Years ago I had found his channel and liked it, and then some video (I don’t remember the title or even subject at this time) came up on a subject I happened to know quite a bit about. He got to some point in an explanation, bungled it, and then hand-waved it away, saying the details were unimportant.

Stopped caring about anything he had to say after that, and I also then realized that there was a an entire genre of “person with no actual expertise reads Wikipedia articles and explains them with good lighting and high production quality.”

Most things? That's a really strong claim, do you have anything to back it up with? Just a couple videos here and there wouldn't cut it, given how strong your claim is.

For what it's worth I watch his videos and he seems to touch on incredibly valuable topics I would never hear about otherwise, like [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/2tuS1LLOcsI?si=b3mS0meBazL0RlcS

Do you have a reputable sources to back up your claims here? Johnny cites sources pretty consistently.

> that event might mark the beginning of the end of their geopolitical ambitions.

i hope so, they have been one of the biggest sources of discord in the Middle East, funding civil wars in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, funding a coup in Egypt.

Europe didn’t have a common religion after the Reformation (at least not in the sense people who lived there at the time would recognise).

In fact it was wars with a strong religious element between Protestant and catholic factions that tore Europe apart for centuries afterwards

No dominant religion in the Middle East? Haha!

The reason is fractured is because of the inherent tribalism within the cultures of the region. Strip away the tribalism (Oman, Qatar, UAE to an extent), concentrate the people near a few cities (Egypt), or provide them a unifying overarching culture (Iran, Turkey), and you get some success. In fact, the early Islamic empires were heavily mired in infighting even though they were "unified" under the Caliphate, in spite of the Prophet's calls for the "Ummah" (One Islamic Nation). I would even argue that Islam's biggest contribution to the region was in providing a specific administrative framework with which to shed the tribal infighting and unite culturally similar but disparate peoples together. It's also why Israel succeeded as a nation with its European flavor of nation-state identity.

An Israeli intelligence officer perhaps correctly attributed it to the past culture of water scarcity and needing to protect your water sources. That is, in the desert, there are only so many sources of water, and if someone steals it away from you, you simply die. So that created a culture of inherent suspicion of outsiders and people outside the clan, even though they all share the same customs and culture.

No it doesn't.

-- Moshe, why are you keep reading anti-Semitic papers? -- I just like to hear how powerful and clever we are.

Every ~10 year or so. As opposed to the locals who experience it daily, either war or the conflicts-between-wars.