Religion matters more than politics in the middle east because the maps were drawn by Europeans to seperate people from the same ethnicity from one another so religion is the only unifying aspect of the country you’d be born in.

you have no idea how fucked up middle eastern politics can get. first split by sunni/shia/other religions, then allegiance to syria/iran/israel/iraq/egypt/selection of gulf states, and sometimes by tribe/clan allegiance too just to keep things from getting too easy. then try to make a government out of like 15 parties all with divergent goals funding and incentives

That might even explain the American angle. Nobody else has managed to make them care about non-America places.

The paradox of being an antitheist is that you have to believe that religious ideas are uniquely powerful and dangerous. Politics, history, culture, and all context are just debris drifting in the mighty river of religion.