Gurgen wrote:
Your first point: every powerful civilisation has engaged in warlike colonial expansion, not just Western civilisations. The current material condition of the Arabic world is also unthinkable without the Ottoman empire. It is also unthinkable without the Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. I don't see where your cut-off point is for relevant historical events and I wonder if there should be such a cut-off point at all. Before Hitler, another genocide with an explicit religious component was perpetrated in the 20th century by a non-Western power. Yes, your view is more nuanced than I presented, but the bottom line is that you generally trace current problems to European colonialism.
I recognise the Armenian genocide (which is the reason we have the term "genocide"—to create the category of events that include the Holocaust, and it).
You have sort of walked past my point, I feel. As I said, it doesn't matter about "good" and "evil" or rating cultures as better or worse, so it barely matters that many historical empires have been hostile, warlike and expansionist. That's to be expected. I'm not claiming Chinggis Khan was a nice guy. It's not about cultural difference or similarity.
What matters more in the world today is that Europe "won", so that European nations and colonies subsequently dominated much of the globe and now have much more wealth and power than other nations.
When you want to explain the state of things, you look to power, because power by definition has the greatest responsibility for the state of things. And I think it's reasonable to say that the Middle East today has been the playground of violent European imperialism and its allies since WWI.
You could hold the Ottoman Empire responsible if you wanted, but we both know that since it fell, it has not been much responsible for drawing borders, executing coups, propping up dictatorships and settler colonies, selling arms or engaging in military interventions in the Middle East over the past century. European nations and colonies, first and foremost the US, have had that unhealthy interest and influence.
Gurgen wrote:
The second point: it wasn't meant as a gotcha. You made the point that extreme interpretations of religious texts are influenced by external factors, implying that without these external factors they would not happen. If you have read religious texts, you may have noticed that there are a few different categories: (i) texts which contain no reference to violence whatsoever and only a madman could interpret in a violent way, (ii) texts which are ambiguous and can be interpreted in various ways, depending on social and historical context and (iii) texts which contain explicit references to violence or calls for violence and which need benevolent interpretations. Let me be politically correct and indeed use an example from the Bible: "Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death." I don't really need any external factors to interpret this in a violent way. It is simply there. Quite to the contrary: I need someone (or my own brain and disbelief) to interpret the violence away. I need someone to explain that while this may have been an instruction to the people of Israel in Moses' time, in modern times most people believe it's wrong to kill someone for working on a Saturday and most devout Christians believe the reckoning for this awful sin will come on judgment day as opposed to now. This, however, does not excuse the fact that we have a so-called holy text that quite explicitly calls for and at the very least legitimises the murder of people who according to our 21th century morals have done nothing wrong. If the text says "Please hug your neighbour every day", I cannot possibly come to the conclusion that God wants me to kill someone.
We might argue along your lines that if Islam is more textually violent than Christianity, Christianity is likewise more textually violent than Buddhism—but then, tell that to the Rohingya in Rakhine State in Myanmar.
If Christianity is intrinsically less violent than Islam, why then are Christians more violent than Muslims? Christians have been responsible for considerably more violence than Muslims through history (by body count). And why do 3,500 dead Americans translate into hundreds of thousands of dead Arabs and Pashtuns?
The answer is that Iraq wasn't about cultural difference, it was about power and empire—it was about the perfect pretext to continue energy geopolitics "by other means", and to conjure up ISIS in the process, with its quasi-Leninist desire to be the version of Islam the kufr will most hate and want to destroy.
By the same token, Assad's brutal war of suppression with Russian support against the CIA-backed "moderate rebels" in Syria is also about energy geopolitics, and the deaths there are not "sectarian" deaths they are oil deaths, territory deaths, pipeline deaths like the others were.
