tamouh said:
...
In all honesty, as a Canadian Citizen from Middle Eastern background I find many posts here insulting to me and my fellow citizens, and I'm sure to many CF current and past serving members of Middle Eastern backgrounds including myself.
tamouh’s point needs to be taken into account. I continue to maintain that we have a (self-declared) enemy – an enemy with a
fifth column right here in Canada. That enemy is
not Islam or the Arabs, generally, or even the Iranians.
The enemy is:
some Islamic groups or
movements – like al Qaeda.
The enemy
might be (or become) some nation-states, including Iran, Syria and, yes, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, too.
The enemy has two broad groups of supporters – the
fifth column, around the world including right here in Canada, too:
• Muslims who are, understandably, enraged at
invasions of Muslim countries and at overt racism and religious bigotry in the West
and in Asia; and
•
Tolerant Western ‘liberals’ (who are not, in any way,
real liberals, but that is being dealt with on other threads) who want to sympathize with the underdog or who are bitter anti-capitalists (à la Pierre Trudeau) and, therefore, need to declare that
”the enemy of my enemy <the US led, capitalist West>
is my friend.”
No one is our enemy just because (s)he is Muslim or of Arabic ethnicity. Many (most? just some? –
I have no way of knowing or even of guesstimating with any degree of confidence) of our fellow citizens and guests in our country are good, honest, peaceful people who wish no harm to Canada or Canadians; many are defending and will defend Canada now – in our armed forces.
I am having some trouble finding the right words; I have, elsewhere
<here, actually: http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/48639/post-425248.html#msg425248 > disclaimed my own use of
Islamist as shorthand for the
movements and the supporters. I detest
cute terms like Islamofascist and I have said, over and over again until people are tired of hearing it that
terrorism is not something against which sensible people wish to wage war – we need to eradicate
some terrorists, just as we need to support, arm and, now and again, even decorate and honour others – see: http://users.pandora.be/dave.depickere/Text/secretagents.html .
In any event, I, personally, have no brief for (or against) any of the antagonists in the Middle East and no particular interest in the survival of any of them or their religion or their
culture. I do not find a localized (to the Middle East) nuclear
holocaust to be especially
unthinkable. That does not mean the people there, or their
cultures are in any way inferior, nor does it mean that any Muslims or Canadians of Middle Eastern ethnicity are less loyal Canadians than any others – handsome old fellows of (largely) Scots descent, for example. It does mean that I don’t much care how people look or what they choose to believe or, even, what they say; I do care about how they act.
I want to return to a point above:
” Muslims who are, understandably, enraged …”
paracowboy said:
but <it, the subject of Muslim rage is > an inter-related one, and your posts are always informative (dry as a fossil, ;D but informative) so by all means, expound!
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First permit me two digressions (these are the really dry bits,
para, you can safely ignore them :-* ) :
1. Many years ago (several decades, actually) a wise old Brit told me, referring to Palestinian
gastarbeiters in the Arabian peninsula,
”They [the Palestinians] are the Jews of the Middle East.” What he meant was that the Palestinian
town Arabs were heartily detested by their (rich) hosts who really, really wanted to believe that they were still noble desert nomads, etc, etc
ad infinitum. The Palestinians were, however, essential – as were (still are) the Euro-Americans because the locals also detested (probably still detest) education and work. (Some of you will remember the
one day wonder in the press when it was discovered that while young Egyptian peasants were being deployed to Kuwait/Iraq (Desert Storm) young (rich) Kuwaitis were gambling in the casinos and dancing in the discos in Alexandria.)
I read, recently, (I forget where) an article which explained that
one of the reasons that science and technology is
retarded in the Middle East is that the Arabic language, with all of its nuances, is so difficult to master that there is little time for math and science at the elementary level. This difficulty leads to a further de-emphasis of the core mat/science subjects which, inevitably, means that people educated in Arabic, in the Middle East have a poor technical base. That doesn’t mean they don’t understand or cannot exploit science and technology – it means that most Middle Eastern countries produce less scientists, engineers and technologists than do Asian and Western countries (despite the difficulties and cultural complexity of, say, Chinese) and they are less valued in those technologically less sophisticated societies. I’m not sure I agree with all of that thesis but it does explain some of the things I saw, many, many years ago, over several years experience in/around that region.
2. I was, recently, invited to give a seminar in a couple of (foreign) universities. I was asked to
explain America. I posited that one cannot understand America today without understanding Britain 100, 200, 400 and 800 years ago. I used the collapse of the
Angevin ‘empire,’ the defeat of the Armada, the defeat of Napoleon and the Boer War to describe the rise and fall of Britain, emphasizing a few points:
a. Britain was
blessed after Henry II by being a rich country with poor kings;
b. Henry II’s greatest legacy was the legal system which instilled, throughout the nation, confidence in and respect for the rule of law;
c. Britain was, from about 1200 on, an essentially
liberal (individualistic) society with strong entrepreneurial skills;
d. Elisabeth made a virtue out of economic necessity by developing a
maritime strategy – which the French, in particular, never figured out;
e. A British naval meritocracy coupled with a highly entrepreneurial naval system (prizes, etc) made the defeat of Bonaparte’s
continental system both inevitable and, relatively, easy; and
f. Britain
stagnated rested on it laurels in the 19th century and became so preoccupied with domestic issues (Ireland) that it ignored its naval and military ‘tools’ and forgot the essential foundations of its foreign policy – I suggest that the
entente cordiale with France (1904) was a blunder of historic proportions, maybe the worst in British history.
But, in those critical centuries, Britain changed the world and it made it possible for a new enlightened, liberal, secular, capitalist 'West' to impose its
order on all others - including the Muslims, all the Muslims.
Those digressions matter, to me, because they help me to see how and why the (British led, until 1940) West, and East Asia too for that matter, grew and prospered while the Arabic/Persian ‘world’ stagnated.
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In fairness we must admit that many Muslims do not wish to return to a medieval social order. They want to recapture the
golden age of the late 15th century: Saladin had (350 years earlier) liberated the
umma from the crusaders; the new Mogul empire brought new
culture and
civilization from the East to the Arabs; Europe had not, quite, mastered its Renaissance; the
golden horde had been absorbed and the Muslims had military superiority; Islam was paramount.
1500 is the turning point:
• In 1492 Grenada finally surrendered to the Spanish Christians;
• In 1529 the Christians won a decisive, pivotal victory at Vienna; and
• In 1571 the
Holy League defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto.
Hammer blow after blow pounded the Muslim empire. It would get worse when, in the mid 18th century, the Brits dismantled the Mogul Empire and replaced it with their own Indian empire.
Many modern Muslims, especially those of Arabic/Persian/West Asian ethnicity, are enraged because they can see, now, that the world which surrounds their spiritual home raced ahead - socially, politically, technologically, militarily and economically – while Turkey, Persia, Arabia, North Africa and West Asia sat on their duffs, smoking their
hookas, sipping their
chai and dreaming of past glories. (Sound like France?) They understand, and are enraged, that their ancestors were lazy and corrupt and pissed away a great, powerful empire which
might have been a springboard for creating a unified Muslim world. In short they see 500 years of wasted opportunities and they see the consequences: they are forced to leave their ‘homelands’ to seek better futures in foreign, unfriendly,
pagan lands – the lands of the people who, just a few centuries ago, bowed and scraped when they met a Muslim.
Humiliation.
Not just the individual humiliation which happens, day after day, year-in and year-out, when one is treated as a second class citizen – even by the other recent immigrant who runs the grocery store; there is a deeper, more painful group humiliation which comes from being assumed, by the ruling majority, to be second rate. Ask Québecers about this.
Now top that up with a steady diet of corrupt kings and princes and rude, crude, buffoon
ish tinpot dictators like Muammar Khadafi; add a dash of
6 Day War and then Saddam Hussein and years and years of bad jokes about Arab tanks (all reverse gears); now add Desert Storm; watch a few million Jews defeat and defeat and defeat again scores of millions of Arabs; then comes 9/11 and a whole new round of anti-Muslim images in film and on TV; there is more, overt racism after 9/11, too; then the invasion of Afghanistan then Iraq; and it goes on and on … is it any wonder that many, many young Arab men (already poor, already ill-educated (as the poor most often are, regardless of race or creed), already poorly integrated into the
mainstream society (as the ill educated poor almost always are)) are enraged?
I have no particular interest in or knowledge of Islam. I have read that (in terms of proselytizing) it is the most ‘successful’ of the great religions. I do know that many Muslims believe that their religion is under attack – it doesn’t matter why they
believe that, it doesn’t matter if their
belief is without foundation; what matters is that they (many of ‘em)
do believe that ‘we’ (all the rest of us, including the Chinese and the Indians) are out to get them. (Speaking only re: the Turkic people in Xinjiang province of China, that’s probably true. There is an overt (Han) Chinese
programme aimed at swamping the ethnic Uygur people with Han Chinese and, at best, marginalizing Islam. The Chinese government is
’tolerant’ of
’minority’ religions, provided they toe the party line.)
So there we have it: most Muslims are poor – no matter where they live. Worse, because we have (electronically) shrunk the world they
know they are poor. Most Muslim countries are ‘backwards’ – technologically dependent upon the West (and maybe the East, too). Many (most?) Muslims feel under siege. Young Muslims, like young people everywhere, want ‘something better’ right now and they are frustrated when the existing system (for getting ‘something better’) seems closed to them – especially to those already in the West. Is rage so surprising?
What can we do about it?
What should we do about it?
I don’t know.
To those who managed to get all the way to the end: sorry this was so long, I’m too lazy to do a proper job of editing.
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Edit: deleted a word - stagnated - which is not true and replaced it with a phrase which is better