“I’m honestly just waiting for Hezbollah to attack Israel and start a new war to distract from everything going on in Syria.” —- A Certain LC Student in my Modern Islam class.
facepalm.
there are so many things wrong with that statement that I almost want to die. I mean, I’m not an expert on the Middle East, but people so often use their ‘knowledge’ of what’s going on over there to inflate their egos and feel like experts or something. Especially IA majors (at LC)… Especially in light of the so-called Arab Spring, which people like to think of as some kind of revolution or reformation so that those backwards Arabs/Muslims/fundamentalists can finally be more like us, which a lot of people want to believe is what those poor, oppressed, backwards people want anyway… Chances are that whatever comes out of these movements is going to look nothing like what most Americans want, anyway…
If there’s anything I wish I could make everyone in the whole US understand forever, it would be that Arab=/=Muslim=/=a monolith and vice versa. The sheer complexity of post-colonial experiences in the Middle East is completely beyond me (I’m not afraid to say that) and completely beyond most Americans, especially those who have only studied this stuff in the classroom (American classrooms).
anyway, Hezbollah could attack Israel but it’s not because of some kind of conspiracy or friendship with the president of Syria. Not all the ‘crazies’ in the Middle East believe the same thing. Assad=Ba’ath party=secularism whereas Hezbollah= Shi’ism.
/rant.
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