Re: As far as the Middle East is concerned, the Judeo-Protestant mythology trumps any other issue
Ho, ho, you forget Islam, especially fundamentalist Islam, which is today a political movement disguised as a religion.
I view "fundamentalist Islam" as the political instrumentalization of Islam/the Islamic faith --a somewhat familiar pattern throughout history.... Likewise, the Christian faith was instrumentalized by the Middle Ages popes to launch crusades upon crusades, also with an aim to control Eastern Mediterranean's trade ports.... Eugenics and racial hygienism were the political application of racist theories and pseudosciences in Europe and the US (see my current read: The Nazi Connection, by Stefan Kuhl). And today, the southernization of US politics (see my previous read: Ruling America, Harvard press, last chapter by Michael Lind*) has turned the US into a Judeo-Protestant theocracy.
Re: ...considering the history of the Jews as a landless nation who were condemned by their religion to wander,...
A ridiculous, bogus claim I've debunked time and time again. The US still harbors the largest Jewish population in the world (an estimated 6 million**). Do American Jews feel "landless"? Are NYC mayor Bloomberg, Senator Joe Lieberman, etc., landless, wandering Jews? Besides, a cursory look at the Israeli press informs us regularly about Jewish emigration from Israel back to Russia, Germany or the US....
Message 19521261
Message 20872570
Message 18066781
Re: The so-called countries which exist today in the Middle East are merely the creation of Britain and France in an attempt the divide and rule the Muslims...
Of course, and the same colonial arbitrary bordering was imposed upon African countries. Yet, it's one thing to carve up a given territory while keeping its inhabitants in place, but it's quite another to carve out a homeland by forcing its inhabitants out and replacing them with people from other continents and cultures. That's colonialism's fatal flaw. That's why most anti-colonial struggles and liberation wars in the 1950s and 1960s didn't end up with a border redrawing. Algerians in 1962, Congolese in 1960, Vietnamese,... didn't redraw, or demand to modify, their borders --they just wanted to get rid of European colons. A major exception was India/Pakistan/Kashmir but even in that case, the border conflict never escalated into a full-scale war.
Re: If the Muslims had had their way, Islam would have been a caliphate and, in other words, it would also have been a religious fantasy made true.
But it wouldn't have been the same "fantasy"... If you want to conjure up the Muslim fantasy that mirrors the Zionist one, just imagine that Arab countries had forcefully occupied Spain's Andalucia in the wake of the Spanish civil war (1936) to turn it into a Muslim colony... as a redress for Spain's expulsion of Muslims in the late XVth century(***). Imagine the spectacle: a Muslim Andalucia with the strongest military in Europe, endowed with 200 nukes, strategically located on the Strait of Gibraltar, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean... and surrounded by hapless, if hostile, Spaniards... led by a Spanish Arafat, urging the European world to rally to his forlorn cause and reconquer "Christian Andalucia"! Imagine Moroccan, Algerian, Turkish, snipers shooting at Spanish boys... Arab bulldozers rolling over Spanish villages... while Saudi Arabia vows to defend Al-Andalus at all costs, vetoes any UN resolution that might hurt the Muslim colony, yet offers to play the "honest broker" between the resentful European world and Arab Andalucia. Imagine!
Gus
(*) hup.harvard.edu
(**) Message 19419571
(***) sispain.org |
