I have not until now been able to bring myself to jump in for fear I would tend to inflame the discussion, which while I find it interesting, I am a bit uncomfortable with on the Axiom forum.
My wife is Israeli. Her father's family has lived there for six generations, long before the modern state of Israel. Her mother and her parents fled the Nazis in Poland to Israel 1939. The rest of her mother's family remain in Aushwitz. Some of her family were murdered by arabs in Palestine back in the 1930's. Her grandfather bought land in Jeruselem before the creation of the state of Israel. This land, which my wife has inherited an interest in, has been a Palestinian refugee camp since 1948.
Having grown up with generations of experience with this conflict our conclusion is this: The problem is not Arabs, Muslims or any other ethnic or religious group. It is anger fueled by pain that often manifests as fanatism. We haven't noticed fanaticism being exlusive to any religious or ethnic group.
Growing up in Israel my wife will tell you that Jewish fanaticism was, and is more troubling to her than was Arab fanaticism. She got to see this quite close up from her cousin Mier Kahana, one of the most fanatical Jewish leaders campaigning for the removal of all Palestinians from Israel and the occupied teritories (he was assasinated in New York 10 or 12 years ago).
We find it sad to have these discussions use generalizations such as Wahabists, Shia, Jews, Christians, Americans etc. in us against them positions. I believe these are all dehumanizing stereotypes whether applied to others or oneself. We are all different individuals with both good and bad traits. Much of the trouble in the world comes from the dehumanisation of treating others as well as ourselves as other than as unique individuals.
I believe that if Paul Johnson had been treated as an individual human being rather than as a symbol for all the U.S. "offenses" he would still be alive. I also believe that if those who had murdered him had treated themselves as individual human beings rather than as members of a religious belief system and as members of other ethnic identities, Paul Johnson would also still be alive.
I have never had a bad experience with the Arabs I have met in Israel. My one experience in a Muslim country was a vaction we took in Turkey because we couldn't stand staying in Israel (too much tension) while my step children visited their father.
I went to Turkey expecting an intense and somewhat overwhelming experience in a very foriegn country. The first surprise arriving in Istanbul was how clean it was. The second was how safe I felt. I never encountered anyone who seamed at all questionable, even amongst those living in what to us would be extreme poverty (people trying to make a living sitting on the sidewalk with a bathroom scale looking for donations from peole who wanted to weigh themselves as they walked down the street). We did not encounter the kind of alchoholic and addicted homelessness that I see in U.S. cities even though Tukey was undergoing a major econimic crisis (1,250,000 Turkish Lira to the dollar exchange rate, with 10% inflation per month in the summer of 2001). Rather my experience was more characterized by the guy who rented us a car. He said to us, as he turned us lose with his car to drive the Turkish countryside: "If you have any trouble with the car, I am 100% sure you can ask any Turkish person and they will help you". When we bought some rugs from a young man in his father's shop, he was unable to take our credit card. He walked with us to several curency exchanges but he wouldn't let us get cash because the surcharges they wanted were too high to suit him. So he said: "take the rugs without paying me, I will drive the ten miles to your hotel tomorrow and you can pay me at the better exchange rate at the hotel".
This is the side of Muslim culture I hear next to nothing about in discussions these days, the deeply ingrained sense of hospitality. The duty that Muslims have to take in even their enemies and to protect them with their life if they ask for sanctuary.
I believe that to solve the problem with terrorism we must avoid making the same mistake the terrorists make. This is to categorize other people in mass and to attack them indiscriminately. The more precisely and carefully we we can address the mechanisms of terror, the more quickly we can remove it without adding to the causes of it. As with most problems precision and finnesse are more likely to succeed than the application of force without sufficient control.
To take this back to the home theater topic, you might enjoy the movie "The Beast", it is an Israeli movie about the Soviet invasion of Afganistan. It brings it down to human the level of a Soviet tank crew who become separated from their unit and the group of Muhajadeen who hunt their tank "The Beast".
