Beirut Spring

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Remember that politics move quickly, and people and their opinions evolve.

“a paranoid and chauvinist worldview”

January 4, 2011 · Mustapha Hamoui

Hussein Ibish nails it (emphasis mine):

All of this anti-Christian violence […] comes in the context of rising rhetoric throughout the Arab world and other parts of the Muslim world that is paranoid and chauvinistic, and which sees all religious minorities as unacceptably heterogeneous and dangerous. [There’s] an increasing desire to impose a false religious and cultural homogeneity on a heterogeneous Arab world and to repress or drive out disparate elements, including Christians, Shia, smaller Muslim sects like the Ahmadiyya or various Sufi groups, and secularists and other liberals. Parts of Arab political and Muslim religious culture that would repudiate violence nonetheless promote the thinking that ultimately rationalizes it by embracing a paranoid and chauvinist worldview.
[…] the ultimate responsibility for this carnage must be placed disturbingly far and wide throughout contemporary Arab political and religious attitudes, in an all-too-common delusional perspective that sees enemies and traitors in every corner and is convinced that the world is out to get us.

It doesn’t matter if Muslims show outrage at the death of Christians when their imam at the mosque tells them that Christians can’t go to heaven because they are mushrikeen (heathens). I know a lot of people who don’t find any problem with the logic that Bin Laden will ultimately go to heaven because he’s a Muslim, while say Alexander Fleming, the inventor of penicillin will never see heaven’s gates because he was a mushrek.