Moggy wrote:Karl wrote:Rightey wrote:Sorry Karl, I don't understand your issue here with my statement.
Err, my issue is that you seem to genuinely believe that the reason South America hasn't produced ISIS-level terrorists is because of their
glorious Christianity? The real answer is nothing to do with religion: South America produced bad but less extreme criminals because the political and economic situation there was bad but less extreme. The president of Argentina is going to be the next chair of the G20; the region was clearly never a write-off economic clusterfuck like much of the Middle East is.
Nothing would change if the Middle East had a different religion or a mix of religions or whatever. If your instinct is to think otherwise then you need to do some serious reflection on how you justify that, because from where I'm sitting it's bigoted nonsense.
I mostly agree with Karl.
The history of South America is very different to that of the Middle East. Sure they have both had dictatorships and interference from the West, but the differences are extreme.
The history of violence in the Middle East goes back a lot further than S America.
The ME does not have a blanket religion covering the whole region like S America, the ME has tensions between Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Hell, they have plenty of tension just between the various Islamic groups even if we just ignore the Jews and Christians.
S America is mostly the descendants of colonisers who decided for themselves (at the expense of the natives) the borders of their lands. The population (and the grievances!) of the ME goes back thousands of years but had its current borders drawn by the European powers.
In modern times, S America has not had a religious power like Saudi backed Wahhabism spreading religious extremism amongst the region.
Personally I think Karl is wrong that a difference mix of religions wouldn't change anything. If the entire ME was Catholic then the entire history of the religion (from the crusades onwards) would be different. Without the Ottoman caliphate, who knows how the religion would have developed? But that's not the world we live in and it's pointless speculation to imagine what could have been rather than what is.
I agree with Mogggy in that ultimately this line of reasoning is futile because there is no real good equivalent for the middle east in other parts of the world. I mentioned S. America because it was a highly chaotic region that had a lot of turmoil in the past. Not just because it's Christian. You can point to other regions but again those would not be prefectly analogous.
That being said though there are certainly some things that would be different if the ME was a different religion. Chief among them would be the absence of Al-Quesadea or however they call themselves. They attacked the US because they saw US bases in Saudi Arabia, the muslim holy land, as a violation of their holy law. To my knowledge no other group has such a rule to exclude outsiders for a whole country.
Of course that's not to say that some other group might not have emerged in that situation with some other motives. But ultimately it's not really a strong argument either way as there are to many variables.
