Not only don't you get a right to services in the language, you're subject to being shot by zealots who know that Syriac = Xian. We heard about the Yazidi. We didn't hear about the Chaldean Xians. Same kind of thing in Egypt with the Copts--we don't hear about the persecution there until it's under al-Sisi's government, but we only hear a lot about it when Muslims finally, after decades of silence, are seen to be always meritorious because they protect a community *after* it was harshly attacked. Some might have been honest "protect the weak," some "protect the dhimmis," some "protect our honor." One of those is worth some sort of admiration; the other two, not, but that doesn't let people present them as all being under the guise of protecting the weak.
The worst non-Muslim state in the area is still better than the best Muslim state. The Druse had a rough go under the Ottomans, and only have some sort of rights under the French-installed Lebanese system, the Zionist state, and Bashar Assad. The "best nation" treats them like pig shit. And don't even mention the Armenians or the Greek and Kurdish genocide and ethnic cleansing (the Greeks had been there since 500 BC or before, only to be eradicated or nearly so in the late 1910s, the Kurds were the Medes and had moved in before Cyrus took over). Looks bad for the Serbs under the much admired Kosovar Albanians. And Russians don't want to be offended by hearing Ukrainian in the Crimea, or suspecting that news sources speaking Tatar aren't being subversive.
The "occupation" is also true for Russia pre-2013, and it was doubly true for the USSR in its heyday as an empire: That includes the Baltics, which one president described as occupied only to have a lot of left-of-center politicians say they were emphatically not occupied. We even pitched fits when the USSR was called an "evil empire," because they had all the services we wanted. Well, on paper. Freedom of religion, right to own language, excellent health care, free speech, right to a job. Except when they didn't. The US was worse, except in practice. Then, for the worst-treated Americans it was just like the USSR.
We left-of-center have a long history of saying the right things, but only when it suits us, and getting bent out of shape when others say precisely the right thing.
BTW, the Samaritans were all but wiped out in pogroms under the Ottomans. And ethnically cleansed during the "first intifada" in the early '90s by the Palestinians, forced out from where they sought refuge after pogroms against them elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire in the 1700s. They only have special status in the Jewish state, even though they're considered heretics.
Culture, though, easily survives language. You transfer a few words or reassign meanings, and it's done. Unless you confuse culture with trivialities like food (which usually also survives language change, but not so much intermarriage--unless one culture wholly assimilates).
= new reply since forum marked as read
