Why are so many people in the West obsessed with Arabs and their civilisation?

Question:When you are on the internet, especially in racist forums, you notice that a lot of people are totally fascinated by the history of the ancient Middle-East and a large part of them tend to be revisionist by rewriting history and denying the Arab peoples their legacy: Sumer, Assyro-Babylonia, ancient Egypt, Canaan-Phoenicia, Carthage, and so on. Although most archeologists, historians, and anthropologists, assume all those great civilisations were founded by the direct forefathers of the modern Arabic-speaking populations of Southwestern Asia and North-Africa, it doesn't stop many ignorant people from contradicting sciences by pretending Arabs stole this heritage from other people. Is this jealous and intellectual dishonesty, or a profound ignorance due to an irrational hatred?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: When you are on the internet, especially in racist forums, you notice that a lot of people are totally fascinated by the history of the ancient Middle-East and a large part of them tend to be revisionist by rewriting history and denying the Arab peoples their legacy: Sumer, Assyro-Babylonia, ancient Egypt, Canaan-Phoenicia, Carthage, and so on. Although most archeologists, historians, and anthropologists, assume all those great civilisations were founded by the direct forefathers of the modern Arabic-speaking populations of Southwestern Asia and North-Africa, it doesn't stop many ignorant people from contradicting sciences by pretending Arabs stole this heritage from other people. Is this jealous and intellectual dishonesty, or a profound ignorance due to an irrational hatred?

Many in the West are not so much obsessed, as they are misdirected and ill-informed.

One definition of intelligence is the ability to differentiate between two things. The more intelligent / informed / objective the person, the more they can and do discern the subtle differences. And the less intelligent / ignorant / dogmatic a person is, the more they opt to generalize rather than do the work / research required to be objective.

An example is all of the misinformation on the web about Obama being Muslim. He isn't, but people would rather believe he is than find out the truth with minimal effort. And they pass along the same misinformation to aid in dogmatically misinforming others too lazy to determine the truth. It stems from the "West good, East bad" generalization from the Cold War - or, as you closed with, "...a profound ignorance due to an irrational hatred".

Please realize that there are also many in the West who are multilingual by choice, respectful of diverse peoples and cultures, and open-minded to the uniqueness of each individual rather than generalizing about their "group". We are simply not as "loud" in our approach to life. The world gets smaller every day. Let's pray that with this comes additional desire to first, seek to understand.

Peace.

oil-=all

Semitic people are not related to the Sumerians. They were an entirely different people. Ancient Egyptians were also not Semitic. T
There were Arab pirates, but we can ignore them for this discussion. The Arabs were a clever people who knew a good thing when they saw it, and borrowed a great deal from Greece and Persia. They also added their own contributions in mathematics, alchemy, medicine, history, astronomy and so on. Arab (Muslim) civilization was much kinder to lunatics than Christians were. Taxation was lower in Muslim countries, which is one reason why Egypt fell so readily to the Arabs, and why the Turks had such success in eastern Europe. By the way, the Koran owes a great deal to the Talmud.

I really think that it arises from general ignorance and a society whose only contact with the middle east is through television reports on the current US war there. There will always be racists out there who will want to hate on a particular group for one reason or another, and if you factor in extreme nationalism bolstered by the current societal landscape, it's only going to be all the more rampant.

People who forget the past are doomed to repeat it... I believe in that statement.
I also think that people are always in need of a belief.
They try to figure it out with little information let alone not knowing if it is correct info in the first place... once they decide what they think is the right info, it is hard to make people think outside the box after that.
Humanity is where it's at.