The late Harlan Ellison contested this narrative throughout his lifetime: https://youtu.be/P6gtHQGbXmM?t=194

  All of you guys out there in the Middle East are out of the same melting pot. And you're all as crazy as a butterfly on absinthe. I don't know whether you're all Canaanites at the base, or you're all Jews at the base, or out of the Land of Nod, or whatever the hell you were at the get-go, "semites" or whatnot. But you've been fighting it out for something like eight thousand years! And you've never had five minutes of quiet and peace! You're forever killing each other, and sticking knives in each other, and burning babies - and the world has had to suffer with this.

  Great things have come out of the Middle East - great things like the *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam* - but *stupidity* seems to be your chief export! Stupidity, and violence, are your cash crops. All you.