@the-cysko-kid said:

how do you know that I don't know some highlander type cunt? You don't know.....

@the-cysko-kid said:

No one here, certainly not me, ever claimed the middle east was an oasis of peace and love all the way up to the 1960's and 70's. I am only arguing about modern times. There was a time when radical Islam was not even nearly this uniformly distributed throughout the middle east. That's a fact. Doesn't mean that 1300 years ago it was the same. To deny the negative western influences in our modern times there however is absolutely and profoundly ignorant.

Doesn't change though what needs to be done now.

@the-cysko-kid said:

except that I actually know quite a few people from....let's see here....Jordan, Iraq, Egypt,Israel, Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon. Only the person I knew from Afghanistan was a casual acquaintance. And then there's the people I know, in my own family, who experienced the middle east before it became radicalized. So I've drawn my perceptions of the middle east from quite a few people of varying age's who are actually from there or who were there for long periods of time during certain era's. And the narrative is fairly uniform. It wasn't always like that.

So who am I supposed to trust? American/western media outlets selling a well designed narrative? Or people who were walking around the streets of Iraq, Iran and Jordan in the 40's, 50's and 60's? One of goodyears most decorated research chemists is a very close friend of my family's and he was born in Baghdad some time in the late 30's. He's a Christian though, but I take his word about what the middle east once was over any American who's read a few books and thinks he's got it down. My cousins wife is a Iranian, her family came here in the late 70's after the Ayatollah came to power. The grandfather is stone old so he knew what Iran was like in the 30's and 40's as he was already a teenager by then. Now these are people that have not much good to say about the mullahs but at the same time they also not ignorant of how the radicalized muslims got their start in Iran

And what I hear a lot from some people, including here, is so what? We were strong enough to do those things and people couldn't do fuck about it so life's tough. And if we go on with that bit of moral relativism than why is it surprise what's happening now? What ground does anyone have to stand on to complain that these people figured out a way to fuck with us because they have to drop into a deep zone when our military rolls through?

You can't have it both ways. You can't say well we're a world superpower of course we can go where we want and do what we want, who's gonna stop us? And then complain when someone figures out an end around.

But we barely talk about Africa, where islam extremism runs rampant too - including the likes of Boko Haram. Nor do we talk about places like the southern phillipines, where we have insurgent/terrorist islamic extremist groups blowing themselves up and kidnapping people.