Another illustration of how backwards and messed up they are over there. Their way of thinking is so foreign to ours that we can’t really fully comprehend how they think.
The Islamic calendar is at 1435. It was around this time “western” culture started to mature with the Renaissance. I hope they too have this sort of transformation soon.
While US action in Iraq might be why ISIS murdered James Foley, it’s not why they kidnapped him in the first place as that happened two years ago in Syria. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 20 journalists are currently missing in Syria, with many if not most being held by ISIS.
Especially if we choose not to. Fox News is generally not a good guide to understanding things like history.
Many scholars hold that the Islamic world had its Renaissance centuries earlier than Europe. Here’s a really interesting overview.
You don’t think that perhaps you’re overgeneralizing about some kind of homogenous Islamic culture over there, perhaps?
Well that’s despicable.
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The west lacks the will to do much in West Asia beyond air strikes given our cackhanded failures to date yet the situation calls out for a more meaningful intervention.
I think so, at least. I think moderate and irreligious peoples of the area (even the peaceful fundamentalists) deserve aid if only because they are fellow H. sapiens.
My inner cynic will be doubtless be well-fed as we continue doing nothing of substance while the cleansings and show-killings and internecine purges continue.
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I don’t know, I’ve been struggling with this lately. Maybe my increasingly-isolationist milieu is correct; maybe if we do nothing then society will stabilize over there.
Or maybe it’s futile; maybe we can’t help them at all and the peoples there are simply destined to several generations of social and governmental instability.
Yeah, check the right-wing trollosphere and blogosphere, there’s calls that we need “strong” leadership so we can get into our third Iraq war in 20 years. This Time It’s Different
Wow, how insulting did milliefink have to be, to get a public shaming?
Well, there was a time of tolerance, but emphasis really ought to be on the tense: was.
It is telling how Islamic societies of the day reacted to Averroes (also worth reading).
More to the point of agreeance between us: little but culture (which is quite tenuous) separates us from the sort of barbarity we see over there. If our states were, for most intents and purposes, failed, and if our neighborhoods and community organizations were both physically and psychologically wracked by constant violence and insecurity, we would see the same kinds of things we see in Western Asia, i.e. naturally-forming groups of persons made warlike by their environs escalating that behavior to both incoherent metaphysical (religious) ends and very pragmatic (physical, governmental) ones as well.
Not really, because the Islamic culture over there is pretty similar throughout. The most stable countries are the ones with tough authoritarian governments, either dictatorships or monarchies and many are founded on theocracies. They all have horrible human rights records, treat women like chattel, etc. You can’t really point to a country that shares Western values in the same way we do.
Most of us will band together because we are Americans, or Canadians, or French, etc. Many regions there have loyalties to their religious sect and local/regional tribe first. Even countries that have made some progress, like Qatar, have done so because the monarch there insisted on it.
There are a few areas that are exceptions. I’ve talked to several people who served with the Kurds. They said it was night and day compared to the rest of Iraq. They have much more tolerant of other religions and aren’t fanatical in their Islam. They have a sort of national identity. They said the Kurdish area felt more like home than anywhere else they served.
Look - I get it - I am supposed to have tolerance and understanding for foreign cultures. And yes there are cultural differences between say Persians, Arabs, and Afghans. But Islam is the core of their culture that they all share. Even when the relatively peaceful, stable areas like Saudi Arabia have such horrible women’s rights, then no, not really. It’s not ok. When they are killing each other because they disagree if the Caliph or Imam should lead them, that’s not ok. When the execute people for believing the wrong kind of thing, that isn’t ok. They don’t have to “Westernize” per se - but they need a paradigm shift.
Its possible. While I still think they have issues with womens’ rights, you generally don’t see the level of fanaticism in Islam in the US and Europe, especially from those who have lived there a generation or two.
As I understand it, fundamentalism became to take hold of the Muslim world and it started to slide back.
Throughout where? The Middle East? Are you talking about a religious cultural issue, or a regional cultural one? (and would that be fair either?)
What about other major Islamic areas, like Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Indonesia? Do they have the same problems? Do they not exist in non-Muslim countries?
What about the misogyny in, ooh, Orthodox Judaism? (or stick a pin in a map, and choose anywhere else at random)
I really just think that labeling all those problems (which definitely do exist, and need addressing) as Islamic is an over simplification. I don’t think we’re a million miles apart on this.
Why can’t everyone just be nice to everyone else? Why are people just generally so awful? Why are we such a fucked up species? Really, we just suck.
I got the same impression … about the USA. Think about it - there are quite a few similarities from an outside perspective: the attitude towards: violence, vengeance, guns, eyeforaneye-justice, torture, religious extremism influencing politics… its just a matter of scale.
Our collective understanding of reality depends heavily on semantics and abstractions.
Im a Libertarian( of sorts ), do you really think that we Libertarians are meeting in darkened, smoke filled rooms to plot the destruction of civilization?
Do I suspect that the ‘liberals’ are doing the same, yes.
I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between.
It is that simple. There are no complexities or metaphors or double meanings. Get the fuck out. To misunderstand the message is to undervalue the death of this man. An horrible death.
We choose to value the lives of human beings, not their deaths. Journalism is part of this choice.
Except this is an explicitly genocidal death cult which has brought in many foreigners to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the people that actually live there
Exactly. The problem is mythology. Once people would finally acknowledge that neither Jehovah nor Allah actually exist then the world would be a much better place. As a bonus, Arabic and Hebrew speakers would realize that that they share a genetic and linguistic heritage and should logically be allies.
Brilliant start at understanding, then combine that with Sykes-Picot.
Artificial borders for the middle east with not much thought to indigenous or local population and mostly to benefit French and British interests.
The Arab Muslim world is homogeneous like the Anglosphere; The US, Canada, Australia, UK, NZ, even anglo South Africa share a language, a religious, political, and legal history. There is a culture, language, and way of understanding the world that binds the Arab world. Americans will understand how the average Aussi thinks, an Egyptian also can share a TV show or dinner conversation in standard Arabic which is spread by learning to read Quran and terrestrial and satellite TV and radio.
There have been comments with the fantasy that religious observance prevents peace.
Wrong wrong wrong!
The Quran teaches that Allah himself specifically sets aside Israel for the Jews and will return them at the end of days, though some believe this requires conversion to Islam. http://quran.com/17 (goto verse 100) It is outside pressure by the rest of the arab world that keeps many Palestinians from accepting a peace lest they embarrass their brothers in a football match like defeat watched over the years on TV.
Jews have laws over three thousand years old requiring charity support to all of the poor in the land of Israel and to be peaceful as long as the 'stranger that dwells among you" lives peacefully, this can be seen by the Bahai and Druze, adherents to non standard views of Islam who live peacefully and ascend to the highest levels in mainline political parties, business, and the military, ordinary Arab muslims are also very integrated in the north especially in the Haifa metropolis.
What is required is not discarding of religion but a realistic discarding of the hope for perfect ethnic hegemony across the former Caliphate where the local clan ascends to sit the throne. Realistic borders to replace the Sykes Picot lines would also help though many in power have had a century to use them to entrench their power.
I think you might be a little optimistic about this. Let’s say you are right and there is no God of any kind. That just means all the evil stuff that keeps being done in the name of religion is coming from inside us. The problem then isn’t a few wrong ideas but a deeply evil streak within humanity. Let me put it another way. If atheism is right, we’ve got no one else to blame. Satan is us.
Hey, I said that their message was clear, not that it made any sense. 
Taking the contrary opinion, war journalists do sign up for a dangerous life - Foley knew there was a chance that this might happen and he had a choice to do something else. On the other hand, if this were a few hundred years ago he might have been conscripted into an army to fight in a war where he had much less choice and a much higher likelihood of death. In some ways I’m surprised that this is getting such a strong reaction, as this has been happening on a large scale for months to people who really had no choice in the matter.
