True enough, we don't hear much of what is going on in Somalia, Nigeria, Kenya until it affects us, but that's a pretty normal human trait. We don't hear much about the poor of Estonia or drug abuse in Amsterdam either.
If we had all the ills of the world rammed down our throats every day people would start complaining that the press is Lefty biased, and why don't we get more stories about how Christopher Pyne wants to create a bold new tertiary education system, full of opportunity for low income earners.
Exactly. There's only so much news we can digest, and the media (naturally) gives us what they think we want.
But that means people need to have some basic ability to form a worldview that doesn't assume the news tells us everything.
This thread is all about people thinking that Islam is especially evil because the reality of the news cycle means we only get the bad stuff. It's really baffling to me that people then go and act as if that bad stuff is the whole story.
It also comes from people not really understanding historical context. Middle-eastern Islam (and the US, for that matter) took a really sharp right turn in the 50's. I mean, have a look at this series, from Cairo university:
1959
1995
2004
You might need to squint a bit, but you'll see girls in floral dresses, and not a headscarf to be seen in '59, and plenty of girls wearing similar in '95 - with a fair few headscarves too. And then in 2004, it's headscarves wall-to-wall.
There's nothing inherently Islamic about headscarves. The Koran doesn't actually take a position - just says people need to dress modestly, and the only restriction is that women need to cover their breasts.
But the Cold War was pretty hard on lots of the world, and the middle-east especially. Compounding that was the messed-up psychos running Saudi Arabia getting spectacularly rich thanks to oil. Just as the US went right-wing, so did the middle-east, but with a hefty taint of crazy thanks to the House of Saud's influence.
The current "brand" of Islam is only a few decades old. All this "Islam is inherently X" stuff necessarily ignores what Islam has been for most of its history.
Fact is, countries with repressive delusional nutjobs in charge, who then export their bizarre views as hard as they can, along with young men, money, and ideas, can have an effect when backed by stupid amounts of wealth. It wouldn't matter what religion was there. The House of Saud pretty much
Again, look at the 1950's photo. Go look up what was happening in the Islamic world a hundred years ago. Tell me they were fundamentally different from Christian countries.
They weren't really. They were poorer, and they had been colonised by Europe, and there was a lot of resentment, no doubt. But what *changed* was that repressive dickheads got into power (in part thanks to that same colonisation process being idiotically unwound). Oh, Israel happened, too.
But it's not like everyone suddenly converted to Islam. Instead, the people of the middle-east got changed by some bat**** insane dictators, and some absolutely humiliating moves by their colonial masters.
Take a look at (largely Christian) central Africa and you can see the exact same process, with the exact same results - with the only exception being that the poor bloody Africans never got the insane amounts of money the middle-east did, and so didn't have the capability to export their violence elsewhere.
The Christian Hutus killed in 100 days a lot more people than all the Wahabi nutters in the world ever will.