The problems in the ME are not due to the Western powers; they are due to the culture that inhabits the region.

If Sykes-Picot was the source of the problem it would be easy to solve by political means. But the root of the problem is cultural and religious, and hence not solvable via any simple short term means. The Arab Nationalism of the '60 could have resulted in a solution had the problem been simply a matter of politics and borders. It was not; the rise of Islamism throughtout the region is due to the local cultures.

Blaming the European powers fits the Marxist playbook, which is why the idea has so much sway in some circles, but it doesn't make sense.

This

It's more likely both culture and politics. Sykes-Picot was a cluster fuck. They lumped groups of people that have hated each other for centuries into brand new countries that had no idea how to govern and then said best of luck.

They took a majority Shia area, lumped in some Sunni minority, and then handed the power to the Sunni's, installed a king, and called it Iraq. What could possibly go wrong?

I prefer the whole gun/terrorist thing myself!  It's this passivity towards terrorists, that got the World in trouble in the first place!  These mid eastern, shithole, terrorist states should've been leveled 40-50yrs ago!

MARXISM IS AN EUROPEAN IDEOLOGY. It was born in Germany, implemented on the national level in a European state, spread to the world by European "fellow travelers." The biggest ideological threats to human civilization, the most horrible mass murders in human history, all of them occurred in the 20th century and the result of European civilized ideology (national socialism and communism).

The Islamic world is not without blame, but to ignore hundreds of years of foreign rule, often done terribly, pitting supported minority sects against others, solely as a way to gain control of local markets for international mercantile exchange, has a way of ruining any country.

If people are to accept that the founding fathers of the United States had a legitimate reason to rebel against their European overlord, and that during that time period Great Britain wasn't even the most powerful force (France was), it means that European civilization wasn't as awesome as the revisionist historians want to believe. Just because they share common ancestry, some customs, and maybe language doesn't mean they and we are the same. Americans and modern Europeans have little in common, even less when you consider American ideology (freedom, equality, justice), compared to the horrible govts of European history, the best of which were autocratic benevolent dictatorships or constitutional monarchies that favored the Lords over Commons.

The process of Western peacefulness began in England and the Netherlands in the 1500s and had increased since. Steven Pinker has done some interesting research into the issue, you can google his books and youtube videos.

It was the Royal Navy that ended the international slave trade and also protected south American countries after they gained independence. Of course, the increasing civilization of European countries didn't make them instantly modern civilized states. Some events, like the Brits forcing the Chinese to open up the opium trade to non Chinese represent a "mixed" behaviour since they were using old methods to push new economics.

The savages were always more warlike but less capable in war.

Frankly, any effort in the region would have been a clusterfuck. Due to local culture and religion. But this means there is no easy solution. Including education.

everyone needs education on how to shoot properly...no brainer!

Educate them with a belt fed machinegun.

The answer to this (and many of the worlds ills), in a poetically ARFCOM fashion, is both.

You need both.  Guns to kill the current terrorists and educate to prevent future terrorists.

You need to take the words quoted in the OP in context. A girl and her family live in bumfuck Pakistan, the super tribal Swat valley, where even the Paki military can't really travel. One of the lowest rates of literacy in the world, haven for the Taliban, many of the fighters that go into Afghanistan originate in Swat. They are utterly fanatical about Islam, even though most are incapable of even reading the Koran. So the girl tries to promote schooling for girl children, a concept that has recently been banned in the area by the Taliban. Because she rebels against them, wanting to teach girls how to read and do basic math, some Taliban asshole shoots her in the face. She survives, gets the Nobel Prize, and becomes a celebrity because she refused to be silenced by the Taliban, even after continued threats against her life. For an ignorant girl from a tribal area, this lady has more balls than most of arfcom put together. She's not a warrior, she just wants to educate others, especially girls, on things most American kids learn in 1st-5th grade. And she's not wrong that a basic education would alleviate much of the region's problems, especially the religious extremism.

Yes, many of terrorists are highly educated, they are largely more educated than the average person, regardless of whatever ideology drives them to kill (Salafist jihad, Communist, nationalist). But being educated does not increase the chances that someone becomes a terrorist, causation does not equal causality. Quite the opposite really. In most cases, once a person becomes educated, they realize the folly of 1,500 year old religions, though a few will rebel and become extremists. But those few that rebel and grow violent do not represent the others who do not.

She has a point. Islamists do rely on ignorance pretty heavily. Why do you think they indoctrinate very young, poor kids?  Most of the Arabs I know who are secularist and atheist are highly educated too.

FPNI

You are correct, sir!

Most of the ME was under Ottoman rule prior to 1920. The problems of the region are not due to Europe.



We are just England v2.0. The American Revolution is best understood as a followup of the English Revolution (also an American revoultion BTW). Our rule of law stems from the English Revolution and resulting English Bill of Rights and even deeper into English history.

One thing to notice is that England has one of the oldest governments in Europe (dating back to 1688) but they don't have an actual written constitution and are technically a monarchy. Yet we are much more like them then we are, say, Mexico, which has a written constitution and a system modeled on ours. The key significane is the importance of culture, not the exact details of the form of government.

Glib treacle.

There was a story just last week about how engineers are the most likely to become jihadists.

An education just makes a better terrorist.

I'm an engineer.

Many Muslims in the engineering departments. Few in feminist studies. It is most likely that those most likley to become jihadists are also more likely to study engineering.

Anyone able to find out the authenticity of the quote? My Google-fu is weak today.

Sad that she got shot in the face, but she has just become a picture for groups to further their chosen cause.
Just like Gabby "coloring books" Gifford.

You really want to pick the 1500s as some era of peacefulness? Are you insane? It was the start of one of the bloodiest periods in European history. The Protestant Reformation split Europe and caused near endless war. You brought up England. What was happening during the reign of Henry VIII (1508-1547)? Was it peaceful or did religion cause tens of thousands of deaths and the creation of a whole new religious order (Church of England)? What about his daughter, Bloody Mary Tudor, how did she get her nickname? For a brief moment, until the saner and meeker Elizabeth I gained the grown, England was the focal point of the war against the heretic Protestants. Did you forget that big ass armada from Spain that was heading toward England? They weren't bringing presents, but pike, shot, and sword.  

Let's not forget the joys of the Thirty Year War, that fun little war that depopulated the German principalities by 25%. Meaning it was one of the bloodiest in human history. Strictly a sectarian war, Catholic vs. Protestant.

Netherlands during this period was one of the worst places in the world to be a member of the Protestant faith. Controlled by the Hapsburgs of Spain, anyone of the wrong Christian sect was butchered and their wealth confiscated by the Church. Sound familiar?

Great Britain only banned slavery in the early 19th century. And the reason they did it? Religious fervor as the result of the Great Awakening revival that created abolitionist ideology. Ergo, Protestant religious fervor ended slavery, not some form of secular enlightenment.  

I see your liberal brainwa.. I mean education is paying off, young lady.

She's right.

I'm not sure how she intends to educate Muslims to give up Islam.

Says the girl who is only famous for getting shot in the face.

The Ottomans were foreign rulers to the Arabs. They might have been Muslim themselves, but they did not consider the Arabs equals to themselves. In addition, the Ottoman govt was notoriously corrupt, baksheesh was the rule, not the exception. They fucked up the Arab world, then France and England picked up the ball in the 1920s and totally fucked it up. Take a look at the provincial partitions of the Middle East during Ottoman Rule. Then compare them to the borders imposed after Sykes Picot. The former made sense, that latter was fucking retarded.



We are nothing like Great Britain. You'd need to generalize the fuck out of American history to even attempt to compare us to the English. We didn't even become a true world power until after WWII, and even then most of our foreign policy was simply to contain communism to prevent the world from ending.

England wasn't created in 1688, the significance of that date is of the Glorious Revolution, which allowed a titular king to be the figurehead, while giving control to Parliament. But even after the King (or Queen) still had much say in how their country was run, see George III and how he influenced the Revolutionary War and many Acts of Parliament.

The American Revolution was completely unique in its methods and ideology. We weren't trying to overthrow the tyrannical King and replace him with another less tyrannical one. We didn't want a Parliament. Our founding fathers specifically created a system of govt that was nothing like the govt of Great Britain. Sure, we borrowed English Common Law, but that doesn't mean we tried to be like them. It means we took the only sane parts of English history, which gave rights to the common man and established a system of governance that was based on written law and not the whims of a tyrant, and we rolled with that.

To even suggest that the United States culture and ideology of freedom and equality is anything remotely close to most of European historical govt is a symptom of a complete failure to understand both European history and American govt. We DESPISED most of the culture, especially how they governed themselves, which is why we created our unique system for this "American Experiment."

Teach people how to shoot.

The 1500s were the beginning of the Dutch Golden Age. The point is not that the 1500s were ideal, but that the trend towards peace and progress can be seen to begin at that point. I would throw the Reformation in as one of the elements that eventually lead to freedom of religion in the modern world. The events of the 1500s and 1600s in Europe led to the modern world of rule of law, prosperity and peace.

You don't start out with rule of law, prosperity and peace. You have to build it. Not all of Europe was pushing towards prosperity and peace, Catholic Spain was a retrograde force.

The main reason the Thirty Years War had such a death toll was the nature of warfare in the period (living off the land and often in people's homes) and its protracted nature resulted in mass starvation and disease. Native Americans killed about 20% of the English population in Virginia in 1622 by smashing heads in.

No, our culture was almost identical to theirs when we gained independence.

The political difference between our systems isn't particularly relevent. We had the opportunity to start from scratch, which gave us the margional advantage of a well written constitution and an improved form of government. But the cultures is what matters, not the government.

Oh, and I'm not saying "we wanted to be like them". I'm saying we were like them because culture.

Use guns to kill the educators. Then get new educators.

There was nothing peaceful about the Protestant Reformation. Allow me to state this again, there was nothing peaceful about the Protestant Reformation. If you want to take hundreds of years of history and delete it, so you can substitute it and make believe that writers like Locke and Hobbes wrote what they did because they were sick to death about sectarian warfare, be my guest. But don't expect others to go for it, it was a hell of a lot more complicated than you are making it out to be. Like calling Catholic Spain a retrograde force; a cute phrase that forgets that they were the strongest nation on earth for centuries and the effort to surpass them had nothing to do with secular enlightenment but because various Protestant kingdoms like Gustav's Sweden surpassed them in military might.

In WWII, roughly 2/3 of all deaths were the result of non-combat injuries or sickness. But that doesn't take away from the brutality of the war. Just like the 25% death of German people who had their lands deliberated razed purposefully to starve them into death doesn't make the 30 year war any less brutal than what it was. And it was a war completely over religion and the influence of institutions like the Church and the Holy Roman Empire influencing foreign kingdoms through force or threat of force of violence.

Its funny that you previously brought up slavery but wont acknowledge that it was religious fundamentalism that led to the abolishment of it. Much of European history had religion as the background for decision making, that only ended when Nationalism and communism replaced it as the driving ideologies to affect change and make war.

Education at 3250 ft/sec.

Well, I know that guns do a pretty bang up job against terrorists.  I seriously doubt that education will eradicate terrorism, but I know for sure that pithy statements from teenagers sure don't do a lot of good against terrorism

Our political climate was completely different. We were a group of English colonies who decided not to act at all like the English anymore. The political ideology of Locke and others, who gained almost zero acceptance in England, was embraced and actually implemented into our laws and constitution. Meanwhile, England was still dominated by a House of Lords made up of a hereditary aristocracy, a House of Commons controlled by mercantile rich, who drove the Age of Industry to such a negative extent and with so little regard for the plight of the workers that the kneejerk reaction was Communism. Another cultural ideology that we can thank Europe for. If you want to praise Locke and Rousseau and the Age of Enlightenment, then you have that same culture also that gave us Luther and the bloody Protestant Reformation, Marx and Communism, Hitler and National Socialism. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Mao and Pol Pot agree with your advice.

Pretty young arab with an emotionally charged past came up with a catchy catch-phrase is catchy.

Repeat it enough and it becomes the truth, but that doesn't mean it has any inherent basis in reality; only that the idea is what many people wish to believe.



Much like "negotiation" and "reason" and "diplomacy" are often thrown around in the context of dealing with terrorists:  keep hoping for change.

Who is more likely to beat the shit out of someone, or kill, because they don't like what the other person is saying? An educated adult with reasoning skills, a grasp of non-violent discussion about a range of controversial or important subjects, including those that contradict certain closely held religious learnings?  Or someone with under a 3rd grade education who bases their value system off an obsolete tribal/clan customs and a book written 1,500 years ago?

Pakistani people =/= Arab.

She is correct.  I am educated, and have learned from history that the only way to get rid of terrorism is to kill terrorists with guns.  Once more people educate themselves and learn this fact, the world will be a safer place.  Thank you.  Peace out.

Queue up the Key and Peele "terries" video.

You get the gist of what I'm saying.   :)


Feel free to get back to your concise review of World History - it's a fun read!

Progressives.

I don't see too many liberal college professors with masters in anthropology on worldstarrrrr videos.

No one individual is going to have a tactic for ending terrorism. Its just a quote from a single very brave young woman who faced off against some of the biggest scumbags in recent world history. But you don't end a war through violence, but by peace. Use of force only goes so far to solving a problem without causes more problems. There needs to be a way out. Terrorism is a method chosen because its cheap and it largely works. But most of the people who utilize it aren't PhDs and engineers. They are uneducated scum working off a single ideology they embrace to the point that it allows them to perform unspeakable acts of violence in the name of whatever cause they believe in. Education helps fix that because it gives alternative theories and a mindset of an open and free exchange of ideas without the threat of force to suppress them.

Bingo.

In HER mind you can, but not in the real world.


CMOS

Try disagreeing with one and watch how angry they get.

How many conservative and registered Republican voters are you seeing in those videos?

Weren't you the guy that just suggesting killing all the educators and replacing them with properly indoctrinated teachers?



Yep, that was you. You literally are recommending the worst parts of communism, the parts that were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people in the span of half a century. What makes you different than the progressives? Your ideology is different, your means to achieve it is identical.

Few. Because the most rabid of them evidently save their anger for arfcom where they post about wanting to commit genocide against 1.5 billion people.

Meaningless talk coming from someone who has to cover her head in public lest she be punished.

Yeah, liberals get angry and throw hissy fits. You really think pajama boy is going to throw a punch?

How many drunk rednecks with Bush '04 stickers on their trucks do you see getting in bar fights? In my area, a lot.