thank you, noam chomsky, avi shlaim, and rashid khalidi.tioning made possible by democracy now!]

entertainment, with no annual fee.to apply, go to citi.com/thankyoucards >>> and we are back with rashid khalidird haas, meghan o'sullivan and peter bergen talking about the middle east. rashid, when we talk about all this turmoil going on in the middle east and almost everywhere it seems to have taken on a sectarian quality, sect against sect, you know, this brings this old topic which is, are these ancient hatreds or are they modern politicians who are exploiting these divides? the shia/sunni divide goes back to the 7th century. is that what is at the root here? >> no. very simply no. you had people converting from shia to sunni, in iraq in the early 20th century. intermarriage all over iraq, all over lebanon. i challenge anybody to find an instance from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century where sectarianism is the primary divide in any one of these societies where sunnis and shias live together. >> what turns it on? >> one of the things that turns it on is the creation of sectarian structures by the colonial powers, the french in particular in lebanon and in syria and the british in