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No, I think it's far more than that. It's a mistake to dismiss people's religious beliefs and impulses so quickly. I don't think you can understand any particular religion, or religion in general, if you just shove all the bad parts off to the side and say, "That's not really religion."
I'm not dismissing anything. I'm saying that all that rage needs a... a channel, and religion (sadly) performs superbly as such. I was agreeing with you.
Oh, sorry. I misunderstood.
No worries.
I strongly disagree -- and I think strongly disagreeing with Seyorni is something I've never done before.
Granted that the United States manages -- in the tradition of the British Empire -- to make almost every bad situation worse, the West did not create these movements. If the Western countries withdrew completely from the Middle East, if Israel closed up shop and all all the Jews moved to Arizona, there would still be these violent fundamentalist movements, and the West would still have to deal with them.
Fundamentalism isn't caused by oppression, though oppression can certainly feed it. Fundamentalism is caused by the inability to deal with a shifting paradigm. It results, probably inevitably, when traditional dogma confronts modernity. There's no longer any way for much of anybody to avoid confronting modernity anymore. Maybe if you belong to an isolated tribe in one of the most isolated parts of the earth, if you live deep in the rain forest or way out on the steppes, you can be apart from the rest of the world for now. But most people in most countries must come face to face with the modern world, and some of them will react by feeling threatened and by hating the perceived threat.
In a way, Islam's confrontation with modernity is a case of the chickens coming home to roost. When the Ottoman conquests drove scholars West from the Eastern Roman Empire, and when contact with Islam spurred iconoclasm and Reformation in Western Christianity, the seeds of modernity were sown. Islam was unable to conquer Western Christendom with armies, but helped to break its back in ways that Muslims never intended or foresaw, and now Islam must inevitably face the consequences. Nothing Western politicians or Western armies do or do not do will change that bare fact.
And because Western countries have welcomed immigration from Muslim lands, the confrontation will play out in the West as well as in the Middle East -- which is a shame for us, because we're still dealing with the Christian fundamentalism that arose from our own traditional culture's confrontation with modernity.
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Over a million Iraqi civilians were killed and even more forced to flee the country.
The president of Iran stated that Israel could collapse from within just as did the Soviet Union and South Africa did, but you can translate that to mean that he's a racist pig calling for the destruction of Israel if it makes you feel better.
An infrastructure of military basis, how quaint.
Yes, you're right by suggesting they should be lined up to the wall and shot because it's so good and right when we do it, we're so much better than the Nazis.
Iraq body count gives us a tenth of that. It's true that because of the stringent requirements for iraq body count that number is probably an underestimation, but having read the papers that put the number at over a million i'm disinclined do believe them.
I've actually done humanitarian aid work in Afghanistan. Infrastructure comes not only in the form of training the police and army, but in helping with agriculture, housing, plumbing, and healthcare.
