Why Many Muslims Hate the West. (You probably won't read this post.)

[whatthehey]

59. The trouble with victimhood apologetics

Is that it is easily toppled by analogous counterexamples, where victims of equivalent treatment have responded far more peacefully.

The genocide of the first American population has already been raised. Their descendants are far more prone to poverty, bias and the rest of the ills mentioned than the descendants of their oppressors, and yet there is no weekly bombing or execution or terroristic landgrab from today's Cherokee or Arawak. Mongols would no longer exist if the (typically seen as ruthless and authoritarian in the extreme) Chinese government extended the same response to past mistreatment as is blithely considered normal and nigh inevitable from today's Muslims here.

It's not European then American hegemony and economic ostracism that is at the root of current Islamic terrorism. The Muslim world has been on both sides of that hegemony before vis a vis the Christian powers in history, and has managed to more or less peacefully co-exist after the original Arab conquests, the Crusades, the Ottoman Empire, etc. Syrian Muslims were no more oppressed than Spanish Christians (which is to say hardly at all for most of the regime, barring a silly flareup now and then) under opposing rule.

What has changed is the nature of the religion itself. There are thousands of beautiful Muslim artifacts, made by Muslims in states ruled under Muslim law, over many centuries, depicting the Prophet. The idea that it is a capital blasphemy (indeed the idea that blasphemy is de facto capital) to show his image is a regressive relatively modern invention, as is the loss of the idea that "People of the Book", Jews and Christians, should be treated with decency and tolerance and allowed to practice in peace. Hamas currently calls for the slaughter of Jews as a matter of course

"“Let me say, loud and clear, to our people in the West Bank: Don’t you have cars? Don’t you have motorcycles? Don’t you have knives? Don’t you have clubs? Don’t you have bulldozers? Don’t you have trucks? Anyone who has a knife, a club, a weapon, or a car, yet does not use it to run over a Jew or a settler, and does not use it to kill dozens of Zionists, does not belong to Palestine.”

The conqueror Ummayad Caliphate in Spain, with far more power to achieve this aim had they shared it, instead allowed Jews freedom of worship, their own courts, and integrated them into the government bureaucracy. And lest anyone think this was because there was no military conflict too, they extended the same rights to the Christians who had been their military opponents.

Take away the recent (mid 20th C perhaps?) regressive fundamentalist version of Islam form these same people and you would get Turkey, not ISIS. The Ottomans too were utterly defeated by the West, but it's generally not from Turkey that we see sandpapering womens' faces, beheading atheists, and bombing Westerners. The difference is in sectarian lunatic theology given secular power, not in history with the West.