That of course is another example of ignorant, racist bullshit.
You could just as easily argue that I have no credibility on this subject because I’m an American.
Do you argue that African-American posters have “less credibility” on race-related issues or that Jewish posters have “less credibility” when it comes to discussing the treatment of Jews in the Middle East or the Middle Ages?
Anyway, people will notice that I’m not playing the role of the apologist attacking him for slurring my great Shia ancestors but am pointing out that his claims about how horrible the Sunnis are and how great the Shias are are both heavily exaggerated.
There are quietists, radicals, and traditionalists among both the Shia and the Sunnis and claiming that the Sunnis are somehow more “arrogant” than the Shia or “crazier” is simply bullshit.
It’s also just the 21st Century version of the crap I heard spouted off by ignorant Americans in the 1980s about how it was the Shia who were the “crazies” and the radicals(this being the time when Shia radicals had blown up the Marine Barracks in Lebanon and taken over the US Embassy in Iran) whereas the Sunnis were the more reasonable ones.
Now, are there many countries where Sunnis and Shia don’t get along? Yes, but it’s limited to only parts of the Islamic world, it’s hardly universal.
Moreover, comparisons between the Shia-Sunnis differences and Catholic-Protestant differences are intellectually lazy and grossly simplistic.
It’s part of a long tradition of westerners trying to fit Muslims into western categories. In the Middle Ages when Christians referred to Muslims as “Mohammedans” and continued well into the late 20th Century when news reports on the Lebanese Civil War would refer to the Christian groups as “right-wingers” while the Muslim groups were referred to as “left-wingers”.
The Sunnis and Shia certainly have theological differences, but they’ve never been nearly as dramatic as the differences between the Catholics and the Protestants, they never had the religious wars that Christians had and, most importantly, they never denied each other were Muslims, denied the others could enter heaven.
They are not separate “sects” or “denominations” the way the Catholics and Protestants are, recognize clerics of each group(though obviously clerics in Islam are different than clerics in the Catholic Church) and often pray together.
The Salafists are the lone exception to the above two paragraphs, and they’re a rather recent group and were it not for the Saudi oil money and the way the West elevated the Saudis to prominence, they’d hardly be that influential.
Now, that’s not to say that in many areas where Shias and Sunnis have become sworn enemies due to tribal, though not sectarian reasons, most notably Iraq and Lebanon. However, even there, you’ll notice that Shia Iraqis while they have a long-standing rivalry which has often erupted into bloodshed with the Sunni Arabs, have gotten along very well with the Kurds, who are overwhelmingly Sunni. Similarly, people will notice that the Shia Hezbollah are staunch allies of the Sunni Hamas.