Religion and Politics

Kansas and Al Qaeda

Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times compares the Middle West of the United States to the Middle East of the Arab world. While making a documentary relating the drought in Kansas to the rise of food prices that helped trigger the recent Arab uprisings, Friedman found another powerful insight: monoculture farms in the U.S. and monoculture societies in the Middle East both engender dangerous circumstances. He writes, “Pluralism, diversity and tolerance were once native plants in the Middle East — the way the polyculture prairie was in the Middle West. Neither ecosystem will be healthy without restoring its diversity.”

Read at The New York Times

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