In keeping with their constant quest to saddle the USA with the fault for the growing unrest in he Middle East, the Washington Post has unleashed another article, replete with some efforts to blame-the-USA-first, titled “Across Arab World, a Widening Rift”.
In the first paragraph, writer Anthony Shadid illustrates the traditionally intertwined nature of Egypt’s Sunni and Shiite communities showing us how they have so easily coexisted in the recent past but quickly gets to the warnings of the danger of the Shiites “rising”.
Naturally, this is the fault of the USA who has left Arabs with a sense of “powerlessness and a persistent suspicion of American intentions.” The rise of unrest is also blamed on the “United States and others for inflaming it”.
Later in the piece, Shadid takes further aim at the USA in particular and the West in general.
“There’s a proverb that says, ‘Divide and conquer,’ ” Mohammed said. “Sunnis and Shiites — they’re not both Muslims? What divides them? Who wants to divide them? In whose interest is it to divide them?” he asked.
“It’s in the West’s interest,” he answered. “And at the head of it is America and Israel.” He paused. “And Britain.”
That sense of Western manipulation is often voiced by Shiite clerics and activists, who say the United States incites sectarianism as a way of blunting Iran’s influence. In recent years, some of the most provocative comments have come from America’s allies in the region: Egypt’s president questioned Shiites’ loyalty to their countries, Jordan’s king warned of a coming Shiite crescent from Iran to Lebanon, and last month King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia denounced what he called Shiite proselytizing
This illustrates the prosaic penchant for Muslims to resort to overarching and mostly absurd conspiracy theorizing. Blaming everyone but themselves is epidemic in Islam. After all, they are “God’s people” so they couldn’t be wrong, it is presumed.
Shadid does, however, delineate how embroiled the Sunni/Shiite rift has been since as far back as the 7th century.
The schism between Sunnis and Shiites dates to the 7th century, Islam’s earliest days, when a dispute broke out over who would succeed the prophet Muhammad.
Really, this article is quite useful in many ways, when all is said and done. One gets a good measure of much of the blindness to its own troubles endemic in Islam today — though perhaps the writer didn’t realize he had revealed it so himself. While still blaming the US and Western forces, this article clearly shows that these rifts and internecine troubles have been infesting Islam for thousands of years. And, if you read between the lines, you can see how Shiites have been oppressed by Sunnis for generations giving reason for this rift to grow, making it a bomb ready to go off.
“People in the region always complain about a Shiite crescent. You always hear, ‘Shiite crescent, Shiite crescent.’ That’s just a crescent. What about the full Sunni moon?” said Nimr al-Nimr, a Shiite cleric in the eastern Saudi town of Awamiya, who spent five days in police detention for urging that a Shiite curriculum be taught in his predominantly Shiite region.
There is one aspect of the Sunni/Shiite rift that is left somewhat undeveloped by Shadid, though it is given brief mention a few times in the article. And that is the role Iran is playing to enflame sectarian clashes as the Shiite Clerics ruling Iran flex their muscles in the region with their attacks on American forces, their growing Nuclear efforts, and their plan for a “Shiite crescent” of influence in the oil rich regions of the Middle East.
In the background is the growing assertiveness of Shiite Iran as the influence of other traditional regional powers such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia diminishes.
But, as Muslims of both Shiite and Sunni lineage look to the west as the problem, they too often avert their gaze from the problems closer to home, preferring to focus on the outsiders, ignoring their own culpability.
All in all, while this article does fit the general blame-the-USA line of thinking the Washington Post has settled upon, this article does, if you can overlook the blame-the-USA bits, a fair job giving a brief overview of the chief trouble of the Islamic world and it is an internal one that has been roiling for generations.
Now if only we can get American and Western leftists to see that we are not at fault, we’ll be on the road to helping them solve this problem. But, don’t look to the MSM and the Washington Post for much help there.
2 users commented in " Unrest in Middle East is all USA’s Fault… or it isn’t "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI think I might have made this comment to you before, but it bears repeating, as it is an obvious point that is often ignored.
“Blaming America first” makes as much sense as “blaming yourself first” if we take both of these to mean that the ethical focus should tend to be on things we can change. After all, we have very little control over others or other countries, and so it makes sense to focus on bettering ourselves, which is exactly what “leftists” (basically meaning anyone who dissents from the status quo for ethical reasons) often try to do. Leading activist/thinkers on the left, like Noam Chomsky, make this simple point often. Without resorting to violence and aggression, there isn’t much we can do to control other countries or peoples, and that only sometimes works temporarily (in the case of Iraq, it hasn’t worked at all). We can control ourselves by making sure that our foreign policy is not an impediment to peace and security in the region. And yes, one must admit that in many ways it has been. If you read the writings of terrorists like bin Laden, or study Middle East opinion polls and attitudes toward the U.S., you find that the primary grievances concern foreign policy: wars, occupation, opposition to a reasonable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc. I don’t say that all criticism of the U.S. coming out of the Middle East, or some places here (see Dinesh D’Souza), is valid. Much of it is stupid, like some opposition to religious freedom, women’s liberation, or tolerance of homosexuality. I think these are values that America represents well nationally, and that ought to be upheld and defended. But I don’t think opposition to such things is exactly the driving force behind anti-U.S. terrorism, and this seems clear from the best studies that have been done.
I hope you will take the time to read such studies, and recognize this simple point, which I think is valid.
I am just a 71 y/o none technology “Old Person” and my “Late” husband was a vetaren of WWII.
I am a patriot with ancestors in the Revolution.
BUT George W. Bush and Dick Cheny have turned my beloved country into a “Dictatorship” and I know that our founding fathers are turning over in their graves and I am also an addict to history!
If you have any doubts then please research history!! And by all means study the presidency of Harry Truman.
Need I say more???