Quote:
Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
you might be right, but what if the religion explicitly endorses ideals which run contrary to your modern values? by ignoring this and pinning it on each person who comes along and acts on it, you're essentially ignoring the disease while attacking the symptom.
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Lots of moral systems run contrary to my modern values; I try to discuss on the merits and indirectly render ideology obsolete, rather than directly attacking ideology. Mostly because ideology is malleable and generally people are justifying deeper feelings and drives with their ideology rather than the other way around - they announce loudly that the ideology came first to give it some kind of vague moral authority, but I'm skeptical that moral philosophy trumps hunger and greed. To me, it appears that religion is not the disease, but another symptom. The disease is political and economic instability, religion is a meme that help transmit and store information about how to deal with that instability.
To your specific points:
1) Our whole campaign in the middle east. It's not that we had bad intentions, it's just a messy situation. Our choices of engagement gave preference to secular regimes in the middle-to-late 20th century. Regimes largely funded by outside interests (interests external to the countries in which they operated). During this time, there was a strong secular movement in the civilian population, but it's image was tainted by these outside forces leading secularists like Saddam getting into power, fueling the anti-western sentiment in the region. This has created the recent backlash where religious regimes are rising to power again as the local civilian population has turned back to their religious roots having been rubbed the wrong way by secular ideology (which was not kind to them. Secular leaders in the middle-east have often been tyrants like their predecessors).
2. Israel is the state of the Jews and even before Israel, Jewish people had a rough time and ended up in victim roles a lot. Our sympathy was deserved and they were also a more willing ally through which we could try to negotiate peace treaties. However, Israel's power abuses in the last decades have gone largely unchecked. But this isn't the point, really. My point was the way our media portrays Israel vs. Palestine. You rarely hear about the ****ty things Israel does. I acknowledge that our relation with Israel is diplomatic and in the interest of peace, but we create backlash when we represent it is a good-guy/bad-guy thing on the homefront rather than acknowledging that it's a diplomatic impasse of sorts. And this fosters the anti-western sentiment that makes it hard for the west to participate in stabilizing the region. You have to recognize that the Israel is essentially an invading force to Palestine (Sykes-Picot, etc).
3. It's not the existence of military engagement, persay. And I'm not disparaging military action period. We are talking about tact and homefront attitudes we foster (like Bush calling it a holy war and having a hard on for WMD's with little evidence and calling the enemy "evil doers"). US occupation of Saudi Arabia (after the Gulf War was over) drove a lot of the anti-west sentiment that led to 9/11. How necessary is occupation? It's a complicated question but certainly occupation by foreigners is counter to establishing political stability in a region and stability is the ultimate goal.