I hate when people say “Bah the middle east has always been at war, it’s just how they are.” No you asshole, it’s been at war because of western interventionism and Israel. Sure it was at war before Israel, but so was the entirety of Europe throughout its entire history. The only reason the rest of the world got to cool down a bit after the world wars while the middle east remained embroiled in violence and chaos was because the west inserted this alien splinter of settler-colonialism into the region while constantly deliberately fomenting war and unrest.

There’s nothing freakish or unusual about the middle east or Islam that makes its people violent, it just happens to be where a lot of the oil is, so the west keeps poking and prodding it to ensure that it’s always divided against itself and dominated by western-friendly dictators. That’s all we’ve been looking at there.

Reading by Tim Foley.