Terrorists

This semester I'm taking the second semester of geography. Right now we're learning about the Middle East. So, as you can imagine, there have been many suicide bomber jokes and "All Muslims are terrorists" comments. Sadly, I've actively participated in them in the past. I know I probably shouldn't have, but I did. So that's why I'm writing this blog. Because I want to prove that I actuallydo know that terrorists aren't all Muslim, and vice versa.

So starting out, a background on the Middle East. A lot of what we know of the early history of the area comes from the Bible, but many historians don't like it because it's "religious". All throughout history, in the Middle East, mainly near Jerusalem and Medina, there have been wars between different people. This is because of two reasons. One, there where some pretty impressive, and largely expanding empires in the olden days. Like the Roman Empire, who thought that they were so civilized, and that it was their duty to make everyone else civilized too! Second, there were the really religious wars like the Crusades. The Crusades are amazing! I'll probably write a whole separate blog on them. (See, I even give you readers something to look forward to! Aren't I such a nice person?) Over the course of the centuries, many religions have popped up from this area. Each has made its mark history, and cause problems for the existing religion.

So, it's basically it's the religions' fault that we have so many problems today. When the government of the time tried to exterminate or make life hard for the people of different religions, they didn't kill everybody, that would only feed the anger of the religion into growing larger. This has happened repeatedly for many religions and we now have two main types of Muslims, Judaisim, a few Christians, and several other faiths. And because the other religions have all, at some point, tried to wipe each other out, they've held grudges. The governments never helped, in fact, they've done the complete opposite. The governments are dominated by single religion and because of an inability to move out of the past, have held immense grudges and caused even more mayhem.

When a government like the U.S. then comes in to help, it makes some of the radicals of the country jealous of not being able to be like us because of their hard-hearted stubborness. (I might add that I think we're a very lucky country to have wise leaders such as Pres. Bush, who don't hold such grudges.) The radicals then focus on everything that the U.S. does, and, if we mess up, even a little, they get even more enraged and determined that they're right, and we're wrong.

But not everyone in that area are radical terrorists. In fact, the numbers of radical terrorists are about one tenth of the normal citzens. The reason we don't normaly hear this kind of thing though, is because the normal citzens don't go blowing up U.S. soldiers and bombing the innocent. In fact, most Middle Easterners live normal, and relatively safe lives. Many of the people in that area have the same likes, dislikes and goals as we do. They want to go to college and live a good life supporting a family. True, most of them are a different religion, but they aren't radical, 'all U.S. citizens must get nuked' kinds of people.

We seem very quick to forget that there are radicals in every religion like Hitler; Hitler was actually a Christian. Granted the Christians didn't like him and liked to pretend that he wasn't, but the truth is, he was. The terrorists are similar to Hitler, they give their area a bad name. In Hitlers reign, he created a very bad name for Germans, who, like the Middle Easterners, were mostly nice, innocent, yet terrified people.

"We live in a world of guns, bombs and terror. To conquer hate seems a nigh-impossible task." -Theodore Bikel