Bashir Assad Quotes

What is ironic about this fact is that 1000 years ago, the Muslim Middle East was scientifically and mathematically far in advance of Europe. However, after about 1100 AD, the Muslim religion began to lose its intellectual tolerance and cultural appreciation for science and innovation to the point where innovation of any kind was regarded as heresy, and the logic and empiricism that was present in early Islam disappeared, and there has been little scientific innovation and progress in traditional Arab Islamic nations ever since.

While Peres and many others think that the Arab nations can become developed countries, there are major barriers in the way. One is oil. No country that has had a great deal of oil has ever developed. Then there is education. Israel’s technological success requires a very high level of education in secular subjects which no Arab nation provides. The Western cultural values of inquiry, freedom of thought, individuality are were in large part developed from the traditional Jewish values. The Muslims had these at the early 2nd millineum. But political and religious forces since then, have created contemporary Arab cultures whose vaues are in many ways antithetical to modern technological development.

The pre WWII Zionists who returned to the Holy Land brought with them, the education, culture, technology, and particularly the modern scientific methods of agriculture and irrigation. The Arabs lived the same way as they had done since 1100 when the Muslim world "closed" to new ideas and change. At that earlier time, the Arabs had the advanced agricultural techniques which Europeans copied throughout Spain and Italy. While advanced for 1100, Arab agriculture was backward by early 20th century standards. Arab farms could mostly just feed the land owning family and produced little surplus, and they wasted huge amounts of water in the process. The returning Jews assumed that the Arabs would welcome these new techniques as well as the public health, medicine, engineering and science. They thought that they were bringing great gifts to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land. However, even though the Jewish farms improved the quality of the produce and increased the productivity many times with much less water needed, for the most part, the Arabs would not depart from their traditions and religious dictates. One of the reasons Islam had been so successful in its inception was that it prescribed behavior in every phase of life, not just religious. But then it became very difficult to change. So the benefit that the Zionists thought that they were bringing back to the Middle East were not seen as benefits by the Arabs whose various cultures and countries have remained religiously and tradition bound even into the 21st century.

She is a leading American Arab who is a Syrian expatriate. The examples she gives in the beginning of the quotations are relatively recent atrocities where Muslims have attacked and brutally murdered other Muslims. She articulates one of the theories to explain the Islamic propensity to brutality and violence that the religion itself, when taught literally which it so often is, actually produces an inclination and glorification of brutal violence and develops a tolerance and acceptance of Islamic violence.

The Israeli Arabs have a much higher standard of living than their coreligionists in the Arab controlled parts of Palestine and even Eqypt.See {588743} for more information that is related.

Many of the Kurdish people want an independent state—Kurdistan—of their own. There are large concentrations of Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. The Arabs who have a number of independent states in the Middle East came to the area well after the Kurds, but in the vicissitudes of history, the Kurds have not ended up with a country of their own.

The Center is in Holland. Chouket is Tunisian

for al-Jazeera in Qatar

The Shah of Iran was one of the worst violators of human rights in the world. His secret security service were brutal thugs who murdered and tortured with impunity. Carter however in most other instances made human rights a centerpiece of his foreign policy. In Iran he overlooked the human rights abuses as the United States needed the Iranian oil. When the Iranians finally revolted against the Shah, they resented Carter and the United States for allowing the Shah to operate his empire with no regard for civil rights while the U. S. continued to preach about human rights. When the Iranians established their revolutionary government, they got the worst of all worlds. Iran became a fundamentalist theocracy, had their economy deteriorate despite their oil wealth, and the Human Rights violations of the Revolutionary Government were worse than the terrible record of the Shah.

Western Saudi Arabia. Although his claim to rule all Arabs was never recognized by other nations and he was deposed by other Arabs in 1924, his sons Feysal I and Abdullah ended up ruling Iraq and Transjordan.

The Arab States opposed the creation of Israel. They promised that Jews could like in Arab lands and would have “absolute protection” and “no discrimination whatsoever”, There was no need for a separate Jewish since the Islamic states were open to Jews. At the time, few took the statement seriously. The Islamic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had been a general officer of the Nazi SS. There had been hundreds of anti jewish riots where Jews were killed and if they were lucky, only their property would be destroyed. Historically, only in Ataturk’s Turkey could Jews and Christians live as equals in an Islamic state. Under Islamic law, “people of the book”—Christians and Jews—could live in Muslim nations but had to pay special taxes and had many restrictions on their public visibility. Since 1947, there is not a single Islamic state in the Middle East with the exception of Turkey where Jews had “absolute protection: and were not discriminated against.

In the original language the word Sham is used as a metaphor for beautiful. It represents a region of the Middle East known for its beauty.