MaNiElla said:
lol, seriously, do you know what a culture is? How can "arab" or "middle eastern" be a culture?? LMAO
Arab is a culture!
1. Same language,
2. same religion, philosophy, values, ideologies, etc
3. same ethnicity,
4. same technologies, aesthetics, etc
5. etc.
There is such a thing as the global Arab culture.
Do you see people calling "the australians" or "the americans" a "culture"? lol.
Yes! There is certainly an Australian and an American culture. We share a similar culture (language, religion, etc), but we have also sub-cultures - just like the Arab community.
Thus both the Arab community and the Australian-American-British-NZ-etc community are both cultures with respective subcultures.
This is an interesting point, because it's my view that religions develop out of cultures (duh). When this happens, the religion initially reflects or is transformed into an image of culture.
Thus I think it is unfair to label Muslims, but fair to label the Arab community. It is
contingent upon the fact that most Arabs are Muslims that people label Muslims as 'violent'. It is in fact Arabs who are violent, not Muslims -- I could theologically convert to Islam, and that would be fine. However it would not be until I descended into the hideous Arab culture that I became a violent person, like many of the Western converts to Islam (David Hicks et al).
Nobody could deny that Hicks and other Brits/Aussies/American converts are violent. Yet most of them are white and 'not part of the culture'? Well they are part of the culture. This is because when we talk about a culture, ethnicity is just one part of it - and contingent upon the fact that people stay still geographically - by and large, most Arabs are part of the Arab ethnicity (an ethnographer could be specific). However, foreigners can enter a culture other than their own. See sucessful white rap artists as an example.
Essentially, you're definitely wrong about culture. And, in my opinion, a lot of other people in this thread are wrong about religion, and should be looking more broadly at Arab culture.