Friday, February 24, 2006

All We Want... (updated)

Is for Muslims to share the attitude of this man:

I asked Birzo if he found Baba Sheik’s comments about Islam and Muslims offensive.

“Of course not,” he said. “I understand his mentality and he understands mine. It’s okay. We are Kurds. Kurds don’t get upset about religion. We aren’t like Arabs. We believe in arguments based on reason, not emotion. If people don’t agree with me about something, I’m not going to get mad at them. We will just have different opinions.”


Read the whole article.

Michael Totten is doing some fantastic reporting. Be sure to look around his site, and hit his tip jar while you're there. You can't get this kind of journalism from a newspaper anymore.


Update: Okay, perhaps you can get something similar. This article at National Geographic looks very interesting (h/t Michael Yon), but you'll have to buy the magazine to read the whole thing. There's a one-page excerpt at the link. Here's a short blurb:

When I learned her age, it struck me that Mivan Majid was the Kurdish dream personified. She had never known a day under the rule of Baghdad. Suleimaniya, her hometown and the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan's eastern sector, has been under unbroken Kurdish control since 1992, the very year of her birth. She wanted to be an engineer, Mivan told me, "because they build such cool things: houses, roads, shopping centers. It's like, when you're an engineer you don't get hung up on our terrible history. You look ahead."


Here are our moderate Muslim allies. Let's hope our government does right by them.

2 comments:

Ardsgaine said...

Who said the superiority was racial?

And who said that being devoted to reason and tolerance of different viewpoints was being "less uppity"? Aren't those still liberal values?

Oh, wait... I'm sorry. I keep forgetting that the term "liberal" has been hijacked by people who don't believe in liberty, reason, or any other single Enlightenment value. My bad.

Would it be too much to ask that you change your name to "the Leftist Avenger?" You know, just to keep things clear for those of us who still think that words ought to mean something?

Ardsgaine said...

The British are one ethnicity and the French are another. If I say that the British are superior because they have a stronger tradition of respect for reason and liberty, that doesn't mean that I believe the difference is due to genetic differences between them. It could be an accident of history and culture. It also doesn't even mean that I think all Brits are superior in that respect to all Frenchmen.

At any rate, you are attributing to me something that the translator said. What I was endorsing was his attitude towards reason and tolerance, not his disgust with his neighbors to the south. Given the history of the region, I don't think his disgust is hard to understand. It briefly crossed my mind that I might need to add some sort of caveat to let people know that I wasn't endorsing racism, but I decided that it was unnecessary, because only someone determined to misunderstand him could think that the translator was arguing for genetic determinism.

Did you bother to read the article by any chance? Why don't you go do that, instead of trying to bait me?