CaptainSpaulding71 wrote:
where did i mention or imply genocide? i meant that part of the reason for suffering in that part of the world is their own regimes. you can indeed change regimes without killing the population.
Sorry. Misread.
CaptainSpaulding71 wrote:
might their lives be better if they had an actual stake in their country's wealth? Why else should they be pissed off at the US and Israel? Many of us in the west are so 'rich' in contrast to the average citizen in some of those countries. why? well, through hard work and the pull-up-by-bootstraps mentality we have here in the US. you don't see a whole lot of that kind of attitude in the ME (outside of Israel). if you did, i'm sure there would be more prosperity. perhaps an Egyptian cell phone. maybe a Saudi automobile. but...no.
Instead of spreading out the large wealth sitting in the ground in those countries (which i argue should belong to the people), their govts keep the money for themselves, blame israel and the US for the public's problems (so the govt doesn't need to pay out those services) and the people for sure have a legitimate gripe here. but...it's with the wrong people. They should be complaining about their govt - not Israel or the US.
Further, these govts keep their people pretty ignorant to control them. they do this by setting up maddrassas instead of setting up real universities and schools. show me where in the Koran you can do torque or statics equations. Show me in Koran where it says how to do titrations (chemistry) or triple integrals or Fast Fourier Transforms. well, if you teach them to 'obey', 'obey' and 'obey' they don't get the idea to 'question' and take whatever their govt says to them as 'truth'. isn't *that* subjugation...of the mind?
you avoided my main point on why these countries get a free pass for their treatment of their own people. Why do these countries get a free pass for the way they treat women. Why these countries get a free pass when it comes to multitudes of human rights abuses.
You can cry all you want about 'but the US does the same stuff'. ah...no. no head cutting. no honor killing. no stoning (except at my old fraternity but that was differnt thing). Some in Gitmo got better med care then they got in their home country.[/
Islamic culture is all about submission. Islam is 'submission to the will of allah'. The common psyche of the Islamic world is one of submission and reverence of those in charge. It is a very very different type of civilisation to the one we have in the west and I can't see how or why that would ever change. There is a lot to be said for their culture - it's far more fraternal than cut-throat capitalism for a start but is obviously easily abused by those who can capitalise on their subjects submissiveness.
Secular Iraq had a large middle class - doctors, lawyers, etc. That has been smashed in favour of characters like the Radical Sh'ia Cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, who now enjoys popular support there. Don't get me wrong, Saddam was a cunt, but if secularity can be smashed so easily it only leads me to believe that secularity is not really feasible in many middle eastern nations. The country that has come closest to best compromise between Islam and secularity is Iran. A democracy where women have the vote and universities produce a skilled and learned workforce but the tenets of Islam are respected. If America breaks Iran then you can forget about peace in the middle east forever, and you can forget about improving the international terrorism situation as a result. It would quite simply be game over. Iran represents the best half-way house model of government for all of the crackpot dictatorship ruined countries of the middle east. Change must come from within however. It cannot come from without. The politics of every country evolves around the actions of the people in that country and them alone otherwise you get forced, fragile, legitimacy-scarce government.
As for 'getting a free pass': the US gets a free pass on Guantanamo torture and illegal detainment centre, Ireland gets a free pass on pretending not to know the US is transporting abducted Afghans through our airports, France gets a free pass on discrimating against French citizens who happen to be second generation immigrants, Zimbabwe gets to starve its people to death, Myanmar gets to have keep the elected leader of the country under permanent house arrest - we all get free passes.