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Old 2012-11-22, 10:26   Link #35
Irenicus
Le fou, c'est moi
 
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Age: 34
^Um, no.

1) If you count being the stage for the Hellenistic kingdoms' internecine warfare and massive Roman-Persian wars as peace. The Arabs only found it so easy to ride in and take everything because Rome (well, Constantinople) and Persia just finished another one of those sack-every-damned-village all out wars they liked to fight every once in a while.

2) One conqueror a generation, often more than one a generation battling each other for supremacy. Even the Mongols destroying everything between Bukhara and Baghdad didn't bring peace, it just means localized Turko-Mongol warlords fighting for scraps within the decade.

3) A very short timeline in comparison, collapsed spectacularly anyway, didn't account for insurgencies and "internal" chaos (like in, say, Iran or Egypt), and left the seeds of current woes. Oh, and the Anglo-Afghan wars.

Being the crossroads of cultures, empires, and migrating peoples, and now the world's oil well, the Middle East has never really known peace. Perhaps the longest stretches of peaceful periods would be during the Ottoman hegemony, and that's only when they and Safavid Persia left each other alone. Though perhaps you may also call Achaemenid Persia a relatively peaceful time in the heartlands (which is quite the opposite of what the Macedonians did to the place).

I also find it very strange that you'd consider Israel an occupying power. Even if it's young in comparison, it's locally based and its citizen don't exactly have anywhere else to go. It's here to stay.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ledgem
As such, the idea that Jews are somehow manipulating the media in Israel's favor seems a bit off to me.
While US media is markedly more pro-Israel than counterparts in Europe and elsewhere, I do agree that jumping from that to The Jewish Media is kind of a big, and vaguely discomforting, jump.
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