Yes, the Middle East has always been cursed to be a region infested with religious zealots. Don’t look into the British and American empires (plus Israel itself) doing everything they could to empower fundamentalists and discredit secular socialists, liberals and nationalists (as far back as the British-backed ousting of a reformist Afghan monarch). Don’t look at what the Palestinians had and have to say about coexistence.
Also, sure is coincidental that they’re using the same bad faith argument Jim Crow and Apartheid defenders used to claim: that dismantling oppressive systems would lead to a bloodbath by “savages” against former oppressor populations.
These are the same liberals that just ate up an entire manufactured newscycle about Russian antisemitic savagery, never pausing to remember how they themselves cheered the destruction of communism throughout Europe and Central Asia. The USSR was a multinational secular state. Lenin could clearly articulate the conditions where antisemitism thrives and how it protects the interests of tyrants. Can a liberal do that? Fuck these people.