I'll say!!
Posted on 11/09/2003 8:40:45 AM PST by quidnunc
Lost in the furor over Indonesian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s anti-Semitic comments at last month’s Muslim summit were other revealing parts of his speech.
The central theme of Mahathir’s rant was that 6 million Jews hold down 1.3 billion Muslims. The implicit question therein is, what is there about the Muslim world that makes it so weak that it can be held down in such fashion?
Apart from the ugly anti-Semitism, Mahathir’s depiction of the Muslim plight constitutes an inadvertent confirmation by a prominent Muslim leader of what Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes and other Western scholars have been saying for some time — that Muslim rage is less a consequence of Western imperialism than of Muslim shame in the face of vastly superior Western power, wealth and cultural achievement.
The Muslim world, most especially its Arab branch, is pathetically poor, militarily incompetent and ruled by some of the world’s most vulgar and brutal despots. There is virtually no respect for the rights of women (or any other human rights), scant prospects for Nobel prizes in science or literature and no stable democracies under the rule of law.
The Muslim response to these "deficiencies" has been as predictable as it is historically fallacious and psychologically transparent — to blame others, mostly America and Israel.
Of course, the Jews don’t thwart Muslim development. And if they, in their puny numbers, actually did, whose fault would that be, the Jews or the Muslims? That so many Muslims apparently believe that they can be so easily exploited and dominated by others in a way that Chinese, Indians and Koreans can’t tells us a great deal about the Muslim sense of civilizational inferiority.
In short, the central source of Muslim rage is Muslim awareness that Israel and the West are everything Muslim societies aren’t — democratic, prosperous, and intellectually alive. Empirical evidence for this just happens to have come at roughly the same time as Mahathir’s diatribe in the form of The Arab Human Development Report 2003. Compiled under U. N. auspices, the study provides a deep and gloomy immersion in the backward nature of Arab economy and culture.
Perhaps the most stunning data concern the stagnant condition of Arab intellectual life, as reflected in educational approaches that breed, in the words of the report’s authors, "submission, obedience, subordination and compliance rather than free critical thinking."
Flowing from such a lack of intellectual dynamism are some truly alarming factoids: that the number of books translated into Arabic in the entire millennium equals only the amount translated into Spanish in a given year; that the number of computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world is only one-fifth of the global average; and that best-selling novels sell only about 5,000 copies compared to hundreds of thousands elsewhere.
Perhaps more alarming still, scientific research and development fails to exceed 0.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product in any Arab country, and only one in 20 students in Arab universities studies science and engineering.
The historian Victor Davis Hanson has long argued that the superiority of Western civilization flows precisely from that which is most conspicuously lacking in Arab civilization — an openness toward new ideas paired with a relentless tendency toward self-criticism. The
West dominates because its intellectual curiosity is an ongoing source of creativity and innovation. The Arab world stagnates because it substitutes obedience to authority and superstition for receptivity to ideas. There is, then, a reason why it would be impossible to conceive of people like Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi and Mullah Omar ever holding positions of authority in a Western nation.
When viewed within this context, Islamist hatred for the West constitutes both a cause and an effect of Muslim failure; an effect in the sense of excusing it, a cause in the sense of discouraging the kinds of introspection and reform necessary for progress. In the blunt but inarguably accurate words of pundit Ralph Peters, "their entire civilization has a ‘Born to lose’ tattoo."
As long as even educated Muslims like Mahathir find it so convenient to blame Israel and America for the dismal condition of their lands, those lands will remain weak, poor and pathetic.
I was talking about people like Hitler, Stalin, etc. I was just trying to say that the west isn't immune from having a monster as a leader -- it's just less likely to happen here.
In Arab Muslim culture, the only honorable thing to study is the Koran, and the only honorable profession is warrior. The results are predictable
I'll say!!
The only job available to most educated Saudis, is to be exported to be the Wahhabist mullah of a mosque or maddrassa
Dang, I had it wrong; I should've cheered when Mahathir spoke up.
We know what they're learning.
Terrorism, anti-Americanism, intolerance, hatred, Islamofascism...
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