What Egypt Can Teach America

[dtotire]

What Egypt Can Teach America
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 12, 2011




It’s a new day in the Arab world — and, let’s hope, in American relations to the Arab world.

The truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East for decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil flowing and weren’t too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the region’s youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak. Recognizing that crafting foreign policy is 1,000 times harder than it looks, let me suggest four lessons to draw from our mistakes:

1.) Stop treating Islamic fundamentalism as a bogyman and allowing it to drive American foreign policy. American paranoia about Islamism has done as much damage as Muslim fundamentalism itself.



more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/opinion/13kristof.html?ref=opinion

[ladjf]

1. The "Crusades Mentality" is still with us. It stems from the ego-

centric basis of religion. "We are the only true believers". Everyone else is not one of us and should be rejected, forcibly is necessarily. It's like organ rejection. They body senses that it is not compatible and tries to reject the transplanted organ.

Until people learn that we are all a part of a greater inter-connected system, destructive behavior will continue to dominate human activities.