chance

Soda, we’re not going to do this here. I can’t be arsed trawling through the millennia of history to try to prove who’s more in the wrong. This isn’t the place, or the time, and nothing good ever comes of talking about this anyway. The idea that old-testament kingdoms (established through conquest) provide justification for 20th century settlers is just laughable.

Hamas are indeed a fundamentalist militant group. They do the kind of things you’d expect a fundamentalist militant group to do. I’m not going to defend that. If you want to assume that the people in Gaza turned to them entirely due to spite and their own inherent antisemitism, and that it had nothing to do with the preceding 100 years, that’s fine. If you want to put it entirely down to religion, that’s also fine. I have no fondness for Islam. I’ll note that they only turned to Hamas after the failure of more secular militant groups. But whatever.

I’ll simply restate that there’s a reason people are the way they are. With individuals, you can partially put it down to their unique biology. But with societies, the cause is rooted in history.

Fanatical religion does pose some level of existential threat. But religious adherents tend to become more fanatical when they themselves feel some sort of existential threat.

I can’t think of any historical examples of populations peacefully accepting immigrants divvying up their homeland. I feel like the natural response to groups coming from elsewhere and declaring an ethnostate in your backyard is generally to resist that. Would the Palestinians be in a better place today if they’d accepted the partition plan for Palestine? Probably. But I can’t really blame them for not being keen on giving up half their land to people who were mostly fresh off the boat.

It’s not about the Arabs as a whole. Arab nationalism never really got off the ground, but even if it were a coherent national identity, it’s more about the local population who were actually pushed off their land. If some ethnic settler group had the desire and the means to militarily defeat Canadians and drive them over the border, would you consider that acceptable on the basis that there was still the whole continental US full of people just like them?

I think you’re right that many Muslims aren’t keen on some of their holiest sites being under the control of a government that panders to adherents of a different religion. More generally, it’s kind of humiliating for lands which were for so long core parts of Arab and Muslim empires to be now held by a foreign power.

You could say that Islam is supremacist, depending on your interpretation. It’s been many things over its history, based on the predispositions of whoever claimed to be Caliph at the time. Some were degenerate playboys who sponsored learning and were relatively tolerant. Others were fanatical puritans who banned music and forced women to hide their faces. It’s rarely been pacifist, and the example of the prophet himself gives an argument to anyone wishing to take up arms against hostile powers, and even conquer and subjugate them.

Would a Neo-Islamic empire seek to take over the world? Probably. But then that’s what empires of all stripes tend to do. Regardless, I see no prospect of an Islamic resurgence. The Arab states are weak and divided. The only Islamic powers with nuclear weapons, Iran and Pakistan, are otherwise militarily mediocre. The only current threat to American global hegemony is China (with Russia playing the side role of a decaying rogue nuclear superpower.)

I generally reserve the term “fascist” for the European revolutionary nationalist movements of the 20th century. Otherwise, it just becomes another way of calling someone Hitler. Would Hamas try to commit another Holocaust if they somehow had the power? Possibly. I think they’d probably settle for reverse ethnic cleansing the territory under those circumstances.

But it’s not going to happen. Israel has one of the best funded and equipped armies in the world, backed by the global hegemon. Of their neighbours, the Saudis, Egypt & Jordan are effectively neutral, and Syria and Hezbollah are far too weak to pose a serious threat. Iran might threaten, but it would simply be a case of mutually assured destruction – Israel has it’s own nuclear arsenal ready to unleash. As terrible as the war crimes may’ve been over the last few days, Israel is not under realistic existential threat.

I mentioned that the land used to be a core part of various Arab and Muslim empires (for around 1300 years.) I think it’s kind of understandable that seeing it occupied by a hostile power settling there from overseas would lead people in the region to feel a certain way. I never said the land “belonged to Islam”, in the same way that Europe doesn’t “belong to Christianity”, and Russia doesn’t “belong to Communism.” Land belongs to people, not the things they believe in. The people of the region just happen to be predominantly Arab or Muslim right now, and so they view the imposition of control by a people that is neither of those things as an affront.

I didn’t imply Islam was benign. I explicitly acknowledged that the example of the prophet himself gives an argument to anyone wishing to take up a weapon for self-defence or even conquest. Islam was indeed spread by conquest, and its advance in the west was indeed halted by Christian warlords (who at points also conquered, forcibly converted and massacred people of other faiths – one example being Charlemagne’s treatment of the pagan Saxons.)

I should point out though that much of the conversion to Islam in the Middle East took place semi-voluntarily, in order to escape Dhimmitude. Christians & Jews were generally tolerated as a subservient underclass, and the Caliphs relied on the taxes they paid. Forced conversion was more of a thing in Persia, where Zoroastrians were not viewed as “People of the Book.”

One of the goals of Islam’s leaders for around the first century of its existence was indeed to conquer the known world. Their military successes had been stupendous, and seemed gifted by god. After they began to suffer setbacks however, this gradually fractured into infighting between various dynasties, interspersed with being conquered by outside groups (who often then converted in order to more effectively control their new territory – Turks, Mongols, Berbers etc.) Some of these rulers aspired to control the world. Others were more interested in the pleasures of the harem and poetry (the number of Caliphs who seem to have been bisexual or gay is both fascinating and hilarious, given current fundamentalist attitudes.)

Was medieval Europe fascist? It checks all the boxes you listed (as do most societies throughout history). You’re entitled to use words however you choose, but be aware that when you do so they have associations in people’s minds. Fascist=Nazi=Hitler=Holocaust=The Worst, Most Evil Thing Ever. It effectively functions as rhetoric, an appeal to emotion, rather than a meaningful description.

Most authoritarian governments are not fascist. Putin is not a fascist. Erdogan is not a fascist. The CCP are not fascist. Orban is not a fascist. The secular military dictatorship in Egypt that ousted the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood is not fascist. Iran is a theocratic republic, but it’s not fascist. Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist with authoritarian leanings, but he’s not a fascist. Saudi Arabia is a corrupt monarchy exporting religious fundamentalism, but it’s not fascist.

The historical movements that originated the term “fascism” were explicitly tied to ethnicity, “blood & soil”. They were revolutionary nationalist movements. Islam is not. Its conception of a people is not based on shared blood or regional culture. It doesn’t care who your ancestors were or what part of the world they lived in.

As I’ve already stated, a Neo-Islamic global empire is pretty low on my list of concerns. Climate change, AI, nuclear war with Russia/China? Yep. A return to the seventh century Islamic conquest? Not so much. If you want to fear that, fine, I just don’t see it happening. Would be interesting to see though.

What constitutes “mainstream Islam” fluctuates over time. There was a point in the recent past where seeing Muslim women wearing veils or even headscarves was a rare occurrence in most places. If you go back and look at footage of Muslim societies like Egypt in the 70s & 80s, there’s far less sign of fundamentalist religious observance. People still identified as Muslim, in the same way many in the west still identify as Christian, they’d still take part in certain rituals and still believed in god, but their interpretation of which religious rules were important was very different. But the export of fundamentalist teachings by certain powers in the region has changed things, combined with a few unfortunate foreign policy decisions by certain global powers.

I do fear the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in western societies. I just don’t see Muslims as a global monolith acting in unison in the way you seem to. Most of them aren’t “hiding their true beliefs”. For most religious believers, religion is just one of the forces acting upon them.

I wouldn’t be so sure about MAD. The funny thing about powerful people is that they tend to like staying in power, and will generally act pragmatically to do so, even if they believe in paradise. They usually prefer to encourage the poor & ignorant to strap on the suicide vest, rather than doing so themselves. Iran’s leadership could’ve engaged in all-out holy war with conventional weapons ever since they took power. They haven’t, because they don’t want to get wiped off the map. The same would likely be true if they acquired nuclear weapons. They know they would still lose any exchange. They might take out Israel, but the world would still be full of people who don’t follow their particular religion (including Sunni Muslims), while they would be history. And that’s not very appealing, even if you believe you have a spot booked in paradise. Opinion among the Iranian leadership is divided between hawks and moderates, like in any other country. There’s a reason they even bothered to engage with the US on a deal over nuclear development. They might indulge in extreme rhetoric, but their actions point to pragmatism.

Israel is around because of the IDF, nukes, and the vast quantities of US support. If the IDF were somehow actually thoroughly defeated (rather than briefly caught with their pants down), the US would likely step in (along with other allies.) Not saying Israelis don’t face any threat of violence – they demonstrably do. But they’re not getting driven into the sea anytime soon. Though it’s understandable that they’d live in fear of that, given the global persecution of Jews for the last 2 millennia, and the treatment their ancestors fled from in Europe.