Dear Herman Yutic,

You really need to read my entire posts
if you're going to quote from them and
not simply selectively quote them to suit
your own agenda.

Friedman is not advocating Western interference
at all as you well know. It was quite clearly
explained that there is a need to find another
way to partner with people there to change the
context "out back."
"If the price of oil were half of what it is today -
these regimes would not be able to resist political
and religious modernization so easily."

People don't change when they're told they should.
They change when they tell themselves they must.
Falling oil prices would make them tell themselves
they must.

Anyway, re-read that particular post - and perhaps
you may eventually comprehend it.

<<So it should not be considered a true religious war.>>
With all the nationalism, colonialism, occupation, war, injustice and poverty in the middle east the same could be said for the whole conflict ridden area.

The Irish, on both sides used their religion for support and cohesion and sometimes as justification for atrocities, even though the conflict was really about land, nationalism and conquest. Much like the middle east today.

Coincidentally Robert Fisk has a recent article on just this subject.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/02-0

Dear mikk,

Thank You for the Robert Fisk site.

You may find the following interview
with him interesting as well:

http://www.medialens.org/articles/interviews/robert_fisk.php

Fisk as you know is the most decorated British
Correspondent and has been based in the Middle East
for the past 25 years. His knowledge is unparalleled.

In this interview he answers questions about
Islamic fundamentalism which are very revealing.

Dear Bazz, I asked my husband the question you put to me <
" If Northern Ireland became incorporated in the republic, would the Catholics keep killing Protestants ?"

He said that the majority of people in Northern Ireland are protestant and they do not want Northern Ireland to join the Republic at all. They want to remain affiliated with England.

He believes that even in the unlikely event that they were all under the Republic of Ireland, the 'troubles' would continue between the two religions. The history of problems is just too ingrained in both sides for either religion to be happy to coexist in Ireland.

At least there is an uneasy truce in Ireland at present. Maybe there also is hope for the current problems between Islamic and other religions?

Foxy,
In one of your earlier posts on this issue, you surmised the reason for the targeting of the U.S. by fundamentalists who you reasoned found it politically helpful to have an alien enemy.
However, the U.S. has been the driving force for decades in implementing a scorched earth policy for any country or region that resists it's overtures for it's brand of globalized free trade. Usually the victim country gets entangled in the tentacles of the IMF or the World Bank and in order to repay "generous loans" is forced to privatize services and jump into bed with multinationals. Countries and cultures have been worn down relentlessly to accommodate America's capitalist juggernaut.
A different template was introduced by the Bush Administration this time in the Middle-East with Iraq as the main staging point.
Naomi Klein, in her book "The Shock Doctrine" in a chapter titled "Erasing Iraq" quotes Thomas Friedman, who was quite forthright at the time of the post 9/11 invasion about the significance for Iraq to have been chosen as the new model for wiping the slate clean in the Middle-East. "We are not nation-building in Iraq" wrote Friedman, "We are doing nation-creating".
Klein says that Friedman is among many onetime war advocates who has since claimed he did not see the carnage that would follow the invasion. "It's hard to see how he could have missed that detail", she says,"Iraq was not an empty space on the map....If nation-creating was going to happen in Iraq, what exactly was supposed to happen to the nation that was already there?"
In the case of Muslim nations in the Middle-East, one doesn't have to try too hard to see where the anger and sense of grave injustice comes from.

Bazz. had a look mate you have done good things for our hobby, 73s bloke, and examinator have Ireland about right.
England was not alone in divide and conquer tactics, remember they gave birth to Pakistan.
But Islamists problems while maybe fed by others once are self inflicted.
All reildgions have used the Catholic vs Protestant type thing, to win totally unrelated wars.
That interfaith hatred is often as bad in Scotland, watch the football teams oppose one another Catholic and Protestant, those roots go back to migration to Ireland.
I n time, too soon in fact, the next 20 years we will find few who are not concerned about even more growth in fundamentalist blind hatred.