Quote Originally Posted by GoldenBoy812
Middle Eastern culture was of the grandest on the planet at the turn of the first recorded millennium. Since the Crusades, Islam has had a crushing grip on the emergence of new idea's as well as human rights. The region is currently controlled by an uncompromising ideology; an ideology that draws from a dark corner in an attempt to preserve it.

It is not that there is anything wrong with desiring to preserve your heritage and culture. The problem arises when education is allowed to be converted into a tool in which extreme, illogical, and close ended indoctrination is a demanded product.

Although US interests in the middle east are summarized as a function of economic necessity, a lack of presence/WMD control would be horrible. These are not rational people, and i could honestly see the entire middle east nuking each other into oblivion...
And the Christians found in the U.S. are rational people? Everything they do is in their own self-interest, too, they just have more wealth and power to do it in a more organized and more accepted, but no less brutal, way. It is very easy to believe that the Muslims are animals who would eat each other if it weren't for paternalistic Western control, but really, radicalism in its present form exists just because of the West. The West mandated the Middle East in the early 20th century and stole its resources while oppressing its people, they overthrew Iran's elected and popular leader in 1953 (creating the instability which led to the fundamentalist revolution), they have consistently backed a majorly oppressive force in the area (Israel), and they continue to push their economic self-serving agendas on people half a world away. If things were the other way around, I'd bet money that there would be radical Christian bombers. We're perceived as more rational simply because we've had a more cushy way of life and we've been in charge of our own affairs.

The propagandists are highly skilled---so skilled that your average Western is convinced that Israel is a legitimate state that only bends human rights when it has to, and that the West is morally superior. Little do they know of Israeli atrocities or the fact that the West is almost solely to blame for how fucked up things are over there.