Comment by geff82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geff82 | Hacker News Reader

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Families are MUCH closer in Pakistan and the rest of the Middle East than they are in the western world. Doing things against the families will can get you in big trouble and leave you without your family at all. The main difference between the Middle East and the West is: in the west, you grow up and you are taught by your parents how to stay on your own. That is why Westerners often only see their parents and brothers and sisters occasionally. In the Middle East, you grow up to be a good part of the family for the rest of your life. As I married a girl from the Middle East I had to learn and feel the differences and resulting occasional tensions. So to say it short: you normally are not supposed to leave your family in Pakistan. So this girl feels she is in great trouble, even if the solution may seem so simple for us.

Pakistan is not a Middle Eastern country

Yeah and my dad (Brazilian) is fond of saying that Brazil is not a Latin American country because of language and cultural divide between Spanish vs Portuguese colonies.

Fine, both of those are valid beliefs. But you shouldn't feel the need to inject them as a tangent in random conversations to educate people. You will never ever win this battle.

But Pakistan is not a Middle Eastern country. It's not a belief, it's a fact. I think he was right to point that out.

Names are human constructs not facts.

>The first official use of the term "Middle East" by the United States government was in the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, which pertained to the Suez Crisis. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles defined the Middle East as "the area lying between and including Libya on the west and Pakistan on the east, Syria and Iraq on the North and the Arabian peninsula to the south, plus the Sudan and Ethiopia."

Pakistan is on the edge, including or excluding it's more of an opinion thing.

It depends on what you mean though. If you include the Islamic Indo-Iranian states, Pakistan is. If you exclude them, Iran and Afghanistan are not.

Maybe the right answer is "the Middle East is a spherical cow anyway."

That's what happens when you try to draw lines in sand...

Pakistan is about as Middle Eastern as Iran is.....

Pakistan wants to be a Middle Eastern country.

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