But the Middle East is Different

A young man from Morocco came in to a cast in Skypeland to state that the Middle East and Middle Eastern people were different than other places and people, especially the US and Americas, since people in the Middle East could not forget history. He therefore confidently predicted that the Middle East would always have war, forever, or at least for his entire life. He said that the US was naive to think that people in the Middle East could live in peace with an American-style democracy.

He was confronted with several pieces of contrary evidence. We noted that people from all over the world live together in peace in the US, including Jews, Kurds, Shiites, Sunni and Arab Christians. He did not have a good answer for this, but said it was because of the American style of democracy which could not exist in the Middle East.

Since he seemed so fixated on the US, I gave him a couple of other examples. I asked him if he did not know that the Catholics and Protestants had been fighting each other for centuries in Northern Ireland, but had recently managed to put the trouble behind them and are now living in peace. He did not have much response to that. I also noted that the wars between the Serbians and the Croatians, the Bosnians and the people in Kosovo etc were driven by hatreds and events that are about 800 years old. I said that peace had now been achieved there and maintained for quite a while. He did not have much to say about that either.

It is interesting how a lack of knowledge of history and the rest of the world can lead people to just blindly restate silly claims. It is even more disturbing when these silly notions are used to justify further killing, wars and death.