Some meditations on the 'Arab Mind' from an Iraqi dentist trying to free himself from some of its habits. The English is a bit broken:
The Arabs and the West
Why some of our people are ungrateful? Forget all of the causes that led to the war on Iraq and whether it was the right thing or not, and that USA wants to help Iraqis ..or whatever, let’s concentrate on the result: the coalition made a great decision to get rid of the ex-regime, captured them, freed Iraqis and may do the same work to other regimes if they won’t change their policy and get on well... so when we ask some of the Iraqis, educated or not, their opinion about America, they’ll reply: ‘ I don’t like America, and they came here to accomplish a plan’.. What’s the plan?! You can hear hundreds of different plans from those people ! I wonder why do they think like that and forget what America’s been doing for us? Why the United States is always suspiciously dealt with? especially in Arab’s world... Is it because of the regimes? Religion? History and Society? Media\press?
Let’s begin with the regimes, Arabs used to be under a regime for tens of years! So people grow old with them and the president is a part of their life, they used to see\hear him, and do whatever he sees ‘right’ without a discussion, this will affect all parts of life especially the education, for example, since 1985 till now I see\hear\read things against America, Iran, Kuwait, Jews and I used to be ‘Anti’! And I didn’t know what was going on, but I had to be against those cause our parents are against them and the parents do what the government wants, so all of the people are against them and we learned to hate..hate and hate.. We don’t know what’s the meaning of love and respect, think and understand others, cause we can’t or we couldn’t dare to..it took me a long time to get rid of all of what we read and heard, and step by step I’ve started to respect America, Israel and all those who were ‘our enemies’, forget all those thoughts that have been planted in our minds, until I reached a point of Anti-Arabs’ thoughts! It’s difficult for Arabs to think like me cause they have to get rid of some limits and restrictions: like what I mentioned above and RELIGION.. Now let’s talk BRIEFLY about religion:
Islam is the main cause of many conflicts in the world, it’s somehow difficult to find a Muslim with peaceful thoughts, cause they used to read Quran and explain it as they like, and since this book contains many good and bad orders, so you can find nice Muslims who turns a blind eye for some bad things in Islam but can’t say that or afraid of Allah! and evil ones who like the bad part of it, here we have the ‘extremists’ who like the fight, war, distributing Islam and such silly things which we used to hear for thousands of years ago...
And when Quran is ‘far from suspicion’ and no one dares to discuss about it, so they used to shut up and do what their clerics say, and here the chance plays a big role, cause we have different types of clerics: 1- bad guys..2-bad guys..3- good guys and may be turned to bad ones !!!
Enough for this point and let’s talk about history:
‘ we are Arabs and we have a great history and a great civilization we did enormous things, we are a united nation we share different points, language, religion, ..etc, we were the first who..........were were were’, this is the main problem, Arabs have been reading their history and be proud of it for thousands of years and never look for the future and what they shall do, or look at the West and learn from them, because they have a great history and that’s enough! they ‘were the best’ and they don’t know that they are the worst now!
The media: which is also delivered to the public under a strict supervision of the governments, the biased news, hostile opinions and the continuous brain wash, so this point is related to the first one..
Those four points, I think, making this large gap between Arabs and the West, and of course there are other things that cause a kind of dissatisfaction with anything comes from the West..
What are your viewpoints?
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