Gaza, Iraq, Somalia...What are we seeing?

The true state of one side of this 'clash' is an unbelievable goop melange of violence, religion, ancient grudges, sharia, racism and ANTI-CIVILIZATION.

Are we seeing a Darwinian level die-out?

If left alone will these places find a way to climb out, or will it be a Dante like land of apparitions permanently scurrying from doorway to doorway amid shot out alleyways, heading to candlelit hovels and unimaginable personal desperation?

I was struck by a well dressed, beautiful woman in Gaza looking into the camera, "I keep asking myself what IS rock bottom?"

It's as if she walked out of the GAP to find civilization GONE. It's a George Romero-Quentin Tarentino production, only real

I find that I believe that underlying these incredible acts of self destruction is the prejudice that someway, somehow, human progress is evil. That since humans are evil, all we do that springs from what is in us, must result in more evil (like creating our own laws right out of our own heads?), and therefore the more we can crawl back along into the primeval slime of our own ascent, the closer we are to pureness.

In Kurdistan we literally sheltered from above a small society, which with a little help spent 1992-2003 bootstrapping itself (via Jay Garner, who was rejected in favor of Mr. Bremer in Iraq) to some semblance of living and self stewardship. We can see now, what bravura performance they gave themselves.

But we can see in these other places an unmitigated disaster of untrammeled consciences resulting in a descent to dominance of the unabrow grunters and snorters holding a quran in one hand and an EFP in the other, dreaming of murder to achieve unlimited orgasms with what I imagine they think will be UCLA cheerleaders who will be begging to do anything they demand. Somehow I don't think this is the civilization of Omar Khayyan.

While I am not one who believes that the lost Al Andalus and the fountains of Cordoba were an idyllic moment of three religions (and civilizations) coexisting in an Oxford-MIT like trance of existential seeking of truth and knowledge, SURELY it was nothing like this either.

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