ISIS 'beheads teenage boys for listening to pop music and missing Friday prayers'

[guillaumeb]

69. I asked about Saudi Arabia because I have seen nothing recently about the Saudis.

And nothing linking Wahhabism, a Saudi specialty, to the various fundamentalist, violent Islamic groups. I make no claim that you support Saudi Arabia.

But I have seen a number of posts claiming that Islam=violence toward women, or Islam=terror, or the supposed incompatibility of Islam with values of tolerance.
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In Iran in 1953, a democratically elected, secular President, Mohammed Mossadegh, was deposed by a CIA sponsored coup that brought in Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi proceeded to install a monarchy that, while claiming western values, showed no tolerance for dissent. Mossadegh's crime? He wanted to nationalize the oil companies and use the money for infrastructure.

Pahlevi was followed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, a fundamentalist dictator. So US interference replaced a democratically elected leader with, ultimately, a religious dictator.

Egypt has been a US client state since the time of Anwar Sadat. No democracy there.

When you said:"I find it entirely depressing that it appears the only choices for Muslim countries in the Mid East are brutal dictatorships or religious freaks" I would agree that many times, most times, that seems to be the result. But the US has always been willing to work with dictators if it fits the needs of power politics. How much of that is the fault of the US and Europe I cannot say. But maybe if the US would actually stop interfering in the internal affairs of other countries the US could stop wasting trillions on war and actually rebuild this country.