Thread: Anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment in the United States

Originally Posted by Woofness

You seem to be arguing that violence is inevitable and religion is simply a channel through which people vent. I would say that more often the violence is a direct cause of the individuals strong belief or emotional attachment to the religion, and yes if it wasn't religion it would be something else.. a political view, a country, a family. Not because it provides a convenient excuse for their actions but because it is important to them and will cause them to be driven to the extremes of human behaviour it its name.

It's true that religion can be used to encourage violence, but the heart of the issue is that if people didn't have the propensity to commit this violence in the first place, or found such violence abhorrent through any means (religious included), they wouldn't accept the religious justification for violence. The people who commit violence in these situations are ones who are willing to commit violence in the first place. It's the same effect of normally law-abiding citizens in a riot situation who turn to looting because it is suddenly considered socially acceptable, if only for a short time. When the contraints preventing the use of violence are loosed, it will be used by those who wish to use it, and it won't be used by those who don't normally turn to violence, or see it as an easy escape.

Originally Posted by Woofness

...used in the context of the argument about whether the Quran is a book which encourages or justifies violence. As it does, and the Bible doesnt.

But the Bible does justify violence. There are numerous examples that I can think of that display extreme violence, for example, the battle of Jericho.

Originally Posted by Joshua 6:

21And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
24And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
27So the LORD was with Joshua; and his fame was noised throughout all the country.

Admittedly this is just an example of violence, but when we're speaking of religious texts, little more is needed. Any preacher wishing to whip his congregation into a fury could use this quotation to justify violence, for in spite of Joshua's egregious violence, "The LORD was with [him]; and his fame was noised throughout all the country." There are no negative consequences here for treating your enemies as though they were subhuman. Deuterotomy 20 gives instructions from God on how to make war on your enemy. Matthew 18 reinforces the concept that if there is an offending part of the whole, it's better to excise the part considered diseased than keep the body whole, which is an admittedly tenuous link that still supports the idea of complete removal of things that offend you. There is no concept of tolerance or acceptance in that, and this is easily subverted as a metaphor to use when preaching to your congregation. To top this off, Proverbs 20:30 says: "Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being." How in all of this does the Bible not encourage violence, or is very easily subverted into doing so, which has the same effect as though the quotations directly incited violence? In terms of effect, there is no difference, and saying semantically there is is a poor argument, because that distinction has no measurable effect in reality.

Look, I'm not Christian, nor have I ever read the Bible in its entirety, but it is not hard to find this stuff at all. I think most of this sentiment comes from some unwritten cultural belief that Christianity is anti-violence, which has about as much validity as the belief that the Bible never contradicts itself.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Oh absolutely -- I wasn't singling out Islam as The Violent Religion at all. All I was doing was pointing out the contrast between a religion like Islam is in certain places in the Mid East, and how it's able to be so effectively weaponised by political and religious leaders, and a religion like Church of England, which is mostly ineffectual and, in general, not able to stir up anything except tea.

Well, yes, but this is a comparison of the best of one field to the worst of another. An accurate comparison would be one made between violent extremist groups in Islam and violent extremist groups in Christianity. Comparing a moderate, easy-going sect of Christianity with a violent extremist group is going to give an obvious result. I realize that you're making a comparison between groups in power, but the heart of the organizations in power is the real differentiator here. If the moderates of Islam were in power and the extremists of Christianity were in power, the same comparison between the two is still faulty.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Protestantism is, as far as I'm aware, not the same thing as the Church of England, which is the Anglican Church. But I could be wrong. In any case, I don't think the example of the Irish Christians' war is the same thing as the religious warfare in the Middle East -- I only know so much about that particular conflict, but it doesn't seem like either Catholicism or Protestantism has been "weaponised" in anything like the same way; rather, there is a divide between the people and it's being fought over.

It's still, at its heart, the same issue - religions being used to encourage violence. The particulars of justifications are more means to an end in this situations. In this case, this is how Christianity is used to encourage violence, although other examples exist in history, such as, most famously, the Spanish Inquisition. The assumption made before was that Christianity is a religion solely of peace and does not encourage violence, but there are plenty of historical and modern examples of it being used in these ways, the same as Islam. As Christ himself said, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone." Condemning another religion as violent without first looking at your own religion, and this still goes for anyone who lives in the Western world, because they all have close ties with Judeo-Christian ideology on a cultural level, is a foolish thing to do.

Originally Posted by gwahir

I think you're misunderstanding me... I don't know of a religion that doesn't qualify as "violent", I just don't think they're all violent the same way. I'm not even saying Islam is the worst one -- I'm only saying it's uniquely used as a weapon.

I'm not clear on the meaning of this "weapon" metaphor. When you say that Islam has been "weaponized", what exactly do you mean? That's not a very descriptive way of putting whatever you're trying to say about the differences between Islam's role in violence and the role of other religions in violence.

Originally Posted by gwahir

But you already know that I disagree with you about your first point, that religion only justifies violence that people were already going to commit. I find that absolutely naive. It may be true in some cases, but not in the majority. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Jihadism. The Holocaust (maybe). The Irish conflicts (maybe). We have no reason to think that those horrendous things would have happened anyway -- they are FOUNDED in religion.

THIS is what's naive. These incidences of violence aren't really founded in religion. The Crusades are a particularly obvious cause of conflicts with definite geopolitical causes underlying the surface-level coat of religious symbolism with which they were justified. The Crusades were initiated because the Byzantines requested military aid from Western Europe against the invading Seljuks, eagerly endorsed by the Popes for political reasons, and perpetuated by a combination of social and economic factors in Europe. The Spanish Inquisition is another easy one, it's political/social root causes are connected with the desire of Spanish Christian monarchs to weed out and remove elements within their kingdom that were perceived as politically/socially threatening or potentially undermining. They wanted a religiously homogeneous kingdom for political reasons, not because they were oh-so-devout and thought that it was what God wanted them to do.

With all due respect, you are calling other people naive, but you are making arguments based on notions that anyone who has seriously studied this issue would have been disabused of very early on.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Honestly, with no religious motivation, do you think the conflics in the Mid East would be anything like they are now? I doubt there'd be one, let alone one this complex and violent.

Yes, without religious motivation, the Middle East would still be as messed up as it is today. Practically every conflict in the Middle East stems from root causes associated with things like land, mineral resources, water rights, mistreatment of one ethnic group by another, severe economic inequality, resentment of a population towards a corrupt political elite or non-democratic/repressive regime, and so on and so forth. The Iranian revolution and ensuing theocratic regime, plus the Iran-Iraq war? Check. Palestinian militancy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Definitely a check. The Arab-Israeli wars? Check. The Lebanese civil and subsequent violence? Double-check. Everything that's happened in Afghanistan since the Soviets invaded? Check. The violence that has afflicted Iraq since we invaded? Yes, you better believe it. These are only a handful of examples but like I said earlier, I practically guarantee you that you will not be able to come up with apparently religious conflicts that haven't had underlying non-religious causes.

I appreciate that these conflicts have become so wrapped up in religion and religious justification that it's hard to see past those things, and it's very easy for an uninformed observer to say that religion "obviously" causes them. That doesn't make it true.

Originally Posted by ephekt

Of course there are cultural aspects as well, but the primary source of "kill the apostates" is definitely the Koran. The Koran also outlines the ability/imperative to kill infidels as well as the reward for doing so.

You're not understanding me. I realize that the Qur'an is the source of Islamic law mandating death for apostates, and in some places, justifying warfare against 'unbelievers'. Pointing that out isn't the same thing as proving that the actions of violent Islamic groups/sects are caused by those passages. Those passages are the justifications they use for violence that is, at it's root, motivated by other factors. So you're not really making an argument at all, just saying "nuh-uh" in response to those of use who are arguing that Qur'anic content isn't the cause of Islamic violence.



Okay, sycld:

Originally Posted by sycld

However, as you say, the common conduct of members of a religion is just as much a part of the religion as strictly what is canonical or doctrinal.

Yeah, I don't disagree that there are more violently-inclined Muslims (or at least more violent Muslim groups/organizations) in the world today than there are violently-inclined Christians or Christian groups. What I disagree with is attributing this to something that's intrinsic to the character of Islam itself, and saying that Islam is violent by it's nature.

Originally Posted by sycld

Regardless of what is stipulated in the Qu'ran or whether Jihad is defined as a more metaphysical struggle rather than a truly military one, there is something fundamentally wrong with modern Islamic culture.

This is a blanket statement and while I understand what you're trying to say, I don't agree with the way you've put it. There is no such thing as a unitary "Islamic culture". Islam accounts for about one quarter of the world's population, ~1.5 billion people. They have a shared religion but not a shared culture. The cultural diversity and diversity of thought within the Islamic world is immense, as it would be within any other group of that size, geographical distribution, and varied historical and ethnic background.

I'd be comfortable saying that there are severe cultural problems in many parts of the Islamic world; or that many Islamic societies/states/populations have such problems. I would avoid blanket statements, though, because they are practically guaranteed to be inaccurate in a case like this.

Originally Posted by scyld

Unfortunately, the reality is that Muslims with moderate attitudes regarding their faith, tolerance of other religions, and who believe in non-violent resolutions to conflicts are in the minority.

This is a statistical claim; what's your source? Most of the info I've seen on this topic (and I've seen a lot, since it’s a huge part of my field) seems to support the opposite conclusion, at least with regard to actual terrorism/violence. I can't recall ever having seen that much data about tolerance for other religions or similar issues, but at the very least I feel confident arguing that a majority of Muslims don't support terrorism/violence. Do your own research and see how many reputable studies you can actually find saying that a majority of Muslims believe the things you say they do.

And even insofar as Muslims do support violence, I’d be careful attributing that entirely or even largely to Islam. I feel pretty comfortable saying that if you put non-Muslims into the same historical/social/economic/political conditions that we see Muslim violence/terrorism emerging from today, plenty of them would similarly support or sympathize with the use of violence against their perceived oppressors. They wouldn’t dress their struggle up in Islamic religious trappings as Hamas and Hizballah and al-Qaeda do, but the basic effect upon them would be the same (they’d find another ‘vehicle’ for their violence instead of radicalized Islam).

Originally Posted by sycld

That's not to say that there aren't perverse practices justified through religion amongst adherents to other faiths. But none are so widespread as they are in Islam.

I don’t necessarily disagree, I’m just disagreeing that many of these practices come from the teachings of Islam, rather than some other source.

Originally Posted by sycld

Just take a look at countries ran by Muslims. Most of them cannot separate church and state. As my father said who taught English in Saudi Arabia for a year, there the Christian Bible is (or at least was) treated the same way as pornography. Turkey is secular through a rather brutal enforcement of social secularism.

This I don’t disagree with; the biggest single problem I do see with Islam is that basic Islamic scripture—Qur’anic scripture—makes zero distinction between church and state. This IS a problem with Islam (and Turkey’s solution, while I agree with it in principle, really just exacerbates the problem they’re trying to fight in some ways—they need to wise up and realize that banning political parties doesn’t do away with the social attitudes that caused those parties to emerge, it just strengthens them and the banned parties always reform within a few years, e.g. AKP and Felicity came out of Virtue Party, which itself came out of Welfare Party and the MNP/MSP before). Anyhow: Yeah, failure to separate church and state is a problem that most Islamic countries have to some extent—in cases like Saudi Arabia and Iran, it’s near-total.

At the same time, though, I think it’s rather unfair to entirely blame Islam itself for the failure of Islamic societies to adopt and internalize the Western invention of church/state separation. It’s definitely a problem within the Islamic world but its roots lie not only in Qur’anic scripture, but—like religious violence—in other factors. In other words, just as we have to ask why religious sects and groups form around violent ideas in the first place, we have to ask why Islamic societies haven’t embraced church/state separation nearly as readily as Western societies (or alternately, why Islamist political groups have been able to seize power in Muslim societies and create governments like that of Iran). The ayatollahs never would have been able to come to power in Iran, for instance, if a history of Western political/economic interference and the tyranny and ineptitude of the Western-backed Shah hadn’t created the social and political climate of 1979. The basic mechanism is the same one that I’ve been talking about this whole thread with regard to violence. Again, I don’t disagree that Qur’anic content shoulders some of the blame for Islamic societies’ failure to separate church and state, but it’s far from the only cause. A number of Muslim states would probably have much more secular governments and cultures today if not for various foreign policy decisions on the part of the US and Britain especially.

It’s also important, when discussing Muslim societies where there is no church/state separation, not to confuse the abuses of particular rulers with what Islam mandates politically. The fact that the Qur’an recognizes no church/state separation doesn’t mean it supports or advocates many of the things that go on in Islamic states—the repression, the terrible treatment of non-Muslims, the draconian legal codes, and so forth. Most of the Wahhabi dickery we see in Saudi Arabia, for instance, was invented by the Wahhabis themselves and not taken from the Qur’an. The same goes for most of the repression practiced by the Iranian government.

Originally Posted by sycld

Even Malaysia, the largest Muslim state with a rather religiously diverse population, forces all ethnic Malayas to submit to Shrariah law, and the Shariah courts rulings can countermand any ruling from a secular court.

This isn’t at all accurate—who told you this? The Malaysian legal system is based on English common law with a parallel sharia system which is only applied to Muslims, usually only in non-criminal matters. There have been proposals that it be expanded to apply to all Malaysians regardless of religion, but currently it does not; the only set of laws that apply to all Malaysians is the country’s secular common law-based system. I don’t like Malaysia’s system and it does violate the principle of separating church and state, but not nearly as egregiously as you claim it does.

Originally Posted by sycld

The latest "Islamic state" is Chechnya, where a Muslim was elected as president of this constituent state of Russia. At first the Kremlin was quite supportive of him, as they looked upon him as someone who could bring peace to the region and solidify Russian control of the region. Now, he's forcing all women to wear Hijab, supports honor killings, and is otherwise stripping Chechnyans of their human rights in the name of Islam.

He might be doing it in the name of Islam but that doesn’t mean he’s actually adhering to anything in Islamic teachings. Ramzan Kadyrov’s rule has about the same relationship to Islam that Tomas de Torquemada’s activities had to Christianity. I appreciate that it’s example of the repression that exists in some Islamic societies but I don’t think there is much of good argument that this repression occurs because Islam says it should.

Honor killings especially are not advocated or called for in the Qur’an and have nothing to do with Islam even if the people committing them try to pretend otherwise. The fact that so many Westerners have come under the contrary impression is especially sad.

Originally Posted by sycld

Sure, in India, there are Hindu extremists. There are Hindu terrorists. There was even some legitimate cause for concern when a party with Hindu fundamentalists leanings had controlled the central government for a time. But India is still at its heart a secular democracy, with free religious expression and an open society. The current prime minister is, in fact, a Sikh and not a Hindu (and by and large a very good leader). Pakistan, on the other hand, is a hotbed of Islamic extremism with an small educated population under siege by a larger population of poor uneducated people leaning towards extremism and a military that often supports militant fundamentalism against the wishes of its civilian government. There is little tolerance for practice of any religion other than Islam. Pakistan is poorer than India, yes, but before the partition of these two states Lahore was a cosmopolitan and diverse city.

I think Pakistan’s situation is a lot more complicated than you are implying, though. It isn’t a convincing argument to suggest that just because Lahore was a cosmopolitan city before partition, Pakistan as a whole had same conditions and ‘potential’ as India at the time of partition and therefore should have developed in the same way, and Islam is to blame for the fact that it hasn’t. Pakistan was not in the same condition as India at the time of partition, and it did not go into the post-partition era with the same circumstances, prospects, and internal issues, and its history has been shaped by some very different external factors too.

If we want to get into a discussion about the specifics of why India and Pakistan have gone in different directions since partition, I think it should have its own thread. I’d be quite happy to participate in it. Here, let it suffice to say that I don’t agree that the blame for Pakistan’s problems can be laid at the feet of Islam, and that your argument to that effect is uncompelling. Lahore’s pre-partition character doesn’t mean much in regard to this question.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Alright, you can convince me if you answer me this: would these fights have been as massive (and in some cases, would they have happened at all) without religion?

Certainly. The continual push of movements such as the Crusades had more to do with wealth and acquiring it as well and political power struggles more so than the dressing of religion. Religion, in these cases, is the vehicle through which the leader exercises his control over the masses, getting them on their side and willing to fight and die, but it's not the only vehicle that's used. Nationalism has been used in the past, much to the same effect. Your argument is analogous to: "If there wasn't any such thing as the idea of a nation, would all these countries have fought each other or so severely?" It's not addressing the initial urge for the fights, but instead the dressing that's used to encourage the violence - addressing the symptoms and not the illness itself.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Would there be land conflics over the very glorious Iraqi landscape without religion? Would anyone care what happened to the little tiny scrap of land that forms what's known as Israel? Why would there be fights over oil or refugees if the land itself wasn't so god damn holy?

Of course there would still be fights over oil - don't be naive. Any static resource that's consumed on that level means large countries need to ensure a proper supply to feed their demand and if conflicts are what's required to ensure this, they would exist. To question what would happen to the state of Israel without religion is a massive can of worms that doesn't solve anything. If you remove the religious reasoning of wanting a holy land, you still have a group of people outcasting another group of people from what the latter sees as their homeland - do you honestly think there would be no hostilities after that point? An example of this is the protests that Native Canadians hold in various parts of the country when the government starts shitting on them. Admittedly, we're less violent in Canada, but that's a combination of culture and the fact that, in spite of the injustice, our basic needs are being met. We don't live in a warzone, we have access to clean water, food and shelter, which many of the Palestinians do not have. Because the Palestinians don't have these basic necessities, their fight becomes that much more desperate, and that much more violent because of it. The anger that's there is less religious in nature than it is addressing more visceral needs, such as food, water, shelter and the fact that the current generation was forcibly removed from their homes by an external force so another external force could live there. Religion fits into this as the vehicle through which the anger at the oppressed's circumstances vents itself through violence. Removing it won't solve the problem.

edit: feel free to ignore this last paragraph and question. Gwahir, you already asked this question in another way, and Syme answered with more detail at the beginning of his gigantic post, so I don't know why you'd ask it again.

editedit: Man, Syme answered all of these questions already in the response you quoted him in - you're asking for slightly more detail and not bothering to look into it yourself, while clinging to your already established, underresearched beliefs that support your detest of organized religion. The issue here is that you're still concentrating on a symptom, on the vehicle through which the initial urge moves. The initial urge, or the illness in this mixed metaphor, is the political desires of the leaders at that time, all of which were concerned more with personal wealth and glory than the sanctimony they clothed their reasoning in. That a government would want a homogenous population is pretty obvious - it's easier to control a single unified mass than it is a hodgepodge of cultures. Look at America as an example, because there are so many different cultural groups vying for attention and power, there cannot be any dictatorial control over the country. Spain in the time of the Inquisition is a different story, and they could, through the vehicle of religion, control their population in a dictatorial fashion.

You're basically saying, over and over again, that if a murderer stabbed someone with a knife in his right hand, if we cut off his right hand, or had it never existed in the first place, than clearly nobody would have been killed by him. We're saying that the violent desires or causes that make this metaphorical murderer act are still present, and another means would be found for him to accomplish his goals, regardless of whether or not the hand was present.

I'll address other points of yours, Syme, if I get to them. However,

Originally Posted by Syme

This isn’t at all accurate—who told you this? The Malaysian legal system is based on English common law with a parallel sharia system which is only applied to Muslims, usually only in non-criminal matters. There have been proposals that it be expanded to apply to all Malaysians regardless of religion, but currently it does not; the only set of laws that apply to all Malaysians is the country’s secular common law-based system. I don’t like Malaysia’s system and it does violate the principle of separating church and state, but not nearly as egregiously as you claim it does.

All ethnic Malays are considered to be Muslim by the government. Thus, it is true at least that all native Malays are forced to submit to Sharia courts.

Perhaps the matters they rule on are relatively trivial compared to the secular courts; that I do not know.

Sorry, you're right, when I read what you initially posted I thought you were saying that sharia is applied to all Malaysians (i.e. all persons living in the nation of Malaysia), not to all ethnic Malays. I misread your post and somehow overlooked the word 'ethnic' in there.

gwahir: I'll try to respond to your questions ASAP, I've been a bit busy so far this week (churning out papers about Islam and Middle Eastern governments, in fact).

Okay:

Originally Posted by gwahir

True. I'm saying that it is used by political leaders to spur their countrymen to violence in a way that other religions are not "used". Anti-religion kids often cynically claim that religion is a tool for the rich, powerful or clerical to control the masses. That's doubtful, because in almost all cases, those doing the "controlling" believe just as much as the masses. But in the case of Islam and the Mid East, I'm suggesting there are very cynical people pulling very terrible strings quite purposefully and in a way that suggests they are not such true believers themselves.

Hrmm alright... I don't necessarily disagree that Islam today is seeing more of this than other religions, but I don't think it stems from anything inherent to Islam either. It's just another part of the phenomenon I’ve been discussing: Of angry/disaffected people, who are open to the idea of using violence to resolve their grievances, having their anger channeled and directed via religious justifications for violence. Part of this process is of course the emergence of opportunistic or pragmatic religious/political leaders who actually do the channeling.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Alright, you can convince me if you answer me this: would these fights have been as massive (and in some cases, would they have happened at all) without religion?

Well obviously I think so, and if me simply answering that question in the positive is enough to convince you, then hey! I’m glad we agree now! But I suspect you actually want a bit more elaboration…

Originally Posted by gwahir

Would the butchery of the Crusades have gone down in history?

Do you mean, would the Crusades themselves have gone down in history as famously, or would the associated atrocities in particular have gone down in history? In the first case, yes, I think it’s certain that they would have—their geopolitical significance was MASSIVE, as was their social/political significance in both Europe and the Middle East, irrespective of the religious factor. In the second case, I’m not sure—part of the way in which these atrocities have been remembered (while many similar events throughout history, absent the Christians-vs.-Muslims aspect, have been less well-remembered)—does stem from the religious angle, and in fact stems precisely from the fact that keeping alive the memory of X religion committing atrocities against Y religion is one of the ways that manipulative leaders use religious differences to justify violence. Anyhow, I don’t know whether or not the massacres and such of the Crusades would be as well-known today if not for the religious angle, but certainly I’d feel comfortable arguing that they still would have happened. There was definitely nothing done in the Crusades that wasn’t also done in Christian-on-Christian warfare back in Europe (or in warfare throughout the Middle East and Asia), or else clearly motivated by non-religious factors (e.g. cannibalism at Maraat).

Originally Posted by gwahir

Would the Spanish Christian monarchs have wanted an otherwise homogenous kingdom? Did they?

Not necessarily, but saying that religion is therefore to blame for the Inquisition is confusing the issue, IMO. The fact is that in Spain at that time (as in much of the rest of Europe, but to a particularly strong degree in Spain), religious affiliation was the primary source of social unity and political loyalty. This was before nationalism was ‘invented’, remember, and before the emergence of political parties or anything like that. To a large extent, religious homogeneity was political/social homogeneity. So yes, the monarchy’s main focus was on religious homogeneity, but it’s because in their society, that was the particular sort of homogeneity that mattered the most when it came to political concerns like “do we enjoy the loyalty of our subjects?” and “does our kingdom contain internal elements that are unfriendly to its rule?”

If you want to get into why religion rather than anything else was the main social/political unifying factor, well, that goes all the way back to the social/political situation that came out of the Western Roman Empire's collapse.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Would there be land conflics over the very glorious Iraqi landscape without religion?

Absolutely. I presume that by calling it “very glorious”, you’re actually suggesting that there isn’t much worth fighting over in real terms, but this is an unrealistic way to look at it. It may look like a patch of shitty desert to us, but to the people who have been living there for thousands of years (and feuding with their neighbors over the good farming/grazing land, water access, local political/economic preeminence, etc.), it’s their home and its land, politics, and economic arrangements are what they care about. You can’t seriously claim that there’s no non-religious reason to fight over it just because it’s not as green and pleasant as whatever landscape you see out your back window. If you look closer at the ‘sectarian’ (Sunni-Shiite) violence that Iraq has seen recently, you will find that underneath the sectarian divisions are clan divisions and other non-religious divisions—some of them going back to before Islam even existed—which became aligned with the Sunni-Shia divide at a later date (just as the Sunni-Shia divide was itself originally a political one). These conflicts and feuds didn’t originate with religious differences even though those differences have been ‘painted’ onto them. So when these Sunni or Shiite militias go out and kill people from the opposite sect, or try to drive the opposite sect out of a given city or region, they are really carrying on a tradition of inter-community warfare that has non-religious origins but has more recently become identified with religious divisions.

And the existence of oil has of course only exacerbated these inter-community conflicts, because under that shitty desert is (at current prices) at least nine trillion dollars worth of crude. If you think that the ‘sectarian’ violence in oil-producing areas in particular is really about religious differences, I have a bridge to sell you.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Would anyone care what happened to the little tiny scrap of land that forms what's known as Israel?

Okay, this is an interesting one and I have to admit that the answer isn’t so clear-cut as it is for, say, violence in Iraq. Obviously, yes, the Palestinians would care just as much about being kicked off their land and treated like dogs even if Jerusalem wasn’t considered holy and even if the people doing it to them weren’t of a different religion. So I think it’s clear that you’d still have Palestinian militancy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even if those religious factors weren’t a part of the current situation. But of course the question we then have to ask is: Would the Palestinians have been treated in that way at all—would the Jews have come and done it to them in the first place, and thus would the situation even exist—if there hadn’t been this religious idea in the heads of some Jews that this particular scrap of land is where Jews should have their homeland? I.e., if not for the religious concept of a Jewish homeland belonging in Palestine, would political Zionism have emerged with its ambitions focused on Palestinian land. Tricky question. Obviously neither I nor anyone else can answer it conclusively. And my knowledge of the history of Zionism (and the specifics of pre-1948 Israeli history) isn’t as good as my knowledge of some other parts of Middle Eastern history. However: As I understand it, groups such as the WZO and the ZF—which bear primary responsibility for setting up the situation that led to the establishment of Israel in mandatory Palestine—were actually dominated by the voices of secular-nationalist and labor Zionists rather than the Mizrachi crowd. Chaim Weizmann, Walter Rothschild, and so forth. My understanding is that these sort of people also made up the largest part of Irgun and similar groups. And that their input was the main Jewish influence on the specifics of the partition decision, since it was mainly their groups that provided testimony to UNSCOP. In fact, as I’m sure you must be aware, the biggest bastion of Jewish anti-Zionism is (and was then) in the Orthodox branch’s more conservative elements, Haredim and so forth. Obviously I’m not denying that religious Zionism played a role, but as I understand it, they can’t claim to have provided the biggest impetus.

I guess we could then get into the question of whether secular Jewish nationalism, secular though it was, would have emerged in the same way in the 1800s and 1900s if the religious dimension hadn’t been present. Whether the Holocaust and pogroms would/could have happened if the religious dimension hadn’t been present. It goes on and on. But I will say (again, based on my limited knowledge of this area of history) that I think there is at least a decent chance that Israel would have been founded in mandatory Palestine even if religious Zionism as a force hadn’t emerged at all. In other words, the idea that the Jewish homeland belongs in Palestine is/was not purely, or even mostly, religious, and the forces behind it's application weren't either.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Why would there be fights over oil or refugees if the land itself wasn't so god damn holy?

You’re joking, right? You can’t seriously believe that competition for control of valuable mineral resources, or people being kicked out of their ancestral homes and subjected to terrible treatment, will only spark conflicts where there’s also holy land involved?

Also, I’m sure you realize that the entire Middle East isn’t ‘holy’. Most of the oil reserves that have played a role in causing conflict, for instance, are not sitting under any land that any religion considers holy. The “holy land” angle doesn’t even begin to make sense as an explanation for conflict in the Middle East, because it doesn’t even apply to most of the Middle East.