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Showing posts with the label "syria"
AS:  I take your point, and clearly Europe to did see, as you call it, a great ‘sorting-out’, but of course that term as you’re using it describes a set of  different processes – or, I should say, historical events and catastrophes – ranging from the Final Solution, the extermination of European jewry to the ethnic cleansing that took place at the very end of and in the aftermath of the Second World War. But what all these events share is that they’re are not a sorting-out of primordial identities so much as they are political events, driven by war, state interests, racial ideology, etc. And so to bring the conversation back to the Middle East, I think there is, unfortunately, a danger in the West’s conversation about sectarian warfare, to treat these identities as if they were primordial and as if this conflict that we’ve been seeing in Iraq and Syria is somehow natural, this sorting-out is a natural process, when in fact Syrian and Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christians lived
One should add the folowing: even if we don't talk about the responsibility of the Western imperialist states in laying the foundation/condition of what is happing now in parts of the Arab world, one should at least mention the responsibility of those very same states in selling instruments of death right now to states like Saudi Arabia and Israel.  One also should mention the complicity of the people in the US, Britain, France, Germany, etc for allowing the sale of arms.  Disavowal