According to a new study of public opinion by the folks who host the Doha Debates in Qatar, a clear majority in 18 Arab countries now thinks Iran poses a greater threat to security in the Middle East than Israel. The leadership in most of these countries has thought so for years. That average citizens now do so should be encouraging news for everyone in the region aside from the Iranian government, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
Some may find it hard to believe that so many Arabs think Iran is more threatening than Israel, but I dont. Leave aside the fact that Iran really is more threatening. Arabs and Persians have detested each other for more than a thousand years, ever since Arabs conquered premodern Iran and converted its people to Islam. The lasting ethnic enmity between the two is compounded by religious sectarianism. Most Arabs are Sunnis, most Persians are Shias, and Sunnis and Shias have been slugging it out with each other since the 8th century.
After the Iranian revolution against the Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeinis Islamic Republic exploded into the Arab Middle East with a campaign of imperialism and terrorism. Khomeini never concealed his ambition to lead the whole Muslim world, and the government he founded has been hammering the established Sunni Arab order with a battering ram ever since.
Iran had excellent relations with Israel before Khomeini scrapped the alliance and switched to the Arab side. Like his successor Ali Khamenei, he used violent anti-Zionism to win the hearts and minds of the Arabs. It worked to an extent for a while. Most Arab governments didnt buy it, but the people often did.
As recently as 2006, Iran, despite the fact that it has a Persian and Shia majority, picked up considerable cache among Sunni Arabs for attacking Israel from Lebanon with its Hezbollah proxy. (Lebanese Sunnis werent very happy about it, but Sunnis in Egypt and Syria certainly were.) The Egyptian and Saudi governments were alarmed, and they condemned Hezbollah for sparking the conflict.
This was unprecedented. While it barely registered in the West, it was huge in the Middle East, so huge that some of the more paranoid Lebanese Shias started thinking that the Sunnis and the Israelis were conspiring against them.
Gulf Arabs give bombs to Israel to kill my people! one excitable individual said to me at a Hezbollah rally in downtown Beirut. The guy was bonkers, of course. Israel doesnt need bombs from the Gulf, and no one in the Gulf would donate or sell them even if Israel asked. Still, the man correctly sensed that Sunnis in the region arent as willing to team up with Shias against Israelis as they used to be.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is a minor historical hiccup compared with the ancient feuds between Arabs and Persians, and Sunnis and Shias. It has barely lasted a fraction as long and has hardly killed anyone by comparison. Arabs and Persians killed hundreds of thousands of each other in the Iran-Iraq war alone in the 1980s. The civil war between Sunni and Shia militias in Baghdad a few years ago was much nastier than any of the Israeli-Palestinian wars.
It took time for all this to sink in with everyday Arab citizens. For a while there was a disconnect between the regions Sunni Arab rulers and people. It looked like Iran, by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel, might actually pull off the most unlikely of coups in rallying the mass of Sunni Arabs in support of Persian Shia hegemony. That disconnect now seems to be over.
Thanks to the Iranian governments stubborn insistence on developing nuclear weapons, the age-old strife between Persians and Arabs, and Shias and Sunnis, may finally be eclipsing the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Robert Costa, National Review
In Congress's upper chamber, a Virginia fox may be the one to deliver the knock-out uppercut to Obamacare. Quiet, cunning, and independent, Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) has been on the sidelines for much of the Senate's health-care debate. Instead of ranting, like Bernie Sanders, Webb has been mulling legislative language in his office for weeks. Neighboring Senate staffers whisper that Team Webb is having a real tough time shuffling the senator out of the office to make appearances on the glad-handing circuit. It seems the man just wants to sit, study, read, and think -- strange priorities in the U.S. Senate. That's because, deep down, the man is a writer, not a lawyer.
Yet now, with Harry Reid's health-care bill on the ropes, Democrats are getting nervous about the brooding one. They're right to be worried. Webb -- not Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, or Evan Bayh -- is the real wildcard in the Democratic caucus. Where he'll vote, no one knows.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, is a longtime Webb watcher. He tells National Review Online that when it comes to Webb, "anything is possible."
"He's one of the most unusual high-level politicians I've ever observed," says Sabato. "He's unpredictable and chafes at party strictures. If things were left up to him, he'd cross party lines more often than he does. If you listen closely to what he says, you can tell he's not nearly as political as most senators."... That's because, deep down, the man is a writer, not a lawyer. If you live in Virginia, please call Senator Webb's office (202-224-4024) and politely ask that he not vote to end debate on Harry Reid's "manager's amendment." Give a reasoned argument, and keep it brief and to the point. In situations like this, constituent phone calls can be enormously persuasive. Anything that we can do to encourage Webb to assert his independence is worth doing.
Posted by: Mike ||
12/19/2009 14:26 ||
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#1
Yeah, right. He's just mulling over his price, like the rest of that scurvy lot.
Quizz : which western european has the largest northern african population? (80% of all cannabis consumed in the continent comes from morocco, which is a de facto narco-state with the full complicity of the local authorities, and the european networks are wholly dominated by Youths, with the legal response being very ambivalent so not to risk an "escalation")
#3
I would think 90% of kids being on anti depressants or some ritalin type drug is more a rpoblem than teens gettings baked.
I only tried LSD once, to no great effect, and funnily enough, I must admit the first times of my ritalin days were pretty interesting, certainly more so than any other illegal stuff (after that, it simply did nothing, no side effects, nothing, even if I took more just to see if the horror stories I was reading online were bogus or not).
#4
I was usuing Ritalin kind of as a garden variety term for ALL the stuff they out kids on these days when they are acting up. I just got my ass whooped. I don't know if you tried the same LSD i did but it had some effects. There is probably a vid floating around the net somewhere of me in subway sandwich shop makin an ass out of myself
Posted by: chris ||
12/19/2009 18:11 Comments ||
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#5
anonymous5089 - with your link... all I can say is Whoa! That explains a lot about Europe!!
#1
Thank you Besoeker for making this post available on Rantburg. The information provides a rational explaination of "climate change" based upon verifiable data.
Now please answer, how does one reason with an unreasonable man ? - Albert Arnold Gore Jr. -
His website Algore.com Official site taking the message of 'An Inconvenient Truth' to Congress.
Posted by: Crusoter Dark Lord of the Algonquins7749 ||
12/19/2009 11:41 Comments ||
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#2
how does one reason with an unreasonable man ? - Albert Arnold Gore Jr. -
Gore's problem is that he doesn't understand anything about the science or the climate. All he does is regurgitate a garbled mishmash of stuff he's heard or thought he's heard. Leavened, of course, with some old time religion - saving the planet rather than souls.
...There are real cultural failures here -- running right through our postmodern societies -- that allow the scare tacticians to flourish. In a sense it is an environmental catastrophe, although the environment in question is a psychic, rather than a physical, landscape. People have become unattuned to the most basic warning signals our ancestors used, to protect themselves against human predators.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
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