Nope.  I was an Anglican.

Before I was an Anglican, I was a Charismatic / Evangelical with Pentecostal leanings.

Been around the block, so to speak.

Jim and I know another person like that.



Edited by LtTony - 19 August 2010 at 9:16pm

There is a large effort at "Arabicising" all Muslims, but many from outside of Greater Arabia don't fall for the conflicts.

Arabs are tribal, probably as much so as we were a few thousand years ago.  That doesn't translate well outside of Arab culture.

I'm friends with a man who lost some family members to Sunni fanatics when several of his relatives (and him) professed to being Shia.  I've not heard much of that Sunni / Shia conflict outside of the Middle East.  And I've definitely not heard of anyone being murdered because of it -- unless it was Taliban, Al Qaeda or other fringer groups doing the killing.

As for Israel, the underlying causes of much of the conflict is regional.  American and European Jews sent money to Jewish settlers to build Jewish projects.  Arabs were left out, and because much of that work centered around modernizing agricultural production and making Arab farmers less productive, relatively speaking, and less profitable, they weren't pleased.  Much of the earliest animosity in the modern era traces back to that.