Sunni Arabs of Iraq

I've been trying to cast around for a useful metaphor to describe what I think of the Sunnis and their terrorist ways. Finally the idea of the Ku Klux Klan and the Reconstruction period after the American Civil War appeared to me. I've been reading about the Civil War lately (and neglecting my Middle East Reading Project) and the parallels between Southern Christian Whites and Iraqi Sunni Arabs struck me.

Both Whites and Sunnis had been the top class of society for centuries. Both had preyed upon, economically exploited, sexually assaulted, mass murdered, kidnapped, excluded, and in short dominated the lower-tier groups. Both White Christians and Sunni Arabs lost their utter dominance because they lost a war with the American Federal Government. Both were completely unwilling to accept their former victims as equal citizens. Both had a culture and a theology that told them that they were naturally superior, that they had a right to rule over their lessers, and killing their lessers in order to preserve their power was not a crime. The Sunnis have formed Al-Qaeda, Ansar Al-Sunna, and many other thug organizations to murder and terrorize their former subjects, in an attempt to keep their dominant position; The Southern Christians formed the terrorist Ku Klux Klan, to murder blacks, officials, police, schoolteachers, and so forth, in order to return to power.

Sadly, in the long run, the Ku Klux Klan was successful, in part because the American Federal Army and Government were sympathetic to whites-only rule. Northerners didn't want blacks to become equal citizens either. The Sunni Arabs don't have that advantage. But they do have numerous sympathetic neighbors, Sunnis who also don't want Shiites or Kurds or Christians or non-Arabs to acquire equal rights or political power. Arabs must rule and they'll kill anyone necessary to keep it that way.

I should say here that the Arabs I have met are the most racist people I have ever known. I used to think that the Japanese were the most racist and xenophobic people I knew, but then the Arabs dropped them to number two. Perhaps this is because practically every Arab I've met is a Saudi?

It took more than a century to break the power of the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization. Those ignorant thugs are still around of course, but they have nothing like the power and prestige and legitimacy they had just forty years ago. I don't think the Sunni Arabs have that kind of time to come to their senses.