Maybe it's not about Israel

Islam is currently involved in a significant majority of the worlds conflicts. I wonder if this article is on spot. Which is summed up with the following quote.

Conventional wisdom also insists that the US is hated by Muslims because it is pro-Israel. That view is shared by most American officials posted to the Arab capitals. But is it not possible that the reverse is true – that Israel is hated because it is pro-American?

Sound outragious well read on.

When it came to ordinary people, almost no one ever mentioned the Palestine issue, even on days when Yasser Arafat's death dominated the headlines. When I asked them about issues that most preoccupied them, farmers, shopkeepers, taxi drivers and office workers never mentioned Palestine.

But when I talked to princes and princesses, business tycoons, high officials, and the glitterati of Arab academia, Palestine was the ur-issue.

The reason why the elites fake passion about this issue is that it is the only one on which they agree. In many cases, it is also the only political issue that people can discuss without running into trouble with the secret services.

The article then goes into some notable examples of other Islamic conflicts in the world that don't seem to concern the Islamic elite, twenty two of them. Many are far worse than Israel from a Muslim perspective. That is if they actually cared about loss of life.

If Muslims hate the US because it backs Israel which, in turn, is oppressing Muslims in Palestine, then why don't other oppressed Muslims benefit from the same degree of solidarity from their co-religionists?

Here's one example that the UN seems not to care about even though it just called for compensation on Israel's security wall.

During Ramadan, news came that more than 500 Muslims had been killed in clashes with the police in southern Thailand. At least 80 were suffocated to death in police buses under suspicious circumstances.

The Arab and the Iranian press, however, either ignored the event or relegated it to inside pages. To my knowledge, only one Muslim newspaper devoted an editorial to it. And only two newspapers mentioned that Thailand was building a wall to cordon off almost two million Muslims in southern Thailand – a wall higher and longer than the controversial "security fence" Israel is building.

Read the article.

Maybe the issue is as simple as where the oil money is, who is living high on the hog under an oppressive system, and who needs to keep the wool over the eyes of the average Arab. Oppressive governments always need a scapegoat. So we end up with Saudi funded mosques popping up everywhere teaching muslim children to hate America. Israel just happens to be in their neck of the woods. I think the arab elite have picked the wrong horse.