is when they take it to extremes. The thing about extremists is they all stereotype. They think only in absolutes. If you ask me, all extremists should be taken out and shot.
this document applies to liberals also, not just arabs. I voted for it before i voted against it.
Kennedy is calling bye. Lawrence, I'm sure you're familiar with the great literary themes, so you must realize that what you decry is the essential fallen nature of mankind itself.
You might as well complain about the weather (can we still use that metaphor in the age of Gore?), or better, piss into the wind. Who we gonna quote --lessee, Shakespeare, "the law is an ass". Lincoln, "the Lord must love the common man, He made so many of them". No, laws--the rights they posit & protect--as elegantly drawn as they may be, remain always crude tools with which to elevate human nature. Best (imho) to look at these things in terms of alternatives (what is the alternative to liberty?) and lesser-evils. One thing I like about flip floppers is they can be pressured into producing results. Plus that noise they make.
Wooden shoes don’t conform well to your feet. Plus they’re slower and not very versatile. Compared to flip floppers that is. What result, exactly, is required of a flipflop? That it stay between the soles of your feet and the planet?
That hardly requires "pressure to produce results", as any pressure would prevent walking (unless only intermittantly applied, that is). You’d think kicking an islamofascist with a wooden shoe would be worse for the islamofascist. But there’s no way to keep the damn thing on your foot since it’ll go flying off if ya miss. With flip floppers you’ll need more kicks but with the appropriate pressure between big and long toe it’s still under your control.
Reagan was like an old sneaker. I looked up your citations from the Quran in some online version as well as asked a Muslim friend and they dont match up with what you have cited.
"but serial killers and Christian fundamentalists who kill masses of followers are not."
You mean all those Christian terrorists who murdered 3,000 people on 9/11 and have tried to out-do that deed ever since? This is Exhibit A of the weakness, feminized surrender, and fetishized religion of PC-Multi-Culti-Postmodern Moral relativism. A refusal to face reality because to do so would expose all the internal and inherent contradictions of the "religion" of the Postmodern Left. One example: they fly about in private jets, live in mansions, and take limos. Yet preach about global warming (they way they live their lives shows they don't believe what they say). This again, is Exhibit A: Arabs and the Post-modern Left pretty much share most of the unlovely characteristics cited above. Their culture (Big Man-ism) i.e. tribal chiefs like King Faisal or say, the Weinsteins is fairly similar. HOWEVER, the advent of nuclear proliferation which was inevitable (fission nukes are over 60 years old, ICBMs able to reach all continents over 40 years old) makes things far different. A few nukes set off in say, NYC, DC, Chicago, and Boston with say, 10 million US dead and to Arabs, that's a good thing. A knife in the back when least expected. They can't see the inevitable (sorry) fallout, "hug-a-responder" Obama notwithstanding: reduction by about half of the world's Muslim population. Americans don't go in for "knife in the back" stuff and have already had it up to here since around 1979 with Muslims anyway. Most Americans would shrug and say they had it coming after so many, many provocations. Kim Jong Il, or whoever succeeds Musharraf, or Ahmadinejad (who is committed to "sharing" nuclear technology across the Muslim world) or perhaps any of the following announced nations pursuing nuclear power (weapons): Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, and Sudan (I've probably missed some) will one day sell/give nukes for delivery in our cities. THAT is the risk that is essentially unmanageable other than Putin's response to Beslan (basically, kill lots of people in targeted assassinations). It's undeniable that somehow magically Beslan-style attacks stopped. I wonder why ... Of course Americans want to be "nice" and see themselves as "nice" so they'll be "nice" right up until we lose several cities. Then we'll be not so nice. Along the order of Hiroshima and Nagasaki squared. This is a horrible slow-motion tragedy. Everyone can see the disaster coming, no one has the will or courage to stop it (by adopting Putin's ugly but effective methods of deterrence). Bottom line Arabs may not even be able to maintain their own equipment, but helpful North Koreans, Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, Europeans, Brazilians, South Africans (does anyone REALLY think they dumped their nukes? Ha!) will build their nuclear bombs for them. They have the money. The technology is more than half a century old. Simple as that. "but serial killers and Christian fundamentalists who kill masses of followers are not."
"You mean all those Christian terrorists who murdered 3,000 people on 9/11 and have tried to out-do that deed ever since?" If you want to read conspiracy theories into 9/11, that's your own neurosis. I was referring to mass suicides and small-town Christian fundamentalist millenarian cults and very real provable deaths of people where religions other than Islam are implicated. You really should work on your reading skills - the quote you lifted was in the context of defining terrorism with some objective and rational basis. Since you missed it the last time around, here's the questions that are useful to ask. Why are certain militias in the Middle East terrorist while others aren't? How can one governmental militia be terrorist while others aren't? If there is a necessary religious component, why are certain mass-killings in the name of religion terrorist, while others aren't? Why are environmentalists, many from groups who have not actually killed a single person, also lumped in to the category? I can answer my own questions. The terms have no objective basis other than some halfwit neo-cons who have leveraged the term based on very temporary categories of "enemies" and "allies." They have enough persistence and $ to flood the media with their totally incoherent definition of the term. It does NO ONE any good except for the Bush administration and its business interests, who have to try to defend a war that's not achieving its stated objectives. I thought the president was supposed to serve his country, not his special interests and personal pet peeves. It is not in America's strategic interests, nor in the interest of common good, to permit these flimsy definitions. Yes, we all agree, it's horrible that Arabs in certain places are strapping bombs to themselves and blowing up people in buildings, buses, anywhere. It is horrible when any mass of people die unjustly. A very reasonable train of thought follows: It should be stopped. Perhaps military intervention is necessary. It's worked before. Ok, sounds good. But what's going on now? Are we invading Saudi Arabia and its terrorist training camps? The ones that are training people to blow up Americans? No. And we won't be, any time soon. The Bush administration is no more committed to protecting American people from terrorism than the Iranian administration is committed to protecting American people from terrorism. That's what you should focus your energy on, not a buncha left-wing whatevers who want to "give peace a chance." "Bottom line Arabs may not even be able to maintain their own equipment, but helpful North Koreans, Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, Europeans, Brazilians, South Africans (does anyone REALLY think they dumped their nukes? Ha!) will build their nuclear bombs for them." So the whole planet is your enemy? It's thinking like this that spells the doom of America. Go out with all guns blazing. Just like in the cowboy films. I tried googling “post modern left” to find out exactly who best typifies “post modern left” but nobody’s naming names and providing concrete examples. And nobody’s jumping up saying: “I am the Jesus of *post modern left*!”
Conservapedia says: “Postmodernism asserts that no such thing as truth exists.” What the hell does that mean? Who’s asserting this shit? Anybody know who’s the high priest/priestess of “*post modern left*?” What are some examples of their preachings? Anybody? The Jesus of the postmodern left would have deconstructed their own epistemological typology before s/he even had a chance to jump.
I love that phrase - the "postmodern left." I too have no idea what the hell it means. While I'm on a teminological roll, "the left" as a descriptive category has become just about as useful as the term "terrorists." They both equal nothing more than "people I hate." If people just said "people I hate," I think everyone would understand each other better. Let's kill 'em "people I hate." Just think of all the kinds of people that could be subsumed in that statement! Why limit yourself to a paltry couple billion so-called terrorists and leftists? "The Bush administration is no more committed to protecting American people from terrorism than the Iranian administration is committed to protecting American people from terrorism. That's what you should focus your energy on, not a buncha left-wing whatevers who want to "give peace a chance."
I admire your independent thinking. "No one has the will or courage to stop it (by adopting Putin's ugly but effective methods of deterrence)."
The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it. -Adolf Hitler Lawrence, is the fight between AQ and the KSA gov't just a staged sham, then?
This comment is obviously made by an Arab Muslim. thats the way they think ( read above). More than likely "John Smith" is a palestinian. And probably has Muhommed somewhere in his name, Since there are really only like 6 different names for Arab Muslim men, and they just switch them around into different orders and combinations to create a "new" name.
I can still see a terrorist as somebody who’s trying to unlawfully initiate force through violence. And Ron Paul is not “the left.”
While looking I found that Wikipedia has at least a dozen kinds of Libertarian (Glenn Reynolds for example, is a “libertarian transhumanist”). But their section on left and postmodernism seems weak to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_left#The_left_and_postmodernism Is it the remnants of authoritarian-socialists-turned-disillusioned-nihilists what they’re talking about? The left used to be the “initiators of force” while the right was “free trade not wars.” Then a bunch of lefties leaped over center to subscribe to all 101 articles of right wing faith including a ‘global warming hoax’ and called themselves neocons. I say neocons are authoritarians who like preaching their clubs theology whatever the hell that current theology is, then defending it with military force. I’d think ‘Truman/JFK Democrats’ or ‘Scoop Jackson Type Strong National Defenders’ would have made more sense. Everything’s all screwed up now. 29. Fight against those who (1) believe not in Allâh, (2) nor in the Last Day, (3) nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allâh and His Messenger (4) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islâm) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah[] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.
http://www.ummah.net/what-is-islam/quran/noble/nobe009.htm You know saurabh I have read the bible in particular the New Testament and cannot seem to find anything like that in it. Facts are you and your buddies can play possum all you want but we are getting wise to you folks and if you don’t chill out we will plant you. Live and let live or Live and let die, its yours and Uncle Muhammad’s choice. Here is some more
Q8.12: When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them. Q2.120: And the Jews will not be pleased with you, nor the Christians until you follow their religion. Say: Surely Allah's guidance, that is the guidance. And if you follow their desires after the knowledge that has come to you, you shall have no guardian from Allah, nor any helper. Q2.193: And fight with them until there is no persecution, and religion should be only for Allah, but if they desist, then there should be no hostility except against the oppressors. Ask you Muslim "Friend" about this one
Q5.51: O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people. This is why I never visit the southern states. They're still sore about losing the American Civil War.
So how long until we use this excuse of seeing them as being backward and inferior to us before the United States either invades every nation in the Middle East (except Isreal) or destroys it all for the sake of peace?
My bosses are Muslims, originally from Pakistan. I've worked for them for five years now. I say that trumps observing strangers for a year while hiding in a bunker or whatever it was that happened. If I showed them this article they might find it insulting, and rightly so. You might as well as visited Mexico City, stayed hidden in your hotel room and then made a report about how lazy and dirty all Mexicans are, which you already knew, but you "visited their city" for a year. Right. Maybe you saw something out the window. I see no proof that you really did anything to even attempt assimilating into their culture. All I can see is that you maybe had some casual observations at best, and picked the ones that best fit your preconceived notions. Lazy at best. Go back there and live AS ONE OF THEM for five years. Then come back. Maybe then you'll have something to say worth reading. ....and we can start here:
http://www.islamfortoday.com/ummzaid01.htm I'm already practicing making a turban. Problem is folding my towel so that the "Holiday Inn" letters don't show. No, seriously, Joe, you're right --both sides need to understand each other. We don't want to obliterate the Ummah --but the Ummah fringe is sure asking for it. The Ummah needs to rein in its fringe, like now. Like, yesterday. Big wars --with KIA in the tens of millions --don't start as sudden whims. The urge to purge builds and builds, and by the time the masses recognize what's up, it has been in the past usually too late to stop. Putin has a huge approval rating in his own country. Wonder why? Maybe it's the security, the proud nationalism, and the utter ruthlessness in dealing with threats.
What's going to prevent a future strongman in a future USA? The American left, or the American right? Well, it won't be the left --the left has proven it's free & easy with the means, so long as it likes the ends. "I can still see a terrorist as somebody who’s trying to unlawfully initiate force through violence."
Interesting, it's a start... But how is a terrorist distinguishable from a murderer or assaulter (which are specifically legally defined)? And what, then, is a terrorist group? Hamas, for example, has historically blown some stuff up (much less recently), but puts more effort currently into Palestinian infrastructure development and being a political party. There are Hamas members who have never been directly or indirectly involved in force/violence. I'm not writing this to defend Hamas, but to question why the same term encompasses al-Qaeda (which is stateless and international in scope) and Hamas (which is local and fighting over disputed and occupied territory). The term "terrorist" when applied to al-Qaeda unfortunately (for "the West") had the effect of legitimizing their form of violence. The term "terrorist" when applied to Hamas repeatedly by Israel attempted to de-legitimate what in another context (or from another point of view) might be considered a civil war, independence struggle, or other much more laudable term. The term is not neutral, not by a long shot. It's a rhetorical device used to confuse people and stop discussion about deep problems with national boundaries and unity. And on 'dem postmodern leftists: That wikipedia article you quoted is more nonsensical and internally contradictory than the postmodern writing it draws from... did you make any sense of it? I've heard there's something even worse: post-postmodern leftists... this time, with faith... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Postmodernism I do have to say, when neocons spend inordinate amounts of tax dollars (where's the real fiscal conservatives when we need them?), they have much less to show for it than good 'ol traditional pre-Vietnam era progressive politicians. There's nothing like a buncha huge dams, millions of square miles of protected natural parks, world-class research universities and interstate highways to show that at least you did something ostentatious and unforgettable with all that money you pilfered from the working classes. What did we get from neocons? Ineffective data mining software, a security camera on every streetcorner, thousands of hours of public debate about same-sex marriage, and a CREATION MUSEUM. If I'm buying, I think I'd go for the parks and universities. I'll definitely pass on the "retarded design" effigies. [disclaimer: it's late, this posting probably isn't very coherent. It might fit in well with some of more colourful earlier posts, in other words] On a first reading I actually considered that this piece might be parody - each of the points made by the author could so very easily be used by an individual visiting the U.S. for a year to point out the "deeply flawed American character". But now I'm pretty certain the piece was meant seriously. So I decided to pick just a VERY few examples of what a foreign visitor to the U.S. might cite as evidence that American culture is fundamentally irredeemable. I've picked each of the main points (some with additional parenthetical elaboration of the idea as expressed by the author). These examples are not, by any means, exhaustive and this is NOT meant as a rational critique of American culture - it is merely a way to point out how hollow, uncritical and deeply flawed the author's analysis is and that it certainly should not be the basis for thinking about or, God forbid (Inshallah), formulating policy concerning the Arab world.
1) They don't think the same way we do. (We Americans have a basically open attitude to our fellow human beings...) See Ann Coulter, best-selling author 2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people. See George W. Bush, candidate with the highest "beerability" 3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source. (...work is not honorable..., ...romantic love...) Apologies - too many examples, and these are too easy: work: See Enron energy traders vs. Grandma Millie See immigration debates about the jobs Americans won't do See cheap U.S. consumer goods relationships with international slave/child labor See gambling as growth industry in the U.S. love: See opposition to same sex marriage See Sen. Larry Craig, Rep. David Vitter, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Pres. Candidate Rudi Giuliani 4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can't maintain it either. See New Orleans levies, Minneapolis I-35 bridge, U.S. highway transportation infrastructure. 5) They do not think of obligations as running both ways. See U.S. response to more than two million Iraqi refugees 6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites. See the Revolutionary War vs. British interpretation of U.S. tactics, also American attitudes about Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Agent Orange, total tonnage of bombs used in Viet Nam 7) In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do. See John McCain singing "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" 8) They don't place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, and they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity. See opposition to teaching the Theory of Evolution and also the popularity of "Touched by an Angel", and belief in the literal truth of the Bible 9) They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do. See funding sources for detailed double-blind studies performed to investigate the efficacy of prayer for medical conditions 10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids. See Rev. Pat Robertson commentary on the current state of U.S. culture 11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil. OK, again, see Ann Coulter, best-selling author. 12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it. See "Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it" j@ne (run outta yer own names and regular letters?) is certainly right. The US of A has much for which to apologize, while the rest of the world's countries and transnational orgs have few to no cultural or political flaws, arrogance and endemic corruption.
We are the bad parent to mouthy but really insightful teens, and the higher-income earning sibling who helps out the family to rightfully resentful bros and sisters. How dare we formulate policy of global charity, diplomacy and punitive action based on our good sense of self and sometimes harmful deeds and beliefs of others. Hey, there's nothing like pickin' the few rotten ones when cherry-pickin' America. It's so freshman. High school. And those of us such as myself with a couple hundred books on the ME should know better than to think the Arab culture might believe and function much differently than our own, and not necessarily peaceably, honestly, and without dysfunction. ! j@ne, you seem consistently liberal-leftist in your other writings, and reliably against the Bush administration, but have you considered how one-sided it is for critique, often petty or skewed criticism, always to inveigh against the US for occasional bad policy, cultural quirks or for not dotting our I’s, when much of the rest of the world has forgotten or never known how to spell "self-responsibility" and "political integrity"?
Ann Coulter? Smart, engaging, funny, pretty, rich & successful best-selling author and media personality, making a fortune telling the truth about world-socialism's lies, hey, what's not to like?
Yes, yes, but why isn't she tactful and open to all pov's like Randi Rhodes or Rosie O’Donnell?
hmm --maybe she's not interested in a network anchor gig?
1) Paragraph one is the most significant. for us to deal with entities outside the US of A it is paramount to comprehend that. Failing to do so will result in getting eaten alive in many ways.
2) Failing to comprehend that ALL muslims want ALL infidels dead is also fatal Gryphon-
I have had just enough experience to know that these blog comment-reply-reply things almost always descend into ugly pi$$ing matches going exactly nowhere, and I really -really - don't want to do that, but I do want to try to point out some things that you might perhaps have overlooked. As you will note from the introduction to my original comment, it was in no fashion meant as a rational or complete critique of U.S. policy - in fact, it was meant as a PARODY, to demonstrate that the type of evidence provided in the author's original piece was, as you put it, "pickin' the few rotten ones when cherry-pickin' .... It's so freshman. High school." I absolutely agree with you that cherry-picking a few details is sophomoric (freshmanic?) analysis. For a single instance, to maintain that an instructors experience of poor study habits by a group of students, or an anecdote about a single neglected junction box in the desert is conclusive evidence that a vast swath of humanity is incapable of building and maintaining infrastructure of a modern society seems to be, to me and to put it mildly, reaching. Further, you might be surprised to find that I am not a long-hair, mushy-headed, America-hater as some of the replies to my comment seem to suggest. I am a proud and honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. military, gainfully and fully employed in a non-pajama wearing workplace, I fly a U.S. flag from the front porch of my house for all to see, I actively participate in our democracy and accept its results, I grudgingly cough up my taxes according to my best interpretation of the tax code, and I make regular donations to charities. I am the grandchild of immigrants and I recognize and appreciate that my very existence depended on their admittance to the U.S. and the opportunities that this country provided to their generation, my parents generation, and mine. Two things that I do know: 1. There is conflict between Arab/Islamic and U.S./Western culture. In my humble opinion, the original post really contributed nothing toward understanding and addressing that situation and could even contribute to undermining our ability to address the situation because of its sophomoric approach, its sweeping and damning conclusions from what was presented as minimal evidence. (Again, for clarity, my comment was a PARODY of that.) A few erudite historians might recall that sweeping and damning conclusions about, for instance, Jews, and their fitness for participation in the modern world, led to, oh let's say some slight issues. I am certainly willing to read and consider analyses (for instance, your couple hundred books on the ME - that is QUITE an output, though I can't seem to find even a single volume about the ME authored by Gryphon) that could shed reality-based light on the situation, or better that proposes a resolution of the conflict in a manner somewhat more nuanced than "nuke 'em 'til they glow in the dark." 2. Democracies live and die by the willingness of citizens to dispassionately assess the policies of their government. I vote in the U.S., thus I had better be well informed about the issues I am voting on, and I have a responsibility to recognize flaws in our nations policies, and to demand that they be addressed. Critique is not a zero-sum game (criticizing a flawed U.S. policy or ugly American nonsense is NOT somehow implicitly accepting an inhumane Saudi policy or French stupidity.) Indeed, it is the most destructive insult to democracy to maintain that it should not suffer the criticism of its citizens. Nice and pretty what you wrote, and also your bona fides as a loyal American citizen. Sincere thanks for your service. But you seem to be doing the, “I’m not going to feed rumors by mentioning he’s a molester, but that’s what others are saying” approach to critique, denial that you’re criticizing, and then rah-rah that it’s patriotic to do so. Re zero-sum game critique: rarely EVER do American critics speak up with the same or appropriately greater dismay and disdain for other countries’ mistaken and ugly policy and corruption. They would have far more credibility were they to put issues and responsibilities into meaningful perspective for all concerned. It’s nearly always a one-way street, a game of knock the king off the mountain, for all intents and purposes. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Hill_(game)]
Talking down this country as it attempts to address destructive extremism and terrorism while other nations and non-state actors engage in or aid terrorism or sit on their hands (posturing with endless, stalling talk) is most insane. And blaming ourselves for every problem on earth is some kind of narcissistic disorder that other lesser countries are more than happy to feed. The US is an incredibly generous benefactor to the world, to include our economic, tech and values exports. Look to Europe for most of the so-called colonial or resource grab problems that Arabs complain about, a time since past, though grievance memories are long there. Look to the Arab culture for all the rest of the dysfunctionality and abuses over many centuries and ongoing. Yes, we support Israel, which has come to be a permanent elective mad-on for Middle Easterners and scapegoat issue for their klepto-corrupt leaders. They want no mutual accommodation with the Jew government, ever, since it’s a social-political tool for their side. I have family members who have lived in the ME and taught college level ME studies. I myself have taken graduate-level courses in ME studies, and have had Arab and Persian friends and acquaintances. Why do I have to write a book to hold an opinion- have you? Even without all that, there are countless informative books and studies on Middle Eastern culture that show over and over that ME Arab, Persian, various African Muslim, and SW and SE Asian Muslim cultures have histories and cultures obviously different from ours and which aren’t necessarily amenable to western notions of modernity and civil governance, individual liberties and tolerance. There is a HUGE culture diff that isn’t easily reconcilable through paper treaties and Peace Corps initiatives, esp. when there’s a BIG military clash between Islamist extremists, together with the moderate Muslims who support or who don’t oppose them, and the West (to include western libs and leftists, tho’ they mostly don’t realize they’re considered a vile and godless enemy.) good post, gryphon. I, like you, am a little suspect of j@ne's story, as I've seen that ju-jitsu flip so many many times. Someone is harshly leftist anti-American, gets called on it, and quickly becomes a Rotary Club GOP combat-veteran who goes to church and gives to charity and just happens to have a problem with the (fill in the blank) thing going on in America.
I know--I'm probably wrong about j@ne, and surely wrong in any case to be so cynical. I'll try to improve. Buddy-
I am not a rotary club member, nor have I ever been, nor have I ever claimed to be. I am not a combat veteran, nor have I ever claimed to be. Unfortunately (???), there was not a shooting war during my period of service. I only infrequently attend church or temple and virtuallly always only at the behest of a relative or friend. I have never claimed otherwise. I am a devout agnostic. I am, however, and no matter how much your cynicism tells you otherwise, an honorably discharged veteran who voluntarily served in the U.S. armed forces for four years and contributed my effort to defeating "all enemies foreign and domestic", motivated in large part by my patriotism. It's utterly depressing to see how low dialogue has sunk that cynicism commonly substitutes for critical thinking. I too find myself succumbing to cynicism about those who hold opposing views. I wonder if that is inevitable when the stakes are so high. probably --it's Gresham's Law, "bad drives out good". And you're right, it is depressing. One of bin Laden's promises back in the late 90s was something like, "when I get through with the United States, it will be just states". We can let him be right, I guess --seem well on our way to it sometimes.
j@ne, I don't think that's what he was saying, tho' he could better tell you himself (Oh, he did!). It's just that most of us didn't feel it necessary to describe our good citizen ways and flag-wave (esp. as we "dissent"). Here, it's opinion, one's fact and logic we're more interested in, and, in your case, you did seem to be joining in rather than parodying critics, despite your claim to the contrary. Others here have military experience, but don't feel the need to bolster their argument about Arab culture with such a general fact.
When you say this: "Democracies live and die by the willingness of citizens to dispassionately assess the policies of their government. I vote in the U.S., thus I had better be well informed about the issues I am voting on, and I have a responsibility to recognize flaws in our nations policies, and to demand that they be addressed," you almost make it sound as if your criticism is more responsible and patriotic than our support for "policies." It sounds like sanctimony and passive-aggressive, politely stated snark. Do you actually think the rest of us DON'T believe it our duty to self-inform, assess and persuade? Why would we be here otherwise? You might as well tell us you're a good American b/c you think about things. Oh, I think you did- Imo, your 15:18 serves no constructive purpose, since most of us here can imagine how any country in the world could have a few of its polarizing personalities, cranks, values, and failures listed and ridiculed. The original article on Arab culture you're criticizing isn't as shallow or off the mark as you seem to think- there are numerous other sources that would agree with the cultural take it describes, while citing even more examples. Just b/c we have our problems and quirks and the Arabs have their probs and idiosyncrasies doesn't mean there is any moral or functional equivalence between our culture or theirs. Thanks for your responses here and please keep on discussing. You might wish to consider, however, that if critique is important for you to make, then it might be to the rest of us, as well, although we try to offer it on the merits of a case and not on who we are or have done as good citizens unless it's germane to the issue. It's called 'straining at gnats while swallowing elephants'.
The number of free countries has practically doubled since WWII, and for the first time in human history, famine & pestilence aren't keep large swaths of humanity teetering on the edge of existence. The truth is, the leadership, example, business & governmental models, capital, and military power of the USA has formed the critical mass for the irresistable force of this planetary evolution toward a wealthier, happier, healthier human race. That's the elephant. The gnat is the Marxist Critique--and all it's subsets and translations--that basically politicize human nature, in order to thereby blame the expression of the bad side of its duality on the evils of capitalism's liberty. Bin laden said as much today, matter of fact --liberty is bad for mankind, in so many words. Y'know, one person eats a bowl of ice cream & strawberries; another person eats a sticky unhealthy mess of sugar and fat produced by slave animals, frozen and delivered by earth-polluting capitalist machinery, and topped with fruit produced by exploited workers on oppressive private farms stolen from the Indians. Neither can do a damn thing about human nature or history. The former just wants to enjoy the treat. The latter just wants to make sure he doesn't. Thanks for that! Your 20th C and Human Nature in a Nutshell is a keeper to send to friends, by your permission
I'd be honored --but it's you who's writing the keepers/senders--
This is the biggest piece of crap I have seen in a long time. "Israelis are impossible to like but impossible not to respect." I am going to throw up. Please, please stop writing. It's just rediculous what I read, especially as it's supposed to be thoughtful.
And QUIT SAYING "MUSLIMS ARE"!!! Pick Arabs, better yet, pick a person from a particular place and make some comments on the few people you actually observed. But Muslims are a varied people from many different places! What if your "muslims" started commenting on the English or Americans as "Christians" and just making blanket statements! I love this one-- Failing to comprehend that ALL muslims want ALL infidels dead is also fatal (not from the top level quote, I know); REDICULOUS!!!!!! If they all wanted you dead, they'd kill you now. In Iowa City, here in the U.S., we have Sudanese refugees-- not the southern christians, but the Northerners. They are here (SURPRISE) for opposing the killing of Christians and animists from the south-- they're leader was put to death; they are here because they stood up for what they understood as true Islam-- you know Salaam/ peace. Have you read the quran? Don't force anyone to convert is what it says. Does this figure into your diatribe. Just like Christianity, people pick and choose what they're going to listen to from their holy text. Muslims I know here who have been to the UK, and non-Muslim Indians, tell me that it is a tough place to live because of the discrimination. YOUR COUNTRY IS REAPING THE BENEFITS OF ALL THE INTELLIGENT "MUSLIMS" FROM OTHER COUNTRIES WHO COME TO YOUR COUNTRY VIA YOUR UNIVERSITIES AND YOUR GOVERNMENTS WISHES, AND ADD TO YOUR RESEARCH AND KNOWLEDGE AND HOSPITALS WHILE YOU BARELY PAY THEM, SO THEY CAN GO HOME AND HAVE "UK" ON THEIR RESUME AND GET A GOOD JOB!! YOU ARE BENEFITTING FROM THEM. What you say about your frustrations with "muslims" in UK, I can't make comment on. I'm sure you have frustrations I wouldn't understand. This is fine. But the rest of this, why even respond, I don't know. Please, please, stop writing stupidity. "The truth is, the leadership, example, business & governmental models, capital, and military power of the USA has formed the critical mass for the irresistable force of this planetary evolution toward a wealthier, happier, healthier human race."
That's a bold and idealistic statement, but is dependent upon where you choose to look and in ignoring huge sections of the planet. I wouldn't include almost the entire continent of Africa, in your utopian analysis, nor much of central America and the Caribbean, which have been "left behind" in all three counts (wealth, happiness, and health). And then you have China, which has been meeting at least 2 of those 3 (wealthier and healthier... who knows about the happiness) for themselves and for countries they influence, with hardly any help from America (certainly not from its military). And much of the Middle East's recent developments towards those things has been much more directly aided by Russia than by the United States. America's not the only country which likes to exert influence. Development projects happen where there is a large expected profit to be made. That there have been some remarkable improvement efforts and development projects in unlikely parts of the world is a testament to both the malleability of societies when faced with new circumstances, and the ongoing possibility that American overseas efforts produce demonstrable good. But there's a lot of exceptions. A lot of notable ones. Even "the enemy" likes to ensure they make more profit, and engage in exactly the same kind of development projects that you only credit to America. Iran, for example, is highly active in developing eastern Middle East's and Central Asia's infrastructure, leaving America in an entirely irrelevant position. Don't be too convinced of the "truth" (pseudo-truth) you state above, because the way you framing your argument makes an inaccurate cause-and-effect relation between a certain kind of foreign policy which sometimes (but often doesn't) have a particular set of effects, and a certain result (improvement) which is due to all kinds of possible causes, only one of them being American-related. From a South American point of view, currently, you could substitute "Venezuela" or "Chavez" for America in every statement you made, and it would be considered a "truth" by the majority in that region. I think you would agree it's useful to be critical of such seemingly self-evident truths, since they run the risk of blinding one to other equally important but less self-evident ones, ones which undermine the potential efficacy of actions you obviously care about greatly. I don't know what obscure technique you're using to format your web pages, but it displays annoyingly wide on browsers other than IE. I give up on sites that are do not use the most user-friendly and common format so all the "masses" can enjoy it. Why be Microsoft suck-ups?
And, that's too bad because you have some nice articles. Good luck. The only way the muslim/arab problem will ever be solved is this: death to their barbaric religion and corrupt culture. Wake up, beeches. It's a war. They know this to be a fact, so pull your heads out of your posteriors and figure out which side you're on, alright?
Just curious:
Does anyone contributing to this column of rants believe: 1) genocide is acceptable under any circumstance? 2) isolationism is a possible "real politik" solution? 3) bigotry or racism is justified ever? Also, is it the intent of the webmaster to provide a forum for racist discussion, or would it be too much to ask that a specific question be posed with regards to the opening essay so that the considerable brain power being used here might be directed towards some societal benefit even if such benefit be infinitesimally small. Just curious in NY. Joe Just for clarification: inshallah is an idiom signifying hope. It is in western terms "I did my best, the rest is up to luck". I have heard this disdain about inshallah from several americans. This is the equivalent of speaking english in a higher tone to a non english speaker. It is ridiculous, offensive and did I mention ridiculous?
This is probably the least ignorant (and the most educated) of all the ignorantly racist blog/discussion entries I have read. It has all the qualities that constitue a racist streotyping attemp, but does so with seemingly well established observations. A very clever illusion maybe clever enough to fool yourself as well. I hope that some day you will use your education and experiences to learn to not judge people and to learn that your judgements will always be wrong. Or you can just go jump off a cliff next time a brilliant idea like 'today I will rant about a race' pops into your head. No one's saying that inshallah doesn't MEAN that.
I posted earlier, and on inshallah. Yes, I know what it means, but that's not how it's used. 90% of the time (I'm not exaggerating) it's an excuse to be lazy, or an artifact of laziness, or a lack of will to try. I've mostly heard it used in the tone of "well, I hope so, but it's in God's hands" or "if God wills it I will do it tomorrow", which is no sort of guarantee at all. You can't just take dozens of well meaning and impartial (yes, I think I'm being quite impartial) first hand, real-world observations and blindly label them "offensive" just because it casts something in a negative light. They're valid observations, and if you don't like that people have that impression, it's better to have an open mind and try to see it from their point of view than to simply get knee-jerk offended. All Americans think they have power or some vip pass to just walk in Iran and beat the shit of them and take the country just simple... no stop day dreaming!. Iran has power, weapons. and a noncowerd army, not just in Iran..any arab country. a person can walk up to an American and sucide infront of him ( suicide bombers)
this book talk about relation between Arabs and USA and why Arabs don't like USA
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/why-arab-dont-like-usa/12430039 Kudos for having the intellectual courage to modify your opinions based upon what you've experienced.
One minor point: the people you called condescending came across to me as blowhards. Perhaps a word that's underused nowadays? The most stupid and racist article I've come across in years!! I even doubt the writer know the smallest thing about arabs and it seams her was just copycat some general bigots about arabs and muslim. i challenge the write to show the smallest evidence he even visited the region as whole.
Typical westerners they think they know other cultures while in fact they know nothing.. my respect for those people has been long gone. I'm from Jewish and I've known Arabs and Persians I liked very much, especially when in philosophical conversation. We cannot think like them and they cannot think like us. Instead of revenge or avengement, balance or justice doesn't even enter the picture. It is simply reactionary, no considerations required. No rational thought processes or figurative emotions involved. They are impediments. Its not "You kill, then I kill." Its "Kill. Die. Kill." and "Obedience." The Imams, diplomats or whoever are left with verbal communication or their version of reason. I know this sounds harsh, even irrational, but "Imshala" isn't justly translated to 'as Allah wills'; It quite distinctly means "That's how it is and that's that. Period. And anything which violates this prime edict is inherently evil." The only solution, from either side it seems to me, unless someone comes up with a better and more effective method, is eradication. So, where does that get us: Armageddon?
Commenting is one thing, experience and consideration are others. The terrorists of either side do not and cannot think like each other. The Western terrorist uses altruism. The Middle Eastern terrorist does not. Rational thought or considerations do not. It is not a matter of "You kill, then I kill". It is "Kill. Die. Kill." and Obedience. The rest is left for verbal diplomacy by potentates and Imams utilized according to their perspectives for whatever advantages they become convinced they can get. The wishful meaning of "Imshala" may be hopeful. but the reality is that its present meaning is: "That is that and that is all there is to it. Period. And anything which is deemed to interfere with this is inherently evil." The Western equivalent is: "Might is right." The only solution I can see for either side, unless someone comes up with a better more effective and provable method, is eradication. So, what do we want: Armageddon?
YOU NEED TO READ a book called " Orientalism " ... wow, its just written on you.
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I liked this better the first time I read it, when it was called The America I Have Seen by Sayyid Qutb....
Tracked: Sep 04, 07:28
While I'm not completely sure when it was written, this essay on just how different Arabs, and specifically Saudis, are is still quite interesting. While I think he may be overgeneralizing at least a little bit, this does track...
Tracked: Sep 04, 15:01
Is America losing its work ethic? Am ThinkerWhy I quit teaching. PajamasSurrender. How societies commit suicide. Dalrymple in City Journal. I missed that one.Stuff like this keeps happening.One nation, under therapy. SC&A on ambulance-chasing trauma c
Tracked: Sep 05, 05:50
It was interesting to see the various major linkers to that controversial piece on Multiculturalism and Arabs we posted the other day because I had only been vaguely aware of one of the sites, and unaware of the others. The most productive of blog visitor
Tracked: Sep 06, 05:33