The Israeli Palestinian conflict

[Occhidiangela]

"1. What have they done for "civilization" lately? Nothing, they are trapped in anachronisms, trapped in the past. OK, for culture, the Arab world can still split hairs over Islam with the same energy as the Westerners can split hairs over Christianity. Bravo."

Well, there have been plenty of "lately" times when Christianity has done nothing positive whatsoever for humanity. Like I said: They had a tremendous civilization. They have certainly fallen far.

Well, my original frame of comparison is "enlightenment versus tribal" and The Enlightenment was as lethal to Christianity as its successors may be to other models. And the civilization was not Arab, it was Muslim. <== That point is, IMO, oftenmissed, since it took some spreading of what was a synthesis of a new Arab's idea, mixed the sensibilities of the town and nomad, and as it spread it appealed to a surprising mix of audiences.

"I disagree, the Arab world you refer to is a romantic fiction, it was a Muslim world, which included enormous Persian cultural influence. It assimilated some Greek influence, and later adopted Turkic influence. Ottoman period was a furtherence of that civilization, in a similar vein to how America is a furtherence of the Enlightenment of Europe."

Yeah, and christian civilization is no more pure. The Arabs swept aside a decandent and collapsing Persia; they certainly presided over a great revival in the many centuries of rule, and I think it would be foolish not to give them a great deal of credit for their civilization. Sure, the Romans stole a whole lot from the Greeks, and the Persians as well. Does that really dig in to their accomplishments? Not really. Contextualizes them, yes.

That Arabs hardly swept away the Persians. What they did was give them a new religion, what Persia gave them, and the Muslim world, was the societal framework that allowed Islam to grow and achieve empire. The Turks fell in on that, an already established Empire that was built along Persian organizational lines. The Persian social influence on the various Caliphates is well documented. You can win a war, but it is not uncommon that part of the conquered people rubs off on you. Tortillas, anyone? Sushi, anyone? Frankfurters, anyone? :)

The Ottoman Empire is only a furtherance of the Arab civilization in the sense that the Third Reich is a furtherance of Napoleon's empire; same territory, totally different rulers, with the Arabs resenting the Ottomans, rather than the Turks resenting Arab rule. Turks and Arabs are no more the same "civilization" than the French and Germans, perhaps even less.

The French and the Germans we know today both grew from Germanic peoples of Western, Northern, and Central Europe, and both, in time, evolved into Enlightenment based societies. Funny you picked the French and the Germans, they are a funny pair of cultural siblings, and both cultures spawned important Enlightenment thinkers. The French language is a Germanic/Frankish corruption/modification of Latin, just as Spanish and Italian are different corruptions/modifications of Latin. Napoleon as "new Holy Roman Emperor" was a very valid comparison, given his Catholic heritage and his coronation. (OK, he put the crown on himself, but he did invite the Pope. ) Hitler as a "new Holy Roman Emperor" along the lines of Charlemagne or even Napoleon, is not that broad of a reach, however, he was post Enlightenment and post industrial, Napoleon was proto industrial, and as such colored by that significant change from "family/clan/God/religion" to "state" as foundation of a nation. His Aryan principles were IMO a fusion of pre and post Enlightenment mythology.

"Moscow in the era of USSR was a center of great arts, one of the world's finest ballets, and a global center of education. Does that mean any Russian yearns for a return of deapotism, or that I should consider despotism as an equivalent good to the Western approach?"

Well, some do. And, no, you shouldn't. But, accepting the right to self determination of the peoples involved, you aren't the one who needs to be convinced. If the Russians want a new Stalin, then all we can do is try our best to persuade them otherwise. If the Arabs long for a long lost dream of the great rise of Islam, which very many of them do (though perhaps not more than the Enlightenment thought back to the Rennaisance), we cannot deny them that simply on the basis that we prefer our own model. I don't think either their history or their religion prevents them from developing a just modern civilization, perhaps even more than ours. They just have to sort it out for themselves. Much of the problem this whole thread is dealing with is the inherent difficulty assimilating one fully formed western democracy into a developing middle eastern context, acknowledging that it may be impossible, or damaging, to transform one into the other.

Glad we agree on some of this, and I agree that nothing prevents forward movement . . . except maybe a people's own psychic traps. The very existence of many progressive non- fundamentalists is strong evidence in support of your point. :)

Two problems:

1) They won't be left alone to sort it out for themselves, history and time move forward, and IRL there are no Time Outs. The world shrank in 1993, forever, for better or worse. I won't say I much like the rate of change, but that does not alter the fact that it exists. Future Shock is still very much in place, thirty years after the term's invention. (Toffler coined it, and wrote a book of that title.)

2) The hard part: how do you convice those who need to be convinced? <== the first one to figure that one out gets my vote for the Nobel Prize, the one Bill Clinton was after.