Word: westernness
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...Behavior Your essay "Overexposed" about the British attitude to sex was interesting, but I cringed at the phrase, "Britain boasts the highest rate of teen pregnancies in Western Europe" [Dec. 7]. It "boasts"? Suzanne Comberousse, PARIS...
...author invoked the triumphalist narrative of the U.S. and its western Allies winning World War II and later toppling communism. First of all, the Soviet Union and the Allies won World War II in concert. The U.S.S.R. lost over 25 million people in WW II, whereas Americans half a million. Secondly, the U.S.S.R. was collapsing without very much external influence - succumbing to pressures unrelated to U.S. policy whatsoever. The greatest feats are not always American ones. Nodira Karimova Queanbeyan, Australia...
...against the Soviets in Afghanistan and - to judge by the number of captured, killed and identified insurgents in Iraq - continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It is common knowledge in the tearooms of the Yemeni capital of Sana'a and in Western embassies that the government of northern Yemen used jihadis to help defeat the south in the civil war that ended in 1994. But the symbiotic relationship between the government and al-Qaeda shifted after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, when the Yemeni government worried that it too might...
...TIME's Alex Perry wrote in July 2009, over the past few years, young Nigerian Muslim activists, most of them educated and from the middle class, have aggressively embraced a stricter version of Islam, rejecting anything Western and Christian. In the middle of 2009, the government cracked down hard on one group nicknamed the Nigerian Taliban - officially called Boko Haram - killing its leader and scores of his followers. Boko Haram had begun life in 2001 as a peaceful group focused on the study of the Koran, according to Abdulmumin Sa'ad, a Muslim scholar and professor of sociology...
...Nigerian connection is especially troubling because, if the al-Qaeda link is true, then the huge West African country, which is sharply divided between Muslims and Christians, may indeed have become a new recruiting ground for the cause of Osama bin Laden - a situation Western officials have been concerned about for some time. Furthermore, the oil-rich yet impoverished sub-Saharan African nation sits on a religious fault line, its 150 million people split almost evenly between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south. Bin Laden is widely admired in the arid, Muslim north. It has become fashionable...