"It’s worth noticing that up till thirty years or so nobody had heard of of fights between Sunnis and Shiites!"
Are you kidding? At one time, some Shi'a sects were considered apostates (and not merely heretics) by Sunnis. Al-Ghazali, among others, taught that the shedding of their blood was permissible because their commitment to an infallible imam over the Qur'an denied the basis of the social order of Islamic society. Granted, this was with reference to the Ismailis (founders of a Shi'ite Caliphate in Egypt), who are not the same as today's Twelver Shi'a. Still, it was Salah al-Din's mission in life to overthrow Shi'ite rule in Egypt at the same time that he was fighting the Crusaders. Periods of peace between Sunnis and Shi'ites have been relatively rare, with some exceptions.
I'm just wondering how long it will take for the majority of our own population to wake up on this issue. The ignorance on the part of many Americans (including most of our elected officials) regarding the Middle East is beyond estimation. Plus, for many it's a matter of belief rather than fact, which is an extremely difficult mindset to overcome (or even to engage rationally).
Keeping up with every one of FB's "upgrades", having to go back and re-do some (or all) of my settings each time, the fact that the feed linking FB to my blog(s) was never real-time, having to deal with duplicate comments to the same post (one on the blog itself, and the other on the blog's FB page), the zero customer service value to FB (especially when passwords get lost/stolen), plus the various privacy issues that keep getting raised by FB's technological misconduct, convinced me that FB is - as far as my purposes are concerned - more of a time waster than anything else, and a potentially harmful one at that, given its propensity for misuse. As a personal social networking tool, it is not necessary for me, and tended to duplicate what I was already doing through phone calls, emails, face-to-face meetings, etc. I do not need FB, and I will be quite relieved if/when it and its other social networking counterparts go out of style.
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"It’s worth noticing that up till thirty years or so nobody had heard of of fights between Sunnis and Shiites!"
Are you kidding? At one time, some Shi'a sects were considered apostates (and not merely heretics) by Sunnis. Al-Ghazali, among others, taught that the shedding of their blood was permissible because their commitment to an infallible imam over the Qur'an denied the basis of the social order of Islamic society. Granted, this was with reference to the Ismailis (founders of a Shi'ite Caliphate in Egypt), who are not the same as today's Twelver Shi'a. Still, it was Salah al-Din's mission in life to overthrow Shi'ite rule in Egypt at the same time that he was fighting the Crusaders. Periods of peace between Sunnis and Shi'ites have been relatively rare, with some exceptions.
Couldn't have put it better myself.
I'm just wondering how long it will take for the majority of our own population to wake up on this issue. The ignorance on the part of many Americans (including most of our elected officials) regarding the Middle East is beyond estimation. Plus, for many it's a matter of belief rather than fact, which is an extremely difficult mindset to overcome (or even to engage rationally).
This story just keeps getting stranger and stranger.
Keeping up with every one of FB's "upgrades", having to go back and re-do some (or all) of my settings each time, the fact that the feed linking FB to my blog(s) was never real-time, having to deal with duplicate comments to the same post (one on the blog itself, and the other on the blog's FB page), the zero customer service value to FB (especially when passwords get lost/stolen), plus the various privacy issues that keep getting raised by FB's technological misconduct, convinced me that FB is - as far as my purposes are concerned - more of a time waster than anything else, and a potentially harmful one at that, given its propensity for misuse. As a personal social networking tool, it is not necessary for me, and tended to duplicate what I was already doing through phone calls, emails, face-to-face meetings, etc. I do not need FB, and I will be quite relieved if/when it and its other social networking counterparts go out of style.