Arab View of Gulf Area
Middlebury’s Arabic Morass – Middle East Quarterly – Summer 2006 — This is an excellent essay that notices the ever increasing intolerance of Islam, specifically Arab Islam.
At a time when Arabic language training lags at many universities, the Arabic summer school at Middlebury College in Vermont retains its reputation for quality language instruction. Indeed, it could be said to define the gold standard of Arabic language training programs. But even as students leave Middlebury with better Arabic, they also leave indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle Eastern history. Permeating lectures and carefully-designed grammatical drills, Middlebury instructors push the idea that Arab identity trumps local identities and that respect for minority ethnic and sectarian communities betrays Arabism…unlike Middlebury’s French, Spanish, and other language programs, its Arabic course goes beyond language instruction and subtly works to inculcate an Arab nationalist ideology. This takes two tacks: first, the school infuses its academic program with Arab nationalist content. Second, it constructs an atmosphere that replicates Arab nationalist hostility toward minorities and the United States.
When I worked as an instructor at Middlebury in 2004, students arrived at Hepburn Hall, their home for the nine-week program, and were greeted not only by Ahlan wa Sahlan (Welcome) posters but also colorful and smartly outlined maps of the Middle East adorning the hallway bulletin boards. In these, Israel is absent, replaced by Palestine stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The border between Syria and Lebanon was labeled a temporary frontier, a designation consistent with the refusal of Arab nationalists in Syria to recognize Lebanon as a separate entity.[15]
The Persian Gulf had morphed into Al-Khalij al-‘Arabi, the Arab Gulf. The term is anything but innocuous. While Arab nationalists first sought to rename the Persian Gulf after Arabs in the 1960s, the change in terminology is unscholarly and unrecognized.
This article works well with an older even more interesting report on how the Muslims have been driving away the various Christian populations of the Middle East since the end of WWI. Most will be gone by 2020. That article is also excellent and is linked here.
The transfer of power of Bethlehem from Israel to the Palestinian Authority just before Christmas 1995 inspired a spate of articles[1] on Bethlehem’s diminishing Christian presence. They noted that a place not long ago 80 percent Christian is now but one-third Christian. For the first time in nearly two millennia, the most identifiably Christian town on earth has lost its Christian majority. The same changes have taken place in two other famously Christian towns, Nazareth and Jerusalem. In Nazareth, Christians went from 60 percent of the population in 1946 to 40 percent in 1983. Jerusalem Christians in 1922 slightly outnumbered Muslims (15,000 versus 13,000);[2] today, they number under 2 percent of the city’s population.
The same applies in other parts of Israel. A report from the Galilee village of Turan quotes a Christian store owner: “Most Christians will leave as soon as we can sell our houses and shops. We can’t live among these people [Muslims] anymore.”[3] One journalist concludes that “The Christian community in the West Bank is close to extinction.”[4]
Nor are Israeli-held territories unusual in this regard; Christians are fleeing from all over the Middle East. Emigration began in the aftermath of World War I and has greatly picked up in the last decade. In Turkey, Christians constituted a population of 2 million in 1920 but now only some thousands remain.
Hey, maybe they’ll go and destroy the Church of the Holy Sepulchre again and we can start another Crusade to drive the heathens out of the Holy Land!
Waiting any day now for the Papacy to issue that decree….
The three main religon’s people from the same religous roots war each other all the time.
Yet they worship the same God.
Either there’s something seriously wrong with this picture, or this God is simply evil :P. Or it just may be that I’m an Atheist and don’t understand the underlying fun.
Pardon me if any of you find killing your brothers amusing. 😉
The 3 religions have smiliar roots. Yet they war with each other all day long.
They worship the same God yet they still want to kill each other. There must be something wrong with this picture.
Maybe it is because I’m an atheist and doesn’t understand the underlying fun of killing your brothers
or the God that they worship is simply evil.But I don’t expect any of this to stop anytime soon, Amen
What can we expect from the rest of the world when the shining example of Americian leadership is represented by an irresponsible buffoon who actually believes in the rapture, vetos science in favor of religious drivel, and counts on Jesus to save his ass from a life of ignorance?
In 2-1/2 years Bush will be gone, but obsessive compulsive Stalinists like Bobo will continue to hate America with such a blind fervor that when confronted with as huge a threat as Islamism, they will blindly say it’s America’s fault.
While western democracies are focused on providing their middle classes with incremental improvements in life’s basic needs, in order to win elections, Islamists are fighting for world domination, on a scale right up there with Hitler and your favorite Bond villian.
As this topic demonstrates, the real danger is not terrorism, or even weapons of mass destruction, but rather Muslim immigration and conversion in every country on earth. Virtually overnight every western European country has experienced a spike in their Muslim population, and almost uniformly these populations are poor, unassimulated, anti-western, and angry. They have brought the “Arab Street” to the streets of Paris, Amsterdam, and London.
The United States, with it’s multi-cultural society and more open economy, has seemingly been more successful in enticing Muslim’s to sample the pleasures of western culture. But, ask yourself the next time a liberal tv network does a puffy piece on “Muslins in America,” always including a shot of women in burkas walking through a mall and carrying shopping bags from Sears, “In the war for Muslim world domination, whose side are they on?” If you think they’re on our side, you’re a greater danger to America than bin Ladin.
jees this is as much propaganda as the propaganda the author is complaining about.
Get a life for gawd sake. these are two theoracies out to kill each other. Let them get on with it.
Intolerance is an extension of tribal survival. It’s hardwired in our brains. If you let the next tribe expand they’ll consume your limited resources. You go over there and kill them off, or be killed. This is why tolerance is so hard to teach. It’s going against a few hundred thousand years of adaption. A few kids on a school ground will naturally look for any differences and turn on that child with a vengeance. This is what we are, it helps defines us as a specie.
“Either there’s something seriously wrong with this picture, or this God is simply evil”
No God isn’t evil, but organized religion is. When man presumes to speak on Gods behalf, that is where the danger is. And its not confined to the Muslims. Christians are just as bad. The pope has no more insite into God then anyone else. He is just a man, plain and simple.
As to the muslim problem. I have said that Muslimism, especially, muslim fundmentalism is the greatest threat to the world in thousands of years.
PLease. There has been no single war fought over religion. Religious leaders are out there pointing and laughing as people step in line with this faith or that. You can’t be pro mulsim/pro Isreali/Mormon !!!
I can’t even read the American press, nor do I watch tv…Actually…all I do is look at blogs now. I can’t trust anthing. Tech journals are trying to sell gadgets that have a shelf life of 2 years give or tech. Journalists rely on the AP ( who is biased towards whomever is paying them for coverage ). History class in America is about the neocon / neo-conservative crusade over Islam…Ask a teacher ot teach anything else and they’ll come out to tell you, “Why…we won !”
In the end its all garbage. I read news reports like this and I am thinking several things. Who funded the report. Where was it published. Who published it. Do they sleep with 6 year old children while living in a van down by the river ??? Can this report be verified by 2 other sources. If so, by whom !
Moreso, why is Dvorak publishing stuff like this ? Is this something his son pulled up in reponse to a term paper ? Perhaps he is being paid by someone else to provide a counterpoint to all this press coverage lately. Who knows. Well actually, no one does. And there will come a time when I will never be able to read anything anyone has to say in fear of it being tainted propoganda of the state !!!
Fine, “organized religion” is the problem. (As opposed to the unorganized kind?)
But, unless you Bill & Ted’s out there want to get into your time machine and kill Jesus and Muhammad, and all the witch doctors and wizards who proceeded them, this is the world you’ve got to deal with. Sitting there smugly in a drug-induced atheistic haze isn’t going to help anyone. We are in a war that has been going on since at least the eight century. And now the Sword of Islam has a thermonuclear tip. Whose side are your on, and what do you think we should do about it?
“Whose side are your on, and what do you think we should do about it?”
Nuke them before they nuke us. We have thousands of warhead sitting here, collecting dust. Maybe if you used one, the world wouldn’t think of us as pussies. Examples, the nut job leader of N Korea, a small little insignificant country telling us he will retaliate against us if we stop his missle test. Hello moron, one sub could reduce your whole country to ashes. Maybe we should, then others like him, Castro, Chaves, that kook in Iran and other third world assholes would shit their pants and mind their place in the world. We are the superpower, we should show that we are, Peace comes from strength, those that don’t believe that are doomed.
Talk to Palestinians and other Arabs, and they simply don’t believe that there were ever Jews in Israel before 1948. The map itself might be valid since Palestine used to mean Israel.
AB CD, It doesn’t surprise me. Islam seems to surpress information contrary to what is the koran. If the world was ever to be taken over by muslims, it would plunge this world into a period of darkness, that would make the dark ages look like the renosances. All thought surpressed. No freedom for anyone. Science and research would end. Relgion and prayer would be the sole reason for existance.
Todays radicalism more about conservatism than they are about religion.
But the problematic component is the conservatism, not the religion.
Stick with me before you flame:
Are liberal Muslims forming radical groups? (no!) Are moderate Jews gun-ho on starting WWIII? (no!) Are liberal Hindus butchering Muslims? (no!) Are moderate Christians for nuking Iran? (no!)
No! It is only the CONSERVATIVE wings of religion that causing all the problems.
But take the religion otu of it. Secular conservatives are more likely to be militant, these days.
So, using logical deduction, you have to conclude that the troubling component is the CONSERVATISM, not the religion.
But I think the worst-of-the-worst is the evil nexus of conservatism and religion.
(I concede that this was not always the case. Decades-ago, there used to be left-wing bomb throwers, by they’ve pretty much faded away. Now most of the bomb throwers are conservatives.)
I’m not even going to argue with GregAllen because his “analysis” probably got him an “A” in a political science class at Berkeley. I’ll just point out that his “logic” is based entirely on the habit of Dan Rather and his fellow travelers to label every foreign dictator as a “conservative.” Note that in their lexicon, there were even “conservative communists.” They did this in an effort to make it politically incorrect to be a conservative, and to justify outrageous behavior, such as blocking conservative speakers on campus. It shows an intellectually empty mindset simply designed to justify close-minded moral superiority and blind hatred of your opponents. These are people not interested in real solutions to difficult world problems, but only in punishing, humiliating, and hurting their enemies.
Tim, I publish it to get you personally riled up. It works!
Someone should point out to them that the Koran says Israel belongs to the Jews.
Do all who support land ownership based on ancient occupation also support giving North America back to the natives? How about at least giving Texas back to Mexico?
#20, Could we, PLEASE. And send every one owning even a small ranch with it?
#15, Gregallen, Very well thought out post. I don’t like the word conservative though. In my opinion they might better be referred to as the extreme or radical fringe.
Many religious conservatives are very far from violent, such as Quakers and Amish. Many religious conservatives will be found in monasteries or convents, devoting themselves totally to their beliefs.
#20…Smartalix….I’m with you on that.
#21…Mr. Fusion….hey Dude, we own a medium sized ranch and we sure as hell aren’t going back to Mexico….we stole our land fair and square from the Indians, thank you very much.