A few days ago I was in an Arab coffee-shop. I was drinking tea, which is a common practise of Muslim countries, while listening to what the Arab men were discussing. I also heard one woman, I guess, but all I could see were men. They were seated, smoking, drinking tea, while watching Al Jazeera on a TV set mounted on top of the right corner of the room.

I could not understand anything but some of the words, spoken by the Arab public, or said by the Al Jazeera presenter. I thought about joking about what the Arabs, and Middle-Easterners (including Iranians), usually talk about when they get together.

I was saying that they talk about three subjects; first sex, second how clever they have been cunning, or doing something damaging to, some other people, breaking the law, or doing some dodgy businesses they were proud of, and third how Israel and America are treating the Muslims, especially the Palestinians, and some other related issues.

It hadn't been more than a few seconds that I was joking to my friends about the three subjects I just mentioned above that we all heard the words "Filistiniah" and "Israili" said by the TV presenter, then discussed by the Arab public present in the room. And we laughed. The confirmation was so quick. Anything else they were talking we could not understand anyway.

We sat there for about an hour and they never stopped talking about Israel, Palestine, and America. All we could understand were these, and a few other words, anyway.

There are hundreds of millions of Arabs out there. There are more than one billion Muslims out there, and growing in numbers. The population of Israel is just 6 million or something, and that includes more than a million Arab Israelis. These hundreds of millions of Arabs, plus a very large number of the remaining Muslims, curse Israel every single day, or almost every single day.

I am asking you, who do you think is being stupid here? While Israelis are busy running their troubled country which is some sort of democracy-theocracy, where the Arabs have their own seats in the Parliament (Israel is the only country in the world where Arabs, though somehow discriminated, have the best democracy they can afford), Arabs, Iranians, and most of the remaining Muslims, fail to run their own countries where they have unemployment, lack of human rights and democracy, let alone a lot of poverty and illiteracy.

It is the Muslim world that has serious problems, not the West. It is the Arabs who have serious problems, not the Israelis. I am a Muslim too (being born in Iranian Shia family automatically makes a person a Shia Muslim, which is okay anyway) and I do not see Islam as any problem, but how the individuals of the Muslim world behave as a serious problem.

Islam fails to present itself as the motive behind these problems, because no more than seven centuries ago Muslims were simply ahead of the Christian world. Islam was good back then and it is bad now? Christianity was bad back then and it is good now? Religion is something positive for the society, as it can be seen in America. It all depends on the interpretations that are given to religion.