* The Middle East has become notably less “diverse” since 1900 among its citizen populations. The Levant was once 1/4th to 1/3rd Christian, and Lebanon had a Christian majority. More ethnic groups, like the Turks, Armenians and Sephardi Jews. Nearly all gone from the Arab world.
What has changed in the other direction is the oil-fueled migrant worker boom. It brought exclusive gated towns for the Western oil workers, South Asians held as near-slave labor, and Slavs for a time in Saddam’s Iraq.
During the 19th century, and up to 1956, the Western powers had clear technological advantages over the Arabs and before that the Ottomans. Islamism, or properly the Wahabbis began around this time but it took oil and the AK-47 to give it legitimacy. There have been tensions between Egyptian Islamists, of Al-Azhar, and what they consider to be the nomadic Wahabbi degenerate Saudi princes.
The particular rise of Islamism today has more to due with the simultaneous discrediting of liberalism, Pan-Arabism and Communism. The Brotherhood, and now ISIS, are the only political forces with vitality. Their defeat only prolongs the secular dictatorships which have yet to prove they can make a Singapore.
Of course, common understanding of the teachings of the Koran and Hadiths do imply a commitment to expansionist violence and third-class status for “People of the Book”. If the Muslim world somehow regained technological superiority, not likely for the cousin-marrying, the march of conquest will no longer be actively supported by a mere minority.
* As Kevin MacDonald has pointed out the peoples of the ME tend towards hyper ethnocentricism which explains the chronic instability. Segmentary societies always on the brink of communal violence, not unlike the conflicts noted by Enoch Powell as existant in India between different tribes and religions that still occur.
* I subscribed to the Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir’s magazine a few years ago. Their ‘political’ dogma was pretty simple. They didn’t have one! There was no need for it since Islam provided all the laws that were necessary the sole purpose of the ‘state’ was to enforce Islamic law. This made it unnecessary and even blasphemous to ‘vote’ for candidates in an election since, if Allah had already made all the laws, a legislature was redundant at best and evil if it passed laws that contradicted the Koran.
As already noted, the Ummah supersedes the idea of nation so to be an American or Egyptian is to negate the very essence of Islam.
* Most people in African American discussion boards that I have browsed through believe White police officers are a more dangerous threat to society than Islamic terrorists. They say poor Michael Brown was not murdered by an ISIS Jihadist, he was murdered by a White supremacist with a badge. They say ISIS ain’t committing genocide against our Black babies like them racist White pigs are.
* Of course world Jewry, with its millennia long history was raised in that crucible which is near-eastern low-trust hyper-competitive tribal ethnies.
After the Roman caused diaspora, Jews established themselves in Europe, taking with them the deeply ingrained tribalistic traits engendered with them in that cockpit/rat’s nest which is the Levant.
Relative Jewish success in the 18th/19th centuries lead to an Ashkenazi population explosion in Europe, which lead to a fierce battle for resources with gentiles. Ethnocentric tribalistic traits and tendencies gave Jews the edge in that Malthusian resource battle.
* I DO like Israelis like Netanyahu, they FIGHT! Instead of wimping out and rolling over to expose their belly. Like Pajama Boys or Paleos. Sadly most elite Israelis are as Pajama Boy as they come. But come on, Netanyahu was a paratrooper, and Ehud Barak a Mossad agent who helped kill the Red Prince terrorist of the PLO and made in his own words, the world’s ugliest Arab woman during that operation. What’s not to like? You want Boy Rubio? Aging Hillary! and the cankles and pantsuits and vodka and falls?
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As for Pinker, he’s desperate to try and salvage his obviously wrong idea that the world has gotten more peaceful. He sees an absence of WWI/WWII style industrial wars in Europe and figures like that famous New Yorker cartoon (the world is NYC, with Paris and Texas all crowded together) that’s the world.
1. The AK-47 lowers the entry cost into brutal warfare. No longer is a German sized industrial economy needed, cheap and reliable AK-47s can support brutal African or Columbian insurgencies for decades.
2. Drugs, illegal ivory, endangered species, logging, etc. can support an insurgency for decades, fueling violence that does not rise to the level of the Somme or Bastogne but is very high indeed. The FARC, Shining Path, etc. predate ISIS by decades and in the case of the FARC remain in operation. The violence is a way for young men who are NOT smart but able to kill to make decent money, at the expense of massive misery for everyone else.
3. Rise of globally networked criminal gangs like the Knights Templar, Gulf, Zeta cartels in Mexico controlling everything from mining, to ports, to agriculture pushes out the state and produces a Big Man feudalistic social structure in conflict with other Big men. Lacking the notion of Kingship and Divine Right, there is always a fight, with many casualties, even higher than Medieval Europe and there is no strong State to reduce personal violence between ordinary people and various free-range thugs looking for the next gang.
4. Muslim states have ALWAYS been more violent in this way, as the State has always, always been week. You can read any Bernard Lewis book, and his description of Ottoman Tax farmers mirrors that of ISIS, and how Saddam and Assad and Ghadaffi raised money. Tax collectors get a cut, instead of being part of a strong, centralized state run by an efficient, modern bureaucracy like say, the Kaiser’s Germany or the Meji Restoration government.
From Mohammed’s death, the Muslim world has been the scene of violent battles for power and succession, rivaling or exceeding late Roman Republic, and Imperial battles. Only outside forces: the Turks, Mongols, and Persians have ever put a temporary lid on this dynamic.
5. Only Egypt and the Saudi princes have found solutions to Muslim violence and the example of Mohammed — go camp out in the desert, raise followers, raid the cities and become the new Caliph. The Egyptians have been ruled by the Army since the overthrow of the monarch, and the Army has kept the lights on, been less corrupt than other neighboring armies, given some improvement in daily life, and brutally suppressed by ultra-violence the Muslim Brotherhood to keep some semblance of nationalism and military power versus other nations, not limited to Israel but including the Sudan and other threats to the Upper Nile.
Saudi Arabia has been more Wahabbi than Mohammed, and spent a lot of money in the balance on clerics and external jihad. Money alone has not bought peace, they have had to be as rigidly Islamic as the Taliban and support Jihad where it has been a backfiring problem — creating cadres of experienced fighters thinking they not the ruling Princes should rule the Kingdom.
Every place else has been a disaster jump started by the AK-47.
Even in Latin America, you have the FARC, and other types of criminal/guerrilla movements that produce a great deal of misery, and places like Thailand are gripped in violent repressions of the countryside by urban elites.
* There’s a video online of Boko Haram shooting hundreds of Black African Christians in the head on a bridge and tossing the bodies into the river.
The media would show that (pixelated) if it was Serbs.
