My guess is that most of the people (and there are a whole lot of them actually) just vote Tea Party or some other stripe of Republican. Or possibly Democrat, depending on just what kind of handbasket we’re in.
McVeigh is a pretty unique outlier, and I think that’s a pretty informative example. I think there has to be a lot more going on than just religion in the ME to cause this. I think it’s probably a combination of institutional disenfranchisement, disillusionment with the prospects of how things are going socially and economically and religicized politics and demagoguery.
I kind of envision it as the whole climate of the recent police/black issues writ large, and with the heat turned up a lot. Where we see demonstrations, small-scale violence, and a lot of angry rhetoric for much the same reasons, the ME sees all that, plus more violence, and other people who identify with them due to religion coming to help out with the violent part, even though their countries are relatively democratic, moderate and not impoverished.
Tell that to the substantially Kurdish Ansar al-Islam. Have to agree with Ramira - don’t fetishize them as the “good guys.” The Kurds don’t march in lockstep anymore than anyone else, as the history of frequent fratricidal conflicts between the PUK, KDP, PKK and groups like Ansar al-Islam, with numerous shifting alliances, demonstrates ( and these aren’t old wounds ). The rural parts of Iraqi Kurdistan is a hotbed of honor killings and other tribal atavisms like the blood feud.
The Iraqi Kurds currently dominating the north of that country ( the old rival KDP and PUK for the most part ) are about the perhaps pro-U.S. factions in the region, but that’s on a highly relative scale and shouldn’t imply that they are boy scouts.
And it’s not as though Israel is conspicuously putting its “good guys” in the driver’s seat, either. Most Israelis are good people who are not in favor of, e.g., settlers attacking Palestinians in the occupied territories with no legal consequences, or fundamentalist zealots taking over Palestinian land and demanding military protection for their encroachments because “G-d gave this land to the Jews in perpetuity”. Yet the de facto policies of the Israeli regime are condoning and facilitating this kind of extremism.
If even a strong and modern democratic state like Israel is disproportionately influenced in its policies by its minority of fanatics and extremists, it’s not very surprising that dictatorships, oligarchies and failed states among its neighbors are experiencing the same problems in a far worse form.
This thread is an ever present reminder of the mission of this board. There are a hell of a lot of ignorant members on this site. SDMB keep fighting the ignorance.
I do have rose colored glasses towards the group, but that is rooted in large part on the comparison to other groups in the region. But I don’t think they are literal saints, just saint like compared to their neighbors.
So the previous fall of Ramadi was primarily a function of lack of weapons and Sunnis leaving?
What % of the Iraqi forces that fled Ramadi were Sunni? Was it almost all Sunni? Mostly Shia? Mixed?
The lack of weapons is more legitimate, the Sunnis leaving and giving up is not. Not when the alternative is allowing ISIS to take the area. I’ve read reports that if they stayed and fought they could have held on. But perhaps you have sources that even staying would have netted a fall of the city.
The fact remains, they retreated from Ramadi and it fell. Kobani didn’t. The wobbly resolve, even in the face of death does not seem to be as prevalent among the Kurdish population. That is a virtue, not something to be diminished and explained away.
Whatever the reasons behind it, it makes the Kurds looks better and the Sunni/Shia groups look worse.
And the point of this thread was to identify any good guys in the middle east, would you cross off the kurds from that potential list? Because they still seem like the best candidates.
I don’t know enough about the Turkey/Kurdish conflict to say with any confidence what is going on, I’ve heard the kurds in Iraq are more conservative and aligned with Erdogan while the PKK is more secular and hostile. I don’t know who instigated the violence, All I know is Erdogan rubs me the wrong way from reports I hear about his Islamist roots and trying to roll back secular control in Turkey.
Those reports could be wrong, but I’ve heard he turned a blind eye to ISIS operating in his country before they turned on him. And yes, the idea that there are more secular leaning Kurds in Turkey makes the group more endearing to me. I’m secular, and I want them to be ascendant over the parties of god, because I don’t want to live in a theocracy and want to see people that want to move us closer to that weakened.
I am not a neutral liberal, I am extremely biased in favor of groups that are closer to my world view. Which is why I am more hostile to Islamists than christians, because the latter is not trying to murder me or people like me.
Look I agree with you on Turkey. I don’t think he supports ISIS and he may have turned a blind eye on groups who come in and out from Turkey and Syria. And he has used the conflict to go after Kurds, with most of the Turkish strikes in Syria against Kurdish targets. The general elections in June saw the Kurdish party win a minority, hence taking the majority away from President Erdogan and Prime Minister Davutoglu’s AKP party. As a result Erdogan was inflaming violence to punish the Kurdish party.
The recent election results on Nov 1 was the best outcome for Turkey. The AKP ruling party won majority and it took the excuse away from Erdogan from going after the Kurdish parties and plunging Turkey back into violence. On the other hand AKP did not win a supermajority which would have allowed for constitutional changes that would have seen President Erdogan get far reaching powers and perhaps becoming a dea-facto dictator. So that is good for democracy in Turkey.
Scholar Reza Aslan responds to that same poll in this video (it starts at about 2:51). To sum it up, he points out that the same poll also said that 75% wanted more religious freedom - which shows the contradictions you will get when polling people on opinions when they spent most or all of their life in a place in a theocracy. Why is it a shock that people who are afraid to speak their mind will say some contradictory things when they get the chance?
As he says “Religious lived experience is filled with contradictions.”
He also points out how in the same poll, there is a very wide definition of what exactly Sharia Law is.
Finally, he also goes on to say that the same questions for neighboring Islamic-majority countries are far different.
These kinds of inconsistencies don’t only happen to Muslim savages. An Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll in 2012 shows that only around a quarter of self-professed Catholics believed in transubstantiation despite that being a tenet of Catholicism.
There are many more polls of Catholics - particularly American Catholics - where the things they believe or don’t believe would make then apostates.
The spectrum of Christian beliefs range across a very huge scale and only by invoking a Scotsman and his Haggis can one say that the nice Episcopalian lady next door is Christian but Fred Phelps isn’t.
There’s a bunch of people on the other side who feel that a man who went into a Lutheran church and gunned down a man who was there to worship was the real Christian of the two because he happened to shoot down George Tiller, a man who provided abortions.
But yeah, be careful of opinion polls on people who are usually unable to express opinions. They are pretty likely to have inconsistencies.
Or was it the USSR by invading Afghanistan? Or the Brits by carving up the ottoman Empire? Or the Ottomans themselves? The US no more “created” ISIL than the Ottomans did.
Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the CATO Institute and former assistant to Ronald Reagan, while writing for the conservative National Interest concluded:
Fortunately for you, I don’t believe it disqualifies you from posting here, DrDeth. And no mention of the Ottomans (or Otto, man).
But make no mistake: Things didn’t happen in a vacuum. America made a lot of mistakes in the Middle East and arguably continues to be sub-optimal in dealing with the region; why is it so hard to conclude that had those mistakes were a contributing factor to the rise of ISIS? You really think that we could do what we did there for as long as we did it and not have an affect?
We spent a century helping brutal dictators suppress the guys who tried to lead liberal democratic reforms. Is it any surprise that there’s no one left to lead a liberal democratic movement?
By threat, the Kurd are liberalish and democraticish. Women are equalish in Kirdisj society and serve on leadership positions in the Kurdish military. Guess what? We always screw the Kurds.
To me the most suprising contradiction was in Pakistan where 75% of Muslims think that people of other faiths are free to practice (yeah, right) , and 96% (or 72% cumulative) of those say this is a good thing. Also in Pakistan, 84% of Muslims “favor making Islamic law the official law in their country”, and 76% of those, or 64% of Muslims, favor “taking the life of those who abandon Islam”.
So a majority of Muslims can somehow support religious freedom, while a majority of Muslims in the same country support killing someone for converting away from Islam.
Muslim tolerance of religions is often tolerance only of Christianity and Judaism, which supposedly worship the same god, and not pagan or animist religions. The Koran advocates a level of tolerance for “people of the Book”, that is, those who have an Abrahamic faith. So yes, one can tolerate other religions but only a subset of them. That’s what they mean by “religious freedom”.
The thing is, the hope is always that those other people of the Book will convert to Islam, and once you convert to Islam you are never, ever permitted to become anything else. Hence, they’ll tolerate people raised as Jews and Christians because their holly book tells them to, but still advocate the death penalty for people leaving Islam because, again, that’s what their holy book says.
This is the Disneyfication of the Kurds. It is not only not true in substance, it avoids the reality that the honor killing runs deep in the Kurdish society (as it does in the non-muslims related groups).
a sweeping statement that is also not true across the Kurdish groups. PKK some, others not really.
