Israel/Palestine

Islamic cultures made revolutionary advances in science, medicine, art, architecture and many of the other advances that led to a great expansion of human rights and enjoyment over the past thousand years.

Islamic people developed a numeric system without which there would have been no scientific revolution, no Industrial Revolution, certainly no computer age. Imagine a world without a numeric marker for zero. Truly the dark ages.

Modern medicine... simply would not exist without Islamic influences. And so much more.

It's sad that so few people know the history of.... everything, really. Too many Americans hear "Muslim" and they think of 9/11, the Iranian hostages, the atrocities of fundamentalist right wing Islamic dictatorships - or they view Muslims as desperately poor women in hijabs mourning their babies. None of that is close to an accurate representation of the whole of Islamic culture and history.

We would all be a lot better off if we learned about and followed the basic principles of revolutionary religions. In the case of Christianity that would mean following Jesus's directives to feed the poor, love our enemies as ourselves, turn the other cheek, and generally live a life of poverty and service. I know far less about the other religions in the world but as far as I can tell they all say about the same thing. It's sad that human vices and failings corrupt us.

"Til human voices wake us, and we drown."
-- T.S. Eliot

(By the way, Eliot wrote some very antisemitic things in his poetry, but I don't reject his art because of that. We are all very imperfect beings.)