re: #267 CuriousLurker

For the record, I’m not exaggerating. That’s what she actually says in the post Mediaite links to:

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It’s not ALL Muslims, just the observant ones. See? She’s not a hateful bigot, she just a patriotic truth telling humanitarian trying to protect the innocent. //

I’m more than willing admit that there is a problem with Middle East culture. But I also have to put that in context, how new are the ideals of the modern industrialized, democratic West? Pretty new. Just fifty to a hundred years ago we were justifying all kinds of horrible, misogynistic, bigoted shit. Many of us still are. I see the same issues, to varying degrees in India, Africa, and pretty much everywhere else that hasn’t developed as rapidly as the West has.

So who exactly is the outlier here? I do think there is a problem that the “Islamic World” has yet to effectively confront, and it’s a huge one. But I also think that it’s symptomatic of a larger phenomenon, and not intrinsically rooted in Islam itself. I also think that the West, as it were, holds a lot of blame for the regional exploitation that has provided a ton of fuel to this fire. The fact that this exploitation and intervention has fallen largely on muslim countries has gone a long way towards pushing this population towards radicalism.