On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Tyler Durden wrote:
> "Well, they have enough non-central leadership to all be against Israel and
> the US. And to have been at war against the Israelies since Bible times..."
>
> OK, Mike, this is a good example of the kind of "facts" that lead to fairly
> easy (though erroneous) conclusions.
>
> Let's have some history here. The "Muslims" have not been at war against the
> "Israelites" since Biblical times. That is completely wrong. Hell, there
> haven't been any "Israelites" for nearly two millenia.
The labels we put on them today are irrelevant and actually hide the
facts (which is their intent after all, break the continuity of history
into nice neat chunks and it's easy to hide what really happened).
The -fact- is there was a culture in that region that was reasonably
consistent. At some point 4,000 years or so ago several 'sects' formed.
These sects were in general tolerated to start with, but as time went on
they were less and less tolerated. The secondary sects became what we
today call 'Jews'. As time went on these secondary sects congregated and
coalesced into a more consistent nearly-single entity under the banner of
Judaism. A little later this group faced its own fragmentation that led to
the Christians.
So historically what we have is the mother group (Islam) spawning a
splinter group (Jews). Which as time went by were persecuted by Islam. As
a result of these pressures (and probably a lot of others) the Jews
themselves split and we got Christians. The Jews were originally rather
tolerant but as time went by they became less tolerant. So Islam dumped on
the Jews, the Jews dumped on the Christians, the Christians dumped on them
both, and now Capitalism is dumping on all. It's the lack of recognition
of that last state that is so troublesome.
Greed <> Good.
These people did what they did not because of religion or politics, they
did it because people are xenophobic -and- clanish by nature. Comes from
being social animals. What these labels did do was provide a easy way to
tell them apart so people khew who to go to for help when attacked (or who
to to attack themselves). This emotional aspect of human psychology is
also what makes 'staying out of other peoples business' so hard. We
naturally believe we have -the- answer (and back to Godel we are).
Shibboleth comes to mind...
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