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.
Or wear a paper head covering and say, "You want hummus with that?"
Well, it's not just Arab culture.
I can think of many off the top of my head both gone and present ones:
Arab, Amerindian, Sub-Saharan, most Oriental ones...
If all knowlege of all of them were to disappear tomorrow, I am firmly of the conviction that the civilized world's level of science, liberty, comfort and progress will not have changed one iota.
That, to me, makes them clearly and permanently inferior.
I don't really care how the savages managed to lift 150-ton rocks for their amusement.
I don't care if one had a calendar accurate for 450,000 years. I don't see too many space projects using the Mayan calendar.
Of course some civilizations and cultures are inferior.
That's why most of them no longer exist!
If using those faculties (the human intellect) that separate me from the lower animals make me racist, so be it.
Color me unapologetically and permanently racist.
Next lame argument, please.
There HAVE been attempts by the more "enlightened" middle Eastern/Arab countries to develop other industries (specifically petrochemical). These have NOT been successes (despite large amounts of money invested) for exactly the reasons given in the article.
That is one of the most amazing intellectually bankrupt statements that I have ever heard.
But it does explain nicely why the "Celt" culture has not existed for almost two thousand years.
But it does raise a tantalizing issue. China fits this category somewhat.
In the book 1421 it is persuasively argued that Chinese ships circumnavigated the earth, a "mistake" which the Chinese culture attempted to erase.
That, together with many other achievement in all the sciences, should have made them the dominant culture on earth today.
What happened? Exactly the same mentality that is dooming the muslim culture: Hubris.
In the case of the Chinese, they once had a real culture to "protect".
In the case of the muslims, they are simply doomed to disappear because not only are they as a culture ignorant, but also delusional.
I am not sure if this is a myth sustained by the sandmaggots themselves, or by the mindless PC idiots.
Historically, in every instance of Arab "achievement", the greatness exhibited in any given area was the result of exploiting skills and knowlege already existing in the conquered area.
The one clearly muslim characteristic in every case was that innovation, inventiveness, technical, scientific skills and intellectual inquiry came to a grinding halt.
Islam and all those things are permanently and irrevocably mutually exclusive. That's what a primitive, inflexible and ignorant religion does.
My graphic actually depicts Marx, Lenin and Hillary. She is, after all, a radical Marxist - has been since college days.
In the days/weeks following 9/11 the left was wringing their hands saying that we needed to give money to Afghanistan and the Middle East so that their people wouldn't live in poverty. Never mind that 5 of the world's 10 wealthiest individuals live in the Middle East. The money is there; these people instead live under wealthy monarchs and dictators who'd rather construct another 10 gold plated palaces.
Even today we hear the lies of the left that this was a war over oil so that American corporations can steal those oil dollars from the "downtrodden" Middle Easterners.
Just to correct an error in the first line - Mahathir was the Prime Minister of Malaysia not Indonesia.
Mel
That, and a dollar, will buy you a 20 oz. soda at the local convenience store. This is dangerous -- a large number of college grads either unemployed or underemployed because they majored in a field of study with no practical application. Their disappointment and frustration is far more likely to lead them to radical politics than someone who never went beyond the Saudi equivalent of the 5th grade and became a tent maker. That person doesn't expect much out of life. This isn't hypothetical -- during the 1970s, Italy had a big problem with the Red Brigade -- largely drawn from unemployed college grads.
Ironically enough, the Saudis are still importing large numbers of Europeans and Americans for management positions and Pakistanis for janitorial jobs.
But cultures that let themselves be overrun by barbarians from outside aren't so superior --- political correctness is a very poor culture.
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