How interesting that the Holy Land Theme Park would include Arab Dancing.
The Holy Land Theme Park is in the north side of Buenos Aires.
How interesting that Arab Dances should play a prominent role in their performances, especially since the Gospel story concerns Jews, Romans, and the birth of Christianity.
But with 10% of more of Buenos Aires being Arab, I suppose it was hard to ignore them.
Misiones Province – Source:
(Andres Rojas)
Channel 12, in Posadas, Misiones, Argentina – the almost tropical Northeast of Argentina – inaugarated a new studio. What better thing to do than have some Arabic dancers on?
Misiones Province (in green on the map above) has a lot of ethnic groups. Italians, Swedes, Ukranians, Poles, French, Germans, Danes, Japanese, and yes, Arabs, as well as the core Spanish. Apprently, this day, they played to the Arab community. Some of the dancers seem fair complected, and I wonder if some of that Swedish or German blood has intermingled.
The observant listener will note the intro music on the video is Arabic.
At the tip of the province is Iqauzu falls, which is a world famouse jungle cataract which is the border between Brazil and Argentina, and is right next to Paraguay, forming a smuggler’s paradise called the Triple Frontier.
But what is important is that no matter where one goes in Argentina, the Arabs are a significant part of the population, and Arab culture is very mainstream.
In fact, the intro music to the video of Iguazi Falls on the left is Arabic; and if one goes to the comment section on the YouTube Page for that video, one will notice some comments in Arabic. There is a lot of cross-cultural polination between the two worlds.
The Arabs seem to view South America as a friendly part of the West.
Edited: June 16, 2022 – Cleaned up the page from older styling.
Honduras has about 250,000 Palestinians, which is roughly 3% of the population – though in fact, they are quite successful in business. In fact, Honduras has had a president, Carlos Roberto Flores, who was of Palestinian descent.
There are an estimated 5-6,000 Muslims in Honduras, which is less than about 0.1% of the population. Running the numbers this means that the Arabs in Honduras are 97% or more Christian, if we assume that all these Muslims are found only in the Arab community.
Again we see this amazing phenomena. It as if there were a demographic sieve which made sure that only Christian Arabs got to the New World.
Argentina has a national Ethnic Groups day.
This is the Lebanese section of a 27th annual ethnic festival, in Rosario, which is Argentina’s third biggest city, about 180 miles NW of Buenos Aires.
Depending on who you ask, 8% to 10% of Argentines have some Arab background, though in some cases it is heavily diluted with Spanish, Italian, etc. Mostly Syrian Orthodox or Maronite Catholic. They tend to be less radicalized than Chile’s Palestinians, who are almost totally Christian.
Oddly, Argentina has a bit more Muslims, but they seem to be less radicalized because the Palestinian presence – even a Christian one – is minimal; whereas in Chile, half the Arabs are Palestinian.
Argentina’s Muslims are about 10% of the Arab population – which translates to about 1% of the total population. However, the Muslims in Argentina tend to be totally assimilated. Their own imams try to exaggerate the numbers, but Pedro Brieger, an Argentine Acadamic, has noted that in 2003 the real numbers of practicing Muslims were grossly exaggerated.1
The prevalence of Syrian Orthodox and Maronite Catholic seems to moderate the views of Argentine Arabs. Yes, there is some degree of support for Palestine. That is to be expected from any Arab community; but you do not see the large scale political support one sees in Chile.
The reason I suspect is that Palestinians are less common in Argentina.
1See: La Comunidad Musulmana en la Argentina (In Spanish), Pedro Brieger.
Los datos, extraoficiales, son importantes si se tiene en cuenta que en promedio se habla en Argentina de familias tipo de cuatro integrantes, lo que implicaría que en la ciudad de Buenos Aires habría un poco más que 4500 musulmanes, muy alejado del imaginario popular
Translation: The data, unofficial, are important if one considers that an average family in Argentina speaks of four types, which would imply that the city of Buenos Aires would have a little more than 4500 Muslims, far from the popular imagination
My Note: The Buenos Aires Metro area has 1/3rd of Argentina’s population. Immigrants tend to be found in Buenos Aires rather than the outlying areas which usually have older stocks. So we can assume even lower concentrations outside Buenos Aires. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.
Former President Carlos Menem’s Syrian Muslim parents settled in the interior La Rioja Province; but they ran a winery, a practice forbidden to Muslims; so even the exceptions prove the rule. Carlos himself converted to Catholicism.
What this means, in effect, is less than 10,000 practicing Muslims in a country of 41,000,000. Or roughly about 0.025% practicing Muslims.
This is changing. The Saudi financed King Fahd Mosque is probably re-invigorating some renewed interest in the lapsed Muslim community which is considerably larger. But it is competing with a rising Evangelical Revival sweeping all of South America, even Argentina, which is now 9% Evangelical. Until recently, Protestantism was primarily found among some Swedish- and German-Argentines and the Anglo-American resident communities; but that is changing, apparently rapidly so.
I doubt even a resurgent Islam can compete with it.