Madrid, 11 March

Absolutely. The politicised Islamist minority are very definitely not the mainstream of Islamic opinion. Purely anecdotally, I was in Casablanca and Fez last year, some 5 weeks after the Casablanca bombings, and everyone I spoke to (a lot of people, the tourist industry has completely collapsed post 9/11, and everybody wanted to talk to me) seemed genuinely pained by the portrayal of Islam in the non-Islamic world, and were keen to separate their opposition to Israeli and US policy towards the Palestinians from support for terrorism.

Having said that, the "War on Terror" has undoubtedly increased passive support for fundamentalism, and helped to further politicise Islam. I'm not convinced the current policy is actually helping a great deal, but I'm not convinced by any of the alternatives either.

Very well put.

Religious fundamentalist states of any persuasion tend to be morally repugnant and illiberal to the core.

Certainly not Islam. The Koran is extremely clear that a good Muslim welcomes a foreigner as a friend. That was certainly my Moroccan experience, BTW, a degree of openness and lack of hostility that you won't find in London. I lost count of the number of times I was invited into strangers' houses to drink mint tea and discuss politics.

-- Ian

 

The big problem with this is that the outgone spanish govt. tried to do the scum thing and get political gain from the catastrophe.
Perhaps the people saw this and were disgusted, rightly so.

However, al quaeda are going to view this as a success in both casualties AND in influencing the political process of a country, AND getting the coalition out of Iraq. Whether this is true or not, that is how they will think. which means, as well, apart from carrying on despite the wests refusal to aquiesce to terrorism, they will carry on as their morale has been infinitely boosted, and we will see more of this sad sorry situation. They are simply people who call themselves muslim, yet do acts that are so repugnant, real muslims are embarrassed, ashamed and nice people.

Blair has to do Bush's bidding as we still owe him trillions from the 2nd world war. We are the US' slave.

I think the only thing for these, say 5 people if guilty, is 5 people for 200 lives, what 20 lives each, how can you repay that, you can't, but string em up in the centre of spain and let the people at them.

Theauthorities know some these people, and still they let them in and do their dirty work, maybe it is a breach of civil liberties, but I can understand internment from this point of view, do they have to blow us up before we can move on them?

 

Indeed, the main problem has come from the state of Texas!

Tony.

 

Hi, Ian.

While I like your leftish tendencies (you will say: extreme lef, not leftish - OK) I cannot agree with the phrase. It so happens that I actually read the Koran (well, not all of it). And it is actually clear about smashing the enemies of Muslim faith. Don't forget the fundamentalists take the Koram litteraly.

And even if you serach the New Testament (the Old one is full of it) you will find references to the enemies of the faith, perhaps not so clear cut als im Koram aber quite clear.

 

Its one thing to be an enemy of Islam, but we and those Spanish are not, we and those who died didn't care about Islam being conquered, and we as a nation are not hell bent on destroying Islam.
Sure maybe in the past, but not now. Each to his own, I wish us all to exist and benefit from the richness of mutual beliefs.

the thing is, they view an occupation of an Arab country as an attack on Islam, and it is totally unrelated, we went to war to excise a class A1 cnut of a leader, right or wrongly...maybe in a sense saddam was partly right in controlling his country if he believed it would be FAR worse if he didn't, but that is condoning
dictatorship

they percieve it rightly or wrongly as an occupation by zionist, globalist, bush and blair,
evil, etc...

The OT in the bible was about destroying the enemies of Israel, partly to establish the state of Judah.

Or do they view all Westerners as enemies..?

 

That is what I said. Not all, of course. I know some Muslim people and they usually are very nice and extremely polite.

Even the guy who wants you to buy carpets in Tangier or some such place is incredibly polite, extremely intelligent, and makes you buy things you don't want just because you have to like him (I could tell a few stories, here).

But fundamentalists really hate our guts.

There is a lot of empirical data on xenophoby. I'm running short of time (I had an accident that kept me from work, but it is healing, and I will retreat a little from now on). Truth is: all the data seem to show that our species is built for xenophoby. This has an important evolutionary advantage, because humans form identity groups that compete with each other. The 'other groups' are usually seen as composed of evil people (consider our view of fundamentalists, nazis or stalinists - we think they are monsters; well, some may be quite good people with funny ideias).

So attacking and killing these 'other' people is usually viewed as a good deed from the moral point of view.

P.S.: The point that most arabs are not fundamentalists is certainly a good one. But I am speaking of fundamentalists only. Most Europeans didn't agree with the strike on Iraq; but the ones in power - the ones that decide - did agree. So this is a war between those in power, not between countries or even cultures.

 

I've read the Koran too. Like any religious text, it's regarded as divine truth, and unbelievers in that truth are not exactly celebrated. (As you say, this is true of the Bible too.) But it would be a parody to suggest that's its main thrust, or the main thrust of the Bible for that matter. Of course, all of these things can be read selectively to justify just about anything, and have been throughout history. But there's nothing intrinsic to Islam to make it an enemy of non-Muslims, and my point, I suppose, was that anecdotally at least, my experience is the exact opposite (Morocco being only one example). Every Muslim I spoke to for any length of time in Casablanca and Fez told me that they regarded it as their duty to welcome strangers, and acted on that duty with tremendous generosity. Discussions about politics and religion were more open and friendly than I would have imagined before going there.

-- Ian

 

Sorry, this is stretching a point to breaking point.

Nationhood as a product of evolution? Sounds bogus to me.

-- Ian

 

I don't know we are not that different to the monkeys in terms of basic behaviour.

They have a pecking order, a leader, they fight between themselves, they view other groups as hostile,

I suppose every part of us is a real complex mix of evolution to this day, simply the way our country has become due to the effects of the issues and factors that affect it is the sum total of the factors affecting the people in it and the external shaping by the worlds influences, economics, politics, weather, wars, history, culture, I can see the point....

 

FWIW I've lived in two muslim countries (Turkey and Iran) and I've never met more friendly people, particularly Iranians.

As an example of how attitudes have changed towards the British in Iran, we (me, my brother and my parents) were hiking in the mountains above Tehran one sunny afternoon shortly before the Islamic revolution there and some students heard us talking English. "Are you Americans?" they asked. "No, we're English" replied my father. "Ah, excellent, we love the English"...followed by a listing of all the English footy players they could remember the names of

They still came and tried to burn down the British Embassy though. I was in my father's office there at the time and some students came in and said: "Would you be so kind as to leave the building as we're about to set fire to it". So we did. Then they did set fire to the building but only half heartedly. What followed was like something out of an Ealing Comedy as we and a handful of other embassy staff attempted to get the utterly ancient water pump working in order to pump water out of the swimming pool. Once we'd found enough diesel to fuel the pump and found a hose without holes in it the fire had burnt out and we all had a good laugh about it

I remember the day the Shah left. Everyone was ecstatic. On the way home from school we had the minibus windows open and people were throwing in sweets. Everyone was honking their horns and just so happy. The Shah was an evil dictator who tortured many people. Everyone was looking forward to the arrival of the Ayatollah Khomeini. I doubt they could imagine what he would turn out to be for them

A few months later we were evacuated on RAF Hercules planes to Bahrain and then onto Kuwait and London with BA.

I've been dying to go back to Iran ever since. One of the most beautiful countries I've ever been to and has a fantastic climate too.

Michael.

Michael.

 

good on yer mike..my thoughts too,

the media gives the impression Iran is a dusty desert full of religious fundamentalists.

The most horrible unfriendly people in general I have found have been some british!

 

I've been around the world a bit (well, nowhere east of Damascus and not to Canada, but most everywhere else) and people are nice everywhere, from village shops selling diesel in Tanzania to a Bolivian father hitching his three young children a lift with us so he could help sort out another foreigners vehicle. All achieved with very little common language skills.

FWIW the creepiest place I've ever been is Syria.

Paul

 

Actung: Long, but interesting post. Really.

I agree with your previous post. However, I think xenophobia is the result of evolution yes. And I know many Arabs to be extremely kind - when I lived in Belgium, one of my best friends was Moroccan, and it was he who arranged the meeting with the ultras.

But, and that is also an answer to Data,

We are very different from monkeys and apes: they have rivals. We have enemies.

An enemy is a prototype - think of the way Jews were depicted before the last war. It tends to embody everything that is bad. So we dislike them.

Also, when one mistreats somebody else, one tends to think that we did nothing wrong, hence that person deserved mistreatment.

There is a lot of data along those lines.

And why do you think racism is so difficult to get rid off? Because it is a learned tendency? Then explain to me why *every single culture* that has been studied hates somebody else.

There is a story that summarizes this rather neatly.

Once, a chief of a South American village (or perhaps of a Papua one, I don't correctly recall) was asked by the Anthropologist (every forlorn tribe has one, nowadays - they even make contracts!!) was offered a present: he would be able to go for a ride in a helicopter and see the land from a distance.

He asked to take with him several very large stones. The anthropologist was puzzled, and asked why.

The chief said that as they would probably pass above an enemy village he would like to throw them over the other chief's tent.

That is typical. I could tell you dozens of such cases. For instance, all the North American Indians (not, I'm not pc: Native American!) had a name for themselves; that name meant, in all cases 'person'.

By the way, Indians are often very irritated to be called Sioux (an insult: the way some other tribe described them: they call themselves Dakota or Lakota), Esquimaux (which means, in Algonquinian, 'raw meat eater', a great insult) whereas they call themselves Inuit (or smaller groups of the Inuit nation, as Amassalimiut) and so on.

The correspondent, in our culture, would be to say that English=Person, therefore non-English=non-Person.

And if one thinks of History, that is what happened. I think it was Tones who recalled that, during one particular crusade, the instructions were to kill ALL people; God would later claim his people.

Even now, if there is an explosion in Burma that kills 150 people and a rail accident in Britain where 50 people were killed, to whom goes your sorrow - I mean impulsively? Well, just watch the news. A trifle in England is blown out of proportion and some terrible thing in Burkina Faso is almost ignored (it has been renamed, but I don't remember right now; it used to be the Upper Volta). Unless it is some horrible disease WE can catch.

I don't mean to say we ought not to try to overcome this tendency.

But we are all well fed Europeans (even if the English don't like to be called that).

Has some of you ever been starving to death? Have any of you ever had a pack of wolves in your trail? Did you ever fear dying of cold because there was no shelter available?

The vast majority of us will say no to all those questions. We live in complete luxury. Just look at this forum: we talk, without blushing, of expending £10 000 on a hi-fy system. We live in incredibly expensive houses or flats. Our problems are 'should we buy a Volvo, a BMW or an Audi.' If we are ill, we go to see a doctor or the National Health Service (declining, yes, but is exists) and one does very seldom think of death before we are, say, 75.

So we cannot expect people who really live under very hard circumstances to have the time to think of other groups in terms of kindness. Other groups are competitors. That is it.

Well, this is becoming too long, and no one will read it. So I'll stop.

 

It certainly seems that the power structure behind every society needs someone to blame / look down on / fear to keep their population compliant. Religion is a great way to keep a population under control by quite literally putting the fear of god into people (the Catholic church obviously being experts here). Paranoia as manufactured by governments has a similar effect, the Republican US government being the true master of the art. People who peddle fear always have an agenda…

Tony.

 

But that's a a socio-economic observation as much as an evolutionary one. It also doesn't explain the current politics of the Middle East, which are rather more complex than your theory of competition allows.

Reductive explanations of social and cultural behaviour, which try to suggest a single causal framework, whether that be biological, mystical, political, or economic, can't even begin to grasp the complexities of social organisations and individual behaviour within them.

-- Ian

 

Ian:

I know that. But I cannot possibly give my theory in full, here. Anyway, it is not a reductive theory, as I allow for cultural variation (and think I can explain it biologically) and agree that culture takes off by itself. It may even counter biological tendencies.

Nevertheless, my theory explains why we all share:

- a tendency to identify with a group (see Naim or M-n-:JOEL: ) at the slightest provocation (a toss of a coin will do it: it has been shown!!)

- a tendency to attribute to outgroups intrinsic traits of behaviour

- a tendency to explain in-group behaviour in terms of circumstances

- a tendency to be totally reprogrammed by our culture

- the fact that every group is based on kinship (not genetical, but classificatory, i.e., cultural) cooperation

- the fact that the well being of the group is present in virtually every society studied (something which is absent in animals except for eussocial ones - ants, bees, termites, mole rats)

- the fact that religion (another cultural universal which I believe has biological - albeit rather indirect - roots) helps to unite the group and to ostracize the outgroups.

- the fact that human groups are not very kin related (because of outbreeding) and yet are cooperative

and so on.

If I publish this is English I will send you the paper if you want to read it.

That said, of course there are economical reasons to war. But that's the whole point: evolution is also economy based. So stating that wars stem from socio-economic reasons may defend either the cultural or the biological approach.

We are straying a bit. But this is interesting. Cheers.

 

OK, that's a bit more interesting. I'd like to see a biological explanation of culture that isn't ultimately reductive, no-one's managed to come up with one to date to my knowledge.

If you ever publish in English I'd very much like to see a copy.

-- Ian

 

me too!

Yes granted we are not identical to monkies, but if you examine their behaviour, and then observe individual peoples actions, you will be very suprised, they display almost the same actions yet on a more sophisticated and hidden level, yet strip away, and you see monkeys doing the same thing!! its quite funny!

mate seeking, macho posturing, desire for status(buying bmws to flash in) getting to the top of the tree, intimidation, ganging up, grouping, ad infinitum. The sun reading lager swilling man really is very similar to a monkey in his BASIC behaviour, so am I.

All we are as individuals is a hugely complex mixture of what we have inherited from our forebearers, and the sum total of our life experience to date. Eveything be it social, cultural, ecoonmic, political, religious, advertising, probably affects and impacts us in some way, and shapes our person.
Our community multiplies this by all the people, our region, eg south, then our country by its institutions, history, education, social, political, economic, legal, technological evolution, multiply this by groups, factions, clans, tribes, religions, and you get a MASSIVELY unfathomable complex picture of the world we live in, which is ever evolving and changing and every event affects and colours every other.
Its quite fascinating, overwhelming, scary and truly a rich tapestry.