The U.S army did all those things, as well as cannibalism, during the Vietnam War, which was still only a youngish middle-aged man's lifetime ago. The world morphs and develops different attributes at different rates. You've clearly been sold this image of a ravenous bunch of rapist zealots out there in the middle east- and fuck knows some of them need a lot of work- but in all the middle-eastern countries I've visited, I've seen nothing but vitality and a richness of spirit rarely visible in the haggard eyes of the people in my own country. Look into who these people are, who's manipulating them, what tribulations and joys they've experienced; humanize them rather than demonise them. Demonizing is overlaying ugly clay wrought from your imagination onto a flawed person. Humanizing is stripping away everything but the underlying shivering, naked, scared person which lies underneath all our acquired ideological garments. It's the latter which reconciles people, and it's the former which drives them apart.
|