Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Useful Hitchens article

Tribal Ignorance - What you think you know about Iraq's factions is all wrong. By Christopher Hitchens

See the link above to a good Hitchens article on the tribal groupings in Iraq, and how the Western media tends to misrepresent their situation. A crucial paragraph (the bit about the Kurds was news to me):

"To be a Sunni or a Shiite is to follow one or another Muslim obedience, but to be a Kurd is to be a member of a large non-Arab ethnicity as well as to be, in the vast majority of cases, a Sunni. Thus, by any measure of accuracy, the "Sunni" turnout in the weekend's referendum on the constitution was impressively large, very well-organized, and quite strongly in favor of a "yes" vote. Is that the way you remember it being reported? I thought not. Well, then, learn to think for yourself."

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