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Many of them are trying to seek wstern solutions for essentially middle eastern social problems. One of the things that impressed me in the Middle East, is the real lack of crime in Islamic Societies. I would doubt that all of the crime in the Ilamic world does not amount to a fraction of the crime in the ten largest U.S.cities put together.
I had a friend in South Florida who came from Senegal was going to university in Miami, plus working two jobs, even though he came from a relatively well off family in Senegal, his father being on the diplomatic staff of his country's consulate in Ottawa and Toronto.
We frequently discusssed the problems in his country (having an almost equally divided Muslim and Christian population with a good percentage of animists as well), and he could not get the idea out of his head about majoring in a profession like Education or medicine to go back and help his country progress using western ideas. We frequently discussed these issues and I had to make it very clear to him that there is no separating Western progress from Western problems, and that it is highly advisable to look at his own culture, and its history, to adapt them to create progress, rather than to try to wholesale import western ideas. Among the many problems is that his culture is based on the family. The extended family. So that in his culture, nepotism is essentially a virtue, and it is considered ethical to steal from the government in order to better the family. THis is they way it is in most of the reast of the world, so that social benefit comes secondary to familial benefit. I advised him o read Gandhi's ideas about reviving traditional skills and adapting them to provide a means of increasing the standardof living in his country. Westernizing and industrializing his nation simply would create a new sort of social disturbance with shifting of wealth rather than an overall equitable growith of standard of living for the whole population.
Up until the time of the Crusades, it was the Islamic World that had the most civilized society in the world, and in many ways more closely approached the concept of utopain social structure than any other society , before or after.
It is an absurd, and even arrogant, to assert,As geroge Bush does, that western Democracy, with its rather bizarre ideas about liberty, is a one size fits all style of government. This sort of comes from the Americanization of Jesus, or as Franken styled it, Supply Side Jesus. Islamic societies devoted large amounts of money to soacial services, and in essence developed their own concept of a welfare state, with healt care and the basic needs of all members of society being provided for by the state when needed, The idea was a religious mandate, as Islamic Society was basically establised around ideas set up in its scripture. Until the advent of western attempts to conreol the region begninning in the 17th century, Muslim societues were pretty comfortable places for most of its citizens. REligious toleration was more advanced than during any other period in history, and the Caliphates established coucils for each religion within its reach, where the members of each faith selected their own representatives to deal with their own religious issues with no interference froomt the Muslim Rulers. Christians would deal with crhistian social problems, Jews with Jewish Religious problems and so on. Much has been made of the special tax payed by non-Muslims who wanted to live in Muslim societies and keep their faith. In fact this tax (Jizyat) was not much greater than the Zakat (alms tax) required by Muslims, and like any tax was primaruily used to pay for social benefits that non-Muslims enjoyed in Muslim Societies. In fact in most cases Muslim Invaders in the Middle East were welcomed by Christians with open arms, as taxation and social liberties were fr less opporessive under Muslims than Christians.
Where the moderates among Muslims really have gone wrong is in the expectation that word given is word kept. An agreement has always been a matter of personal and famiy honor among Muslims, and so expected Westerners to keep their word when given, Thus the agreements made with Muslims during World War I were expected to be kept. The Zionists who worked for the establisment of Israel, were far more sophisticated in their understanding of the backroom deals and nature of parliamentary government, particularly in England. WHat does it matter if the Balfour Document was based on Lord Balfours rabid anti-semitism, his goal to get Jews out of Great Britain because he didn like them and beleived they were a corrupting influence on Great Britain. So it was relatively easy for European Jews towork the system, while the poor moderates of the Islamic Middle East were totally unschooled in westernpolitics got screwed.
In a sense, Israel itself is the last gasp of WEstern Imperialistic colonialism, becasue when you look at the history of the creation of the modern nation of Israel, it is simply a colony of uprooted Europeans transported to the Middle East, because they were never quite part of European society, no matter how much they contributed to the arts and sciences and culture of the west when they tried to assimilate, anmong Christians, they were not ever accepted. They fared far better under Islamic Society prior to the attack of the West on the integrity of the Islamic caliphates. It is no accident that the Golden Age of Judaism flourished during the expansion of Islam, and religious discrimination only startee to grow in the Islamic World after assailed by the west.
Even more ironic is the fact that the Modern West is the step-child of Islam. All of the cultural, technological, and philosophical changes in the west were a direct result from Western contacts with the Islamic world. Some of the greatest thinkers in the West went to the Islamic Univerities of Islamic Spain for their schooling, as it simply was unavailable in the west. Many of our most cherished political pricipals do not come from the Bible, or the ideas of ancient Greece and ROme, but again, form the Islamic World who protected the ideas of the ancient world, but expanded and expounded upon them before they were passed onto the West after the Crusades.
THe modern tragedy is based on this history, and the west again is in fact more accoutable for the terrorism of radical Muslims.
Imagine if you will, one day a foreign army comes into your country, forces your family out of the homes they have lived in for generations at gunpoint, and tells you you have to leave forever, pretty much with the clothes on your back. You , your wife, your children, your brother, sisters, uncles, aubnts have nowhere to go.Your homes and farms appropriated.
There is no clean water, no school, not doctors, no medicine. You cannot leave the village of cardboard box, plywood and tin that you have been forced to live in without passing through an army of foreign occupation without showing an identity card, and even then you are scroned, kicked or beaten at the whim of your guards, and can be subject to arrest without any legal recourse.
This is essentially the plight of the Palestinian, who has more or less been denied a life because the West decided that the solution to their Jewish problems was to give the the Jews of Western and Eastern Europe someone elses home. Rather tan solve the problem within its own area of the world, Western Europe decided to settle it somewheew wlse, and had a convenient reaons fo doing so. The religion of the worlds superpower states that its God gave that land to theses people anyway. Not that the Jews didnt have good reasons for taking advantage of everything the Western Imperialists had offered them,as they never got much of a good deal out of the West anyway. Let someone else be the victim of the West this time.
Unfortutely Israel has decided to resort to the very political ideas that the West has used to give them such a crappy hand for the greater part of the last 1500. Thats is the problem. Two people who did not get along all that badly, Muslims and Jews, when left to their own devices, are now at each others throats due to the interference of the West. Its an odd irony.
Presenting extremist Palestinians as monsters, the typical response of the west towards anyone who does not go along with its ideology of plunder, is more of the same. If they are monsters, The west, and now America by inheritance, is the mad scientist who created it.
I tend to see ordinary people, driven to extraordinary actions by intolerable circumstances. Israel was a bad solution from the start, but unfortunately, its the one that exists, and going back is not possible. Israel is a fact, and that is something that Palestinians have to accept. But Israel is also simply a colony of the west, existing on land plundered from others, and that is also a fact. AMerica is stuck in the rather uncomfortable situation of abiding by the international agreements it has involved itself in once it worked to establish and take part in the United Nations.
And that is the only place the problem sould be solved. Israel is playing off the rather unjustified idea that fundamentalist American uses as ts justification for the existance of the stte of Israel, that God says it is so, rather than falling back on thefact that Israel exists because the U.N. says its so, and working from there. But that requires that Israel give up on the God says its so aspect of their existance as well. Nothing but going back to the pre `1967 borders will be an admission to that. Only then can it be possible for the moderates to gain the upper hand, and there is precedent for seeing that Israel is willing to respond to such behavior on the part of the Palestinians. When Begin and Sadat signed the Camp David agreement, Israel was quite willing to give up a very large portion of the land that "God Gave them".
One of the worse stumbling blocks to this happening is the fundamentalist ideas of Israel floating around the White House.
A moderate solution is only possible when the moderator is willng to start working from a moderate point of view. No matter what the Bush Administraion and the people who support him fervently state, their solution for the Situation in Palestine is one that is firmly baseed on their biblical view of Israel. THis alone is ustification for getting Bush un-elected. While Osama and his bunch were a problem prior to the Bush Administration taking office, their actions were not escalated to the degree that we are seening until Bush was elected. One of the first thoughts I had in the minutes after I viewd the events of 9/11/2001 was that they were the result of BUsh stating that he was not going to get involved in "nation building" in the Middle East. This more than anything. I beleive, was the motivation, and gave the incentive, to Al Qaeda to take the actions they did at that time.
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