Arabs and the History of Defeat

NOV/16/03 | JVERITAS

[jveritas]

Please pay attention to I wrote in my earlier response to you: "It is a very hard task but the Turks were able to do something like that after WW I lead by a secularist called Mustafa Kamel (AttaTurk)".

The Key words are "very hard task" and "something like that". I am not claiming that Turkey has a Western type Democracy or separation between the state and the Church the way we understand it in the USA. Turkey was able to achieve a semi democracy and this is much better that the political, social and cultural state that the Arabs live under. The best they can do is to be like Turkey and that is not very bad.

Moreover, I totally agree with you that Turkey has a very dark history and had committed genocides against the Christians in 1915-1916, particularly the Armenians, and as a Lebanese Christian who lived during the Lebanese civil war I fully understand what these horrible deeds mean. However, to be historically accurate, it is not through these massacres against Christians in WWI that Turkey became some type of a secularist state. Attaturk realized that to put Turkey in the modern age, they must separate Islam as best they can from the State.

[Blue_Ridge_Mtn_Geek]

Part of the solution to the dead-end culture of the Arabs is to convert them to Christ. If my ancestors (in Ireland and Central Europe) who were practicing human sacrifice and eating each other before Christians brought them a better way, can be transformed, then so can the Arabs.

Modernity and post-modernity have spawned a variety of nihilistic diseases that can be overcome by recognizing where they went off the track, and moving forward with a reformed gospel message.

[jveritas]

Although I would love to see it happening, I am afraid that this may be an impossible thing to do. Please remember that the Middle East was vastly Christian before Islam came in the seventh century and converted the vast majority of people to Islam by the power of the sword.

[miltonim]

A second delusion of the muhammadists is that they are the ones being persecuted.

They believe that Israel, the U.S. and Great Britain are persecuting them, and that the West is bent on destroying them. Therefore, the muhammadists use that persecution complex as an excuse to kill everyone else. For them, terrorism is just self-defense.

For example, after 9/11, the words coming out of muhammadists in America were something like: "Americans are committing hate crimes against us."

[jveritas]

Excellent point. They blame all their problems and failures on the United States and the great zionist conspiracy against them.

[Phsstpok]

It is my understanding that the Arabs were on the winning side in WWI, led in part by T.E.Lawrence, aka T.E.Shaw.

similar thoughts to jveritas. "The Arabs" of the day (meaning the dominant force in the Islamic world) was the Ottoman Empire. They ruled almost all of the "uma," or Islamic world. The House of Saud, the current Saudi royal family, were the "lackey's" of the British, siding with them against their "masters" in Constantinople/Istanbul. The Ottoman's sided with the Germans. The Germans and their Ottoman allies lost and the victors, the British and the rest of the allied powers, divided up the Ottoman empire among their "friends" in the region, creating countries that never existed in history, like palestine, Iraq, Jordan, etc.

Winston Churchill, in large part, drew up the map of the Middle East that we are dealing with today. Of course, most of what we now call Jordan was part of the land set aside, with the full agreement of the Arabs, for the Jews as part of fullfilling the Balfour declaration. The Zionists, at the insistence of the western powers, have been "compromising" with the Arabs ever since, to the point that they are now down to a country 9 miles wide. Ossama references the events of WW1 often in his diatribes against the west and the "humiliation of the Arab world 80 years ago."

Look up the definition of psychotic in the dictionary.

[jigsaw]

Thank you for writing this interesting post.

I do have a question for you....

Logic (at least mine) indicates that when the average population begins to accumulate things they enjoy and want to preserve (refrigerators, TVs, cars, better clothes, etc.), they are less likely to start or perpetuate a war and risk these possessions.

Does this logic apply at all in the Middle East with the Arabs?

[eleni121]

I stand by my argument that Turkey could never have become a "secularized" state had they not commited genocide against the millions of Christians living in Turkey at the time.

Muslims abhor the thought that they could possibly live under a predominantly Christian state.

About the term "arab" - My Arab Christian friends resent being lumped into the term Arab when the issue concerns terrorism. The terrorists are Muslims of every ethnic background.

[eleni121]

The Muslims can be brought to the light of the Christian faith.

It is happening very day. Several of my students (college age and up) have already converted to a variety of Christian faiths. It is wonderful to see.

[jveritas]

Here is the complexity of the problem. The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 were not poor and ignorant but rather they came from middle class families and they were educated as well. Bin Laden himself came from a very wealthy family in Saudi Arabia. Education and wealth is does not guarantee that Arabs will stop their delusions of establishing an Arabic Islamic Empire. This why we should have a very strong military presence in the Middle East for a very long time so we keep them at bay. Creating a semi-democratic and semi-secularist state in Iraq MAY BE the start of a new era in the Middle East that in twenty years from now will be less hostile to the us. And may be in twenty years Arabs will have some logic that says
"When the average population begins to accumulate things they enjoy and want to preserve (refrigerators, TVs, cars, better clothes, etc.), they are less likely to start or perpetuate a war and risk these possessions".

[jveritas]

Your Arab Christian friend may not be an Arab after all. Yes he or she speaks Arabic but his or her ethnic background and his or her culture are not Arabic. Again being a Lebanese Christian, I do not consider myself an Arab. Arabs are the people who came from the Desert of Arabia in the seventh century and established Islam in the Middle East and North Africa by the power of the sword. Those few Christians who stayed in the Middle East despite all the persecutions are not of ethnic Arab background but rather from Phoenicians, Syriac (not Syrian), Coptic, and Arameic descents.

[Eternal_Bear]

The Muslims are winning the battle of demographics. That's the only one that counts in the end. Look at the chinese and the east Indians. They lost most of their wars and now there's over a billion of each and where are their conquerors?

[eleni121]

I'm quite aware of the complex racial and ethnic formulations that exist in the region. And I realize that Lebanese Christians are not Arabs.

Actually my friends and acquaintances who call themselves Arab Christians are Palestinians, and from Jordan, Syria, and Tunisia.

The point of all this is that Christian Arabs are not terrorists. It is the Arab Muslims (and all the other Muslims in the world) who need enlightenment.

[LibKill]

A good read, even with the typo. :)

[bethelgrad]

forgive me for posting without reading all the replies, but Has this been posted before? Seems like I've read it before, only modified to fit Iraq in the equasion.

[MarkL]

Unfortunately, the reason that the arab nations can be delusional is that while they've had crushing military defeats, they haven't lost their ability to wage war, and worse, they haven't been totally defeated.

The only time "true" peace is possible, is when those two steps are taken. The last time it happened was in 1945.

Simply put, Israel is too small to be able to completely crush it's neighbors, although they were stopped from pushing on to Damascus and Cairo in 1973, by pressure from the US, due to the USSR demanding that Israel stop, otherwise they would step in to protect their puppets.

Mark

[jveritas]

This is an article I wrote today, I did not use any other reference article.

[jveritas]

The more they increase in numbers, the more poverty they will bring on themselves. As long as they are poor and uneducated, they cannot win, as simple as that.

[bethelgrad]

Thanks for clearing that up. Very good article by the way. Excellent analysis.

[Eternal_Bear]

Don't you get it? They are coming to the West in large numbers. They are invading and taking over and converting more and more Westerners. Seems like a winning strategy to me.