They can't hate the Ottomans the same way they can hate us. First, of course, the Ottomans are gone, though Erdogan seems hell-bent on turning Turkey into his own little caliphate. If he does, I do hope we kick them out of NATO, establish Kurdistan as a country and carve up Turkey (pun very much intended) like we should have in 1918. Give the Greeks Constantinople (the city has a real name instead of its retarded Turkish toponym, which is just a barbarous corruption of the Greek phrase "to the city" - εις την πολιν or is tan polin in Byzantine Greek) and the Aegean Coast (like they would have had if they didn't get greedy), give Armenia the Black Sea to Trabizond, give the Kurds the Southeast - hell, give Assad Antioch - and leave a little tiny rump state around Ankara we can call Ancyra and Iconium (to avoid using their names in their language). But I digress.
I've said over and over again that the problem isn't just terrorism. It's intolerance generally, and there's an arrogance that manifests itself when Muslims live without non-Muslims that, honestly, other religions just don't manifest. There is some Hindu extremism in India, but compared to the intolerance of Muslims it's a walk in the park.
The other problem in the Near East in particular is that there is no sense of national identity for most people in what is called the Arab World (a misnomer, considering Iraqis are descendants of the Babylonians and Assyrians, just like Egyptians are descended from the people who built the pyramids, and so on). Loyalty is first to clan, then to religion. That's why Syria is such a shitshow right now - Assad is being propped up by the Alawis, Iranians and Hezbollah because his enemies are Sunni (though the Iranians have a national identity, unlike everyone to the West of them, Hezbollah is a great example of the clan, then religion mentality). Sunnis in Iraq decided to support ISIS because they hate the Shia. The Kurds, another group with national identity even though they have no country, don't think of their home as Iraq - it's Kurdistan.
That's a very roundabout way of saying that religion is the key mover in the region because national identity, the other "natural" unifying factor in a society, is totally absent. And it's the Ottomans who suppressed it.
ἡ δὲ κἀκ τριῶν τρυπημάτων ἐργαζομένη ἐνεκάλει τῇ φύσει, δυσφορουμένη, ὅτι δὴ μὴ καὶ τοὺς τιτθοὺς αὐτῇ εὐρύτερον ἢ νῦν εἰσι τρυπώη, ὅπως καὶ ἄλλην ἐνταῦθα μίξιν ἐπιτεχνᾶσθαι δυνατὴ εἴη. – Procopius
Ummaka qinnassa nīk!
*MySmiley*
*NM*
- 23/05/2017 10:31:03 PM
379 Views
*NM*