The Backward Arab World Grows Even More Backward

Between 1980 and 2000, Korea granted 16,328 patents, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., granted a combined total of only 370, many of them registered by foreigners. A study in 1989 found that in one year, the United States published 10,481 scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab world published only four. This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke, but when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world in 2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. The recent push to establish new research and science institutions in the Arab world...clearly still has a long way to go. _NewAtlantis

The Arabian "Golden Age" and the Arabian empire, were always more dependent upon the abilities and energies of the conquered peoples, than on the abilities of the Arab conquerors. The Arabian hegemony from central Asia to North Africa and southern Spain, allowed a commingling of the wisdom of the East, Middle East, and the remnants of ancient Greek learning. The so-called "golden age of Islam" was the result of the symbiotic knowledge explosion that occurred when multiple traditions of knowledge collided within an environment that was tolerant of mathematical and scientific ideas. But that tolerance did not last forever, as Islam never remains tolerant for very long.

By the year 750, the Arabs had conquered Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and much of North Africa, Central Asia, Spain, and the fringes of China and India. Newly opened routes connecting India and the Eastern Mediterranean spurred an explosion of wealth through trade, as well as an agricultural revolution...The spread of empire brought urbanization, commerce, and wealth that helped spur intellectual collaboration. Maarten Bosker of Utrecht University and his colleagues explain that in the year 800, while the Latin West (with the exception of Italy) was “relatively backward,” the Arab world was highly urbanized, with twice the urban population of the West. Several large metropolises — including Baghdad, Basra, Wasit, and Kufa — were unified under the Abbasids; they shared a single spoken language and brisk trade via a network of caravan roads. Baghdad in particular, the Abbasid capital, was home to palaces, mosques, joint-stock companies, banks, schools, and hospitals; by the tenth century, it was the largest city in the world.

...the single most significant reason that Arabic science thrived was the absorption and assimilation of the Greek heritage — a development fueled by the translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad....the Abbasids found scientific Greek texts immensely useful for a sort of technological progress — solving common problems to make daily life easier. The Abbasids did not bother translating works in subjects such as poetry, history, or drama, which they regarded as useless or inferior. Indeed, science under Islam, although in part an extension of Greek science, was much less theoretical than that of the ancients. Translated works in mathematics, for example, were eventually used for engineering and irrigation, as well as in calculation for intricate inheritance laws. And translating Greek works on medicine had obvious practical use.

...The second factor central to the rise of the translation movement was that Greek thought had already been diffused in the region, slowly and over a long period, before the Abbasids and indeed before the advent of Islam. Partly for this reason, the Abbasid Baghdad translation movement was not like the West’s subsequent rediscovery of ancient Athens, in that it was in some respects a continuation of Middle Eastern Hellenism. Greek thought spread as early as Alexander the Great’s conquests of Asia and North Africa in the 300s b.c., and Greek centers, such as in Alexandria and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (238-140 b.c., in what is now Afghanistan), were productive centers of learning even amid Roman conquest. By the time of the Arab conquests, the Greek tongue was known throughout the vast region, and it was the administrative language of Syria and Egypt. After the arrival of Christianity, Greek thought was spread further by missionary activity, especially by Nestorian Christians. Centuries later, well into the rule of the Abbasids in Baghdad, many of these Nestorians — some of them Arabs and Arabized Persians who eventually converted to Islam — contributed technical skill for the Greek-Arabic translation movement, and even filled many translation-oriented administrative posts in the Abbasid government.

...As the Middle Ages progressed, Arabic civilization began to run out of steam. After the twelfth century, Europe had more significant scientific scholars than the Arabic world, as Harvard historian George Sarton noted in his Introduction to the History of Science (1927-48). After the fourteenth century, the Arab world saw very few innovations in fields that it had previously dominated, such as optics and medicine; henceforth, its innovations were for the most part not in the realm of metaphysics or science, but were more narrowly practical inventions like vaccines. “The Renaissance, the Reformation, even the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, passed unnoticed in the Muslim world,” Bernard Lewis remarks in Islam and the West (1993)....Islamic civilization did not have a culture hospitable to the advancement of science, while medieval Europe did.

...In trying to explain the Islamic world’s intellectual laggardness, it is tempting to point to the obvious factors: authoritarianism, bad education, and underfunding (Muslim states spend significantly less than developed states on research and development as a percentage of GDP). But these reasons are all broad and somewhat crude, and raise more questions than answers. At a deeper level, Islam lags because it failed to offer a way to institutionalize free inquiry. That, in turn, is attributable to its failure to reconcile faith and reason.

...most criticism in the Muslim world is directed outward, at the West. This prejudice — what Fouad Ajami has called (referring to the Arab world) “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity” — is undoubtedly one of Islam’s biggest obstacles. It makes information that contradicts orthodox belief irrelevant, and it closes off debate about the nature and history of Islam. _NewAtlantis

A very interesting article, all in all.

But it fails to bring out the genetic decline within the Arab world caused by inbreeding -- first cousin marriages being one widespread offense against wise genetics. A resulting low average IQ in the Arab world -- with a mean IQ of roughly 85 (the same as the average African American IQ) -- places limits on the scientific and intellectual accomplishments of the Arab world which no outside enemy could ever place. (see Wikipedia IQ and the Wealth of Nations)

The relative intolerance and hatred toward outsiders which is so common in Arab Islam is an additional limiting factor. The unwillingness to learn from the experience of others dooms Arab Muslims to persist in making the same fatal mistakes over and over. The underlying source of this Arab xenophobia is likely to be found in tribal tradition, religious tradition, and underlying genetic complement.

Arabs who immigrate to the west are likely to occupy the upper end of the bell curve, and present a misleading picture to western observers, of what they should expect from Arabs as a whole.

There is no indication that any of the efforts to boost higher learning and scientific accomplishment in the Arab lands, will have more than a temporary or superficial impact. The hold of stone-age Islam is simply too strong -- as was seen in the "Arab Spring" movement which quickly devolved into a fundamentalist Muslim hatefest against all "others."

Arab populations are more intelligent and less backward, on average, than SubSaharan African populations. And SubSaharan African populations are typically less backward than Australian Aboriginal populations. That is simply what one would expect from comparing psychometric studies for the respective groups.

Any truly benevolent friend of Arabs as a people, would want to face the facts clearly and without excuses. And he would look to the foundations of Arab backwardness in order to find a solution, and a way to benefit Arabs as a whole.

Recession Clouds Reaching as Far as Dubai

BEIJING -- The worldwide economic slump is slashing demand for exports from Asia, aggravating China's downturn and threatening to push some countries into full-blown recession.After nearly a decade of eye-popping growth, China's economy slowed dramatically in the last quarter of 2008, recording gross domestic product growth of just 6.8 per cent at an annual rate, down from 9 per cent the previous quarter. _GlobeandMail

Whether a nation's economy is based upon exports, like China or Russia, or based upon financial services like Dubai, the current global credit crisis and de-leveraging is causing significant dislocations. Consider Dubai, a nation once thought to have a bullet-proof economy:

No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or canceled. But with the government unwilling to provide data, rumors are bound to flourish, damaging confidence and further undermining the economy.

...Some things are clear: real estate prices, which rose dramatically during Dubai’s six-year boom, have dropped 30 percent or more over the past two or three months in some parts of the city. Last week, Moody’s Investor’s Service announced that it might downgrade its ratings on six of Dubai’s most prominent state-owned companies, citing a deterioration in the economic outlook. So many used luxury cars are for sale , they are sometimes sold for 40 percent less than the asking price two months ago, car dealers say. Dubai’s roads, usually thick with traffic at this time of year, are now mostly clear.

...For many foreigners, Dubai had seemed at first to be a refuge, relatively insulated from the panic that began hitting the rest of the world last autumn. The Persian Gulf is cushioned by vast oil and gas wealth, and some who lost jobs in New York and London began applying here.

But Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or nearby Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out. _NYT

Most unfortunate. The Arab world truly needed an interface to the larger world such as Dubai. A place where Arabs and Muslims could pretend to be free of the irrational tribal strictures of Islam, at least for a while. The dream was to create an Arab "halfway house" that would ease the transition of the Arab world from the middle ages to modern times. It looks as if medieval Saudi Arabia will have the last laugh. At least until Iran drops the big one on Riyadh.

After that, one may have to wait quite a while before anyone laughs again in that part of the world.

Arab World Afflicted by Genetic Inbreeding

Up to half of all Emirati marriages are between relatives, with 54 per cent of married couples in Al Ain being relatives, compared to 32 per cent in Abu Dhabi and 40 per cent in Dubai.

Saudi Arabia, has perhaps the highest rate of intermarriage, with up to two thirds of all marriages occurring between relatives.

One of the costs of the type of close inbreeding that is common in the Arab and Muslim worlds, is genetic disease. Arabs and Muslims often inbreed due to tribal and clannish distrust of outsiders. Western medical and civil authorities need to understand that when such third-world peoples move to the first world, they often bring such dysfunctional customs with them.

Saudi Arabia has the highest rate of birth defects in the Gulf, with around 80 babies out of every 1,000 born with a disorder.

In the UAE, Kuwait and Oman, 70 to 79 children in every 1,000 are born with a birth defect.

Sudan has the highest rate in the world at 82 per 1,000, while France has the world’s lowest rate, at 39 per 1,000.

Birth defects have been closely linked to marriages between cousins and relatives, a common practice throughout the region and estimated to account for 35 to 50 per cent of all weddings.

Such traditions can increase the number of carriers of recessive genes, leading to higher rates of birth defects. Selective and environmental factors, including a lack of public awareness about how to prevent such conditions, also compound the problem.

Autosomal recessive disorders, in which two copies of the gene must mutate for a person to be affected, form an overwhelming proportion of genetic disorders in Arab patients in the UAE, according to CAGS, which says high rates of marriage between relatives are a leading contributor to the condition.

An affected person usually has unaffected parents who both carry a mutated gene. _CBT

Arab and Muslim countries typically lack the type of scientific and biomedical infrastructure to deal with problems that a backward culture creates.

The dysfunctionality of third world customs tend to add synergistically with western dysfunctionalities--unfortunately--when third world muslims migrate to more modern western nations. This is why one is seeing problems of growing numbers of clannish third world street gangs within European cities, inflating crime statistics and reducing overall trust and safety within the society. European prisons are filling with these dysfunctional products of a backward culture, as European health care systems begin to feel the brunt.

US President Bush believed at one time that it was possible to bring the modern world to the Arab world, so that perhaps the worst parts of the Arab world would not come to the modern world. I wonder if he still believes in that optimistic idea?

Arab Emirates Push for Nuclear Power

The United Arab Emirates is pushing hard to develop its "post-oil economy" in time to sail through the rougher days ahead. By establishing itself as an economic "gateway to the Arab world", as well as a world financial center in its own right, the Emirates are attempting to build a prosperous future that is less dependent upon local production of oil. Nuclear power will provide baseload energy for the huge new developments being built in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Air conditioning demands for the growing population centers within the Emirates will require a much greater expenditure of energy.

The UAE’s plan to acquire nuclear technology for power generation and other peaceful uses will allow it to save its oil and gas wealth and maximise its income from hydrocarbon exports in the long term, according to information from analysts.

Although it is importing gas from Qatar and is planning to get more supplies from Iran, the UAE could curb any increase in such imports by introducing nuclear technology for power generation, they said.

The nuclear programme, which is expected to be implemented in phases in the long term, could also help offset a steady and rapid increase in oil consumption in the UAE because of growth in most non-oil sectors.

“This will of course enable the UAE to save its oil and gas wealth for future generations,” said an economist at an Abu Dhabi-based bank....In a comment yesterday, the Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research said the UAE nuclear plans would support its efforts to preserve the hydrocarbon wealth, meet growing domestic energy demand, protect the environment and boost the economy.

“Generating power through nuclear energy is a very viable option commercially… it will effectively contribute to economic development,” it said. _Business24/7

A growing population within a very hot, arid desert, will require a large amount of electrical energy for air conditioning and desalination. Nuclear energy makes sense, given the high costs of natural gas and oil currently.

Does the same energy calculus apply to Iran as well? Certainly. Unfortunately, Iran has been caught enriching uranium for other, less innocent purposes. Combined with Iran's hostility toward its Middle Eastern neighbors and outspoken belligerence and threatening posture, Iran will have to be looked at as a special case.

Arab World Still Lagging in Education, Literacy

Although western influences are bringing better educational opportunities to young Arab females and males, rigid traditions in the area prevent many among the Arab youth bulge demographic from benefiting.

"It's a very youthful region - 60% of the region's population is under 30 years of age, close to 100m new jobs will need to be created over the next 10 to 15 years in the Arab World," he explained..."If we are to create such jobs, then we have to start with education."__BBC

As the youth demographic in the Arab world explodes, little seems to be done to help this rising tide of largely illiterate youth prepare for the changing world outside of insular Arab society.

"There is a pressing need within the region to redirect educational approaches across all stages and all forms to educate students on how to think and not what to think," Marwan Musher, a World Bank senior vice president, said at the launch.

"Education systems do not support adequately the development by girls and boys of analytical skills, problem-solving skills, critical thinking and innovation," he said.___Source

While there always seem to be enough funds to sponsor fanatical Wahabi madrasas--training jihadis and suicide bombers--there is little attention given to helping youth prepare for real world employment. Illiteracy remains a huge problem for Arabs.

The number of illiterate people in the Arab world has reached 99.5 million, accounting for 29.7 percent of the whole population, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) said Monday.

Among these, 75 million people are aged between 15 and 45, the Tunis-based ALECSO said in a statement....The sharp increase of illiterate people will pose a severe threat to the social development of Arab nations, said the statement. ____Source

Of course, if parents intend for their children to live only long enough to fight and die, or to blow themselves up, perhaps the constricted viewpoint toward their future makes sense. Multiculturalists will tell us that we should not judge another culture.

Once, Arab science was supposed to have enjoyed a "golden age." Between the 8th and 11th centuries CE, the ancient wisdom of the west (Greece) met the ancient and more recent wisdom of the east (India, Persia, China) in Arab cities such as Baghdad.

But many of the early scholars were not Muslims either. Instead, what unified Muslims, Christians and Jews, Arabs and Persians, was the Arabic language. It would remain the international language of science for 700 hundred years.

The point is that there is no such thing as 'Islamic science' or 'Muslim science', as it is often portrayed both in the West and the Muslim world today. Science cannot be characterised by the religion of those who engage in it.___Source

Baghdad, Damascus, and other Arab cities were in the right place at the right time to absorb the ancient knowledge, and to contribute to the ongoing development of certain branches of science and mathematics.

When Islam grew intolerant again--as it does periodically--the "golden age" turned to dross, and discovery in science and math moved on to more open and promising societies. It has never looked back since.

Arab lands were once rich in "market dominant minorities." As long as those minorities were tolerated, Arab lands prospered. When Islam grew too intolerant for the tiniest glimpse of outside thought, Arab lands went into decline--and stayed there.

Current "oil wealth" in Arab countries exists due to development by outsiders and continued maintenance of production by outsiders.

The counter-productive attitudes toward hard work that bedevil many minority communities in western countries, are even more widespread within Arab communities. Whether hard mental work, or hard physical work, the general attitude is to avoid it. Given that mental set, educational reformers have their work cut out for them.

Arab World Plans Large Science Infrastructure: What Are The Odds?

the Arab world has stagnated. Per capita income in Arab countries grew at an annual rate of just 0.5% during the last quarter century - less than half the global average. Despite being blessed with massive quantities of "black gold," Arabs have seen their average standard of living decline relative to the rest of the world. The combined GDP of all Arab countries ($531.2 billion) is today less than that of Spain (a country that Arabs once ruled).

SourceAccording to the best studies by intelligence researchers, the mean IQ for the arab world is near 85--exactly that of the african-american population in the US. While the Arab world reaps many billions of dollars yearly from oil and gas revenues, the scientific and educational levels of the Arab world are dismally low. Is it theoretically likely that a larger monetary investment in a Science Education/Research infrastructure could raise scientific achievement in the arab world up to western levels?

Earlier this year, the 22 nations of the Arab League approved a 10-year plan to boost scientific research. It calls for member states to raise their allocation to science twelvefold to 2.5 percent of GDP—more than the average 2.3 percent spent by developed nations.

...Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum of the United Arab Emirates recently launched a new pan-Arab foundation with a monumental endowment of $10 billion—one of the largest charitable donations in history. The foundation's stated mission is to "develop world-class knowledge" in the Arab region, and many are hoping it will foster broad-based scientific research.

...With a $1.5 billion annual allocation to science in a country with a population of less than a million, Qatar is intent on reform. Education City is Qatar's new university system—a 2,500-acre campus that is home to branches of five of the world's top universities, including Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. The Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP) has enticed foreign labs and international companies by offering top-notch research facilities. The country is bringing in foreign expertise to achieve a long-term vision—to make Qatar a knowledge-based society. "QSTP is a 20-year program," says director Eulian Roberts, "but we're working hard now so that we can achieve a change in culture, a change in mentality."

Source

Oman and Saudi Arabia plan to join Qatar and the Emirates in their aggressive thrust to build large new scientific infrastructures for education and research. We know that the Arab world is proficient at "bringing in foreign expertise." That is how the oil and gas fields were developed, how the modern urban infrastructures were constructed and maintained, how the entire Arab civilisation keeps from falling apart. But the key question that any knowledgeable person is forced to ask in connection with this new putsch for Arab science is: Where will they get all the promising young math, physics, chemistry, biology students?

Good science, math, and engineering students at the university level do not spring up from thin air. They come from good programs at lower levels of education. They come from families that typically encourage curious young minds to explore. Where will they find this type of family, this type of K-12 education and top notch undergrad training? In the muslim world--particularly the arab muslim world--curiosity is too often beaten out of young minds, and too many questions are forbidden to children and youth. Women are seen as second-rate minds and third-rate citizens, which eliminates half of youth intelligent enough to pursue a scientific career. Much of science conflicts with rigid Islamic teaching. Where will the religious police be during all of this buildup?

The chart above comparing a population with mean IQ of 85 with a population with a mean IQ of 100 (SD 15) indicates the relative portions of the two populations with enough intelligence for the different careers. While this type of chart has its limitations, it is useful as a broad guide.

Is this type of promotional thrust yet another example of "cargo cult science and education?" I suspect so. "If you build it, they will come . . ." If you build the huge and expensive universities and science/engineering labs, the students and professors will come, the researchers will come, the international regard for homegrown science and technology will come . . . or will it?

While the faculty and researchers for these new institutions can be imported from abroad, the students will have to come from home turf--if the program is to have any meaning at all. And once you do train world class Arab youth in science and technology, how do you keep them from emigrating to Europe and the Anglosphere? That is always a perennial problem for the third world.

Saudi Religious Gestapo Get Pepper Sprayed

The Saudi religious police are guilty of beating people to death, fatally trapping schoolgirls in burning buildings, and generally making an oppressive nuisance of themselves across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Is it possible that young Saudis are preparing to overthrow these corrupt medieval religious tyrants of the street?

According to Dr. Al-Marshood, the two commission members approached the girls in order to "politely" advice and guide them regarding their inappropriate clothing.

It gets better:

Consequently, the two girls started verbally abusing the commission members, which then lead to one of the girls pepper-spraying them in the face as the other girl filmed the incident on her mobile phone, while continuing to hurl insults at them.

YouTube, please.

The Eastern Province's head of the commission also revealed that with the help of the police his two employees were able to control the situation.

The two females were then escorted to the police station where they apologized for the attack, were cautioned and then released.

Source

Naturally, I too would like to see the YouTube clip of this promising confrontation. No doubt the Saudi authorities consider it an example of their spoiled youth acting out against proper authority. Perhaps they're unaware of what happened across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

Islam is badly in need of reform--beginning in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The religious Gestapo of KSA is exactly the proper target for reform-minded Saudis. Keep it up.

Ski Dubai Slopes, Then Chill in Dubai Ice Lounge

Outside, it may be 120 degrees F in the shade. Inside, you can snow ski for hours at Ski Dubai, yet another tourist destination in the jewel of the Emirates.If you look carefully, you can see the silver structure in the center of the photograph--Ski Dubai! Many more photos here!

After you have skied to your heart's content, you can step into the Chillout lounge, an ice oasis in the desert. You can travel many thousands of miles to be in one of the world's hottest and most arid regions--and forget where you are. Of course, if you get tired of the snow and ice, you can simply step outside. Source

Hat tip Impact Lab.

The United Arab Emirates is run by Arab royalty, but is populated by majority non-arab. The architects, engineers, and skilled technicians and workers who are building Dubai and other Emirates, are from the outside.

But the rulers of the UAE appear interested in a more liberal lifestyle than you will find in KSA. Consider the Emirates a type of gateway to the Arab world. Where Arabs can learn about the larger world and outsiders can work and learn about the Arab world.

Eventually, Arab countries will need to learn to live without the oil income crutch. The Emirates are trying several alternatives, including tourism.

Sunni Insurgents Turning Against Al Qaida in Iraq

A recent Time article by Joe Klein describes some of the recent "turning away" by Sunni insurgents, from an earlier alliance with Al Qaida in Iraq.

After the briefing I asked Colonel Antonia if he'd asked the Sunnis why they had turned against al-Qaeda. "They said it was religious stuff," he said. "AQI demanded that the women wear abayas, no smoking and they preached an extreme version of Islam in the mosque. They'd also spent the winter without food and fuel because of the violence al-Qaeda was causing. One guy said to me, 'We fought against you because you invaded our country and you're infidels. But you treat us with more dignity than al-Qaeda,' and he said they'd continue to work with us. I've been involved in many operations here and this is a first—usually everybody's shooting at us. This is the first time we've had any of them on our side." (In web postings, the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade has denied it is cooperating with the Americans.)

Odierno later told me similar anti-al-Qaeda rebellions were happening throughout the country, including some neighborhoods of Baghdad. "Iraqis notice things. They noticed what happened when we began to support the Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda in al-Anbar. And al-Qaeda seems to have overplayed its hand."

Source

Does this mean the US is "winning" the war in Iraq? Of course not. Iraq is a battlefield where "soldiers" from many nations are fighting for their own reasons, while the Iraqis themselves are divided by tribe, clan, ethnicity, religion, and goals for the future. Perhaps the Kurdish region of Iraq has a future, but the Arab parts of Iraq are cursed with the historical tendency of Arabs to cut their own throats while trying to cut the throats of everyone around them. Still, if the tribes of Iraq can agree to eradicate the religious extremists among them--both Sunni and Shia--perhaps even the Arabs can find some peace eventually.

Gaza and the Arab Death Cult

Some of you may remember when the word "Beirut" was shorthand for bloody barbaric anarchy. Now the word is "Gaza." If only the barbarity were limited to a single city or strip of coast. Unfortunately, the seeds of this death cult seem to lie within Arab Islam.

We need to stop making politically correct excuses. Arab civilization is in collapse. Extremes dominate, either through dictatorship or anarchy. Thanks to their dysfunctional values and antique social structures, Arab states can't govern themselves decently.

We gave them a chance in Iraq. Israel "gave back" the Gaza Strip to let the Palestinians build a model state. Arabs seized those opportunities to butcher each other.

The barbarity in Gaza has become so grotesque that not even the media's apologists for terror can ignore it (especially since Islamist fanatics began to target journalists).

Over the weekend, Hamas gangbangers-for-Allah grabbed a Fatah functionary and dropped him from the roof of a high-rise to check out the law of gravity (the only law that still obtains in Gaza). Tit-for-tat, Fatah gunmen grabbed a Hamas capo and gave him the same treatment.

Source

Of course, we are accustomed to seeing Arabs behead innocent bystanders they have snatched off the streets. But usually they could connect these innocents with Zionists or Crusaders, somehow. In Gaza we are seeing what this generation of Arabs is all about. It is not just Gazans. It is not just Palestinian Arabs. Clearly when you look at the state of world terrorism, you can trace most of it to its source in Arab Islam.

Iran would probably protest and say that it deserves a lot of the credit for muslim bloodletting today. Perhaps. But it is the Arabs who participate most enthusiastically, regardless of where you look. Or, in the case of muslim violence in Europe, it is Arab-inspired and financed extremist mosques that serve as the focus for Islamic Supremacist violence.

So, what is wrong with arabs?

Saudi Arabia and Iran: Pathetic Loser Nations In the Eye of the Storm

Out of Iran's population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks ("Azeris" is the regime's term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran's 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards. If some 40 per cent of the British population were engaged in separatist struggles of varying intensity, nobody would claim that it was firmly united around the London government. On top of this, many of the Persian majority oppose the theocratic regime, either because they have become post-Islamic in reaction to its many prohibitions, or because they are Sufis, whom the regime now persecutes almost as much as the small Baha'i minority. So let us have no more reports from Tehran stressing the country's national unity. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. In our times, multinational states either decentralise or break up more or less violently; Iran is not decentralising, so its future seems highly predictable, while in the present not much cohesion under attack is to be expected.

....We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.

Saudi Arabia has a good excuse, for it was a land of oasis hand-farmers and Bedouin pastoralists who cannot be expected to become captains of industry in a mere 50 years. Much more striking is the oil parasitism of once much more accomplished Iran. It exports only 2.5m barrels a day as compared to Saudi Arabia's 8m, yet oil still accounts for 80 per cent of Iran's exports because its agriculture and industry have become so unproductive.

The middle east was once the world's most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN's 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa) at just 63 per cent. Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire middle east generated under 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006—less than Germany.

Source


Sometimes it seems as if the world revolves around Iran and Saudi Arabia--the two headquarter nations for dysfunctional Shia and Sunni Islam. It is clear that both arabs and persians aim to control the Ummah, the body of world Islamic belief. That is why both Saudi Arabia and Iran strive for nuclear weapons--the ultimate mark of power in an international community of third world failing nations.

Arab Illiteracy and Other Omens of a Stormy Future

The causes of Arab underdevelopment identified in the report are lack of freedom, marginal participation of women in public life and educational backwardness.Arab people enjoy least freedom compared to any other region in the world — less than even the countries bordering southern Sahara. Civil rights are mostly ignored though they are incorporated in constitutions and legislations in those countries. There are several impediments for the free functioning of the agencies that are supposed to ensure these rights. Arab women get the least opportunity to participate in the economic and political activities compared to any other place in the world. The level of education among Arab women is the lowest in the world. More than 50 percent of them are illiterate. One of the most alarming facts revealed by the report is the backwardness of Arabs in the field of science. The level of education in the region is falling while the per capita spending on scientific research and development is the lowest in the world. In 1996, it was 0.4 percent of the GNP which is one-third of what Cuba spent on scientific research. In 1994, Israel allocated 6.35 percent for the GNP for research programs while in Japan it was 6.9 percent. Naturally, the educational backwardness increases the rate of illiteracy among Arabs. More than 65 million people, which accounts for 43 percent of the Arab population, are illiterate.Source.

* Islamists who do not recognize that humanistic ideas can serve as a basis for society. In their view, everything has existed in the past, and is present in the holy text [the Koran]. The present and future are not in our hands, but in the hands of a force that propels us like puppets. According to these Islamists, the proper way to live is to return to the times of our forefathers, in the seventh century, and to adopt the principle of the Shura [the consultative council] of early Islam.

When it is argued that the Shura never convened in the early Islamic era, that its representatives were appointed and not elected, that the idea of a society like that of the forefathers is imaginary with no basis in historical fact... they have no answer except to curse those raising these questions and to accuse them of heresy.

Al-Houni concludes that there is no point in arguing with Islamists so long as the starting points are different. The Islamists consider the past to be the pinnacle of humanity, whereas Al-Houni's starting point is human experience and history as an unending process.Source.

Arabs seem to be caught in their own traps of illiteracy and primitive modes of thinking. There may be no escape whatsoever. Sadly, the younger generation of arabs is not only huge, but illiterate, and oddly drawn to violent and irrational strains of Islam. It does not look good for the arab world, and anyone who must deal with it.

Of all the sins Bush is guilty of, over-optimism in dealing with the arab and muslim world may be his greatest.

Interesting Observations on Arabs: Why are We so Surprised When a Different Culture is so DIFFERENT?

12 postulates about arabs from Rants and Raves blog, based on his experience teaching in Saudi Arabia:

1)They don't think the same way we do.
2)When you meet them in ... the right circumstances they are likable.
3)Their values are fundamentally different from ours . . .
4)They can neither build nor maintain a modern infrastructure
5)They do not think of obligations as running both ways
6)In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards . . .
7)They don't mean their rhetoric to be taken seriously
8)The abstract concept of "truth" means something different to them . . .
9)Cause and effect means something different to them . . .
10). . . They see themselves as a civilization on the skids . . .
11)We think everybody has a right to their own point of view--arabs think that's ridiculous
12)Arabs understand that western secular civilization cannot share the same world with muslim/arab civilization. One or the other must dominate, and arabs mean their culture/civilization to dominate by whatever means necessary.

I took minimal editorial license with the twelve points. Read the original observationshere. An extremely abbreviated quote from the post is below, but I recommend reading the entire thing.

1) They don’t think the same way we do.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON'T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO.

2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.

Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect....no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe or the community of the Believers.

3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.

The very concept of "maintenance" is foreign to them.

5) They do not think of obligations as running both ways.

With us, contractual and moral obligations tend to be equal and reciprocal. They don’t see it that way.

6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.


7) In rhetoric, they don’t mean to be taken seriously and they don’t understand when we do.

8) They don’t place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.

9) They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.

This involves some seriously weird stuff about other people being responsible for their misery because they ill-wished them.

10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.

Anyone who looks at the surviving architecture of Moorish Spain can tell that Islamic civilization has seen better days.

11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.

12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

The comments after the post are also very interesting.

In Dubai, Even the Islands Look Like Palm Trees

Dubai is a city in the UAE, a wealthy nation on the arab peninsula, opposite Iran across the Straits of Hormuz. Only 23% of residents are "emirati", the rest are mostly outside workers from south asia, arab countries, and a small proportion of foreign residents from outside the muslim world.

The Palm Jumeirah, a 12-square-mile island group, is part of what's billed as the largest land-reclamation project in the world, the product of five years of brute hauling of millions of tons of Persian Gulf sand and quarried rock.

On Nov. 30, the palm will open to some 4,000 residents, said Issam Kazim, a spokesman for Dubai's state-owned developer Nakheel.

When fully complete by 2010, the Palm Jumeirah will be an offshore city, with some 60,000 residents and at least 50,000 workers in 32 hotels and dozens of shops and attractions, Nakheel said.

Observers say they are surprised that the fledgling developer has been able to build such a complex project more or less as planned, albeit with several snags that delayed the opening from last year.

"The project has captured people's imagination," said Colin Foreman of the Middle East Economic Digest. "Nothing like it has been done anywhere else in the world."

Nakheel's four island projects, the world's largest land reclamation effort, are reshaping Dubai's stretch of the Gulf coast.

The $14 billion project is a key part of this booming city's ambitions to rival Singapore and Hong Kong as a business hub, and surpass Las Vegas as a leisure capital.

The frenetic pace of development has utterly transformed Dubai from a sleepy trading and pearl-diving village in the 1950s to a flashy metropolis of 1.5 million.

The island's construction has not all been smooth, and most buyers were supposed to get keys to their island homes a year ago.

Some of the new land sank and Nakheel needed an extra year to add more and pack it with vibrating land compactors, Kazim said.

Reports from those who have wandered through the island's giant homes describe them as cheaply finished and set uncomfortably close to one another. Nakheel rejected an Associated Press request to visit the island.

Overburdened roads in Dubai's Jumeirah Beach neighborhood are expected to clog further as people begin moving onto the island, accessible, for now, by a single bridge. Mainlanders have already put up with years of road works and innumerable trucks hauling boulders to the island.

Those moving onto the Palm Jumeirah this year will have to live with construction for another three years, and then an influx of tourists. Most of the owners are foreigners, with Britons making up the largest group, Kazim said.

Many observers believe Dubai's frenetic homebuilding will soon outstrip demand.

"We've still got a shortage of properties in Dubai, but that's likely to become an excess in next six or 12 months," said Steve Brice, an economist with Standard Chartered Bank in Dubai.

Brice said year-old estimates that 50,000 housing units would hit the market in 2006 will be more than doubled. Nakheel, one of three big developers here, has said it will release 60,000 units in the 2nd half of 2006 alone.

Nakheel's two copycat Palms, the Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Deira, have also been delayed by design changes and other factors, Kazim said. A nearly finished fourth Nakheel archipelago, shaped like a map of the world, has attracted few buyers and remains mostly unsold.

Kazim said The World's sales trouble stems from simple economics: Nakheel is selling empty islands for tens of millions of dollars only to builders promising low-density luxury.

Dubai's government expects the Palm Jumeirah to become a signature tourist attraction, bringing in as many as 20,000 daily visitors, Kazim said.

Meanwhile, laborers living in a cruise ship moored offshore are scrambling to finish enormous concrete houses that are crammed together on the palm island's 17 "fronds." The fronds are narrow peninsulas as long as a mile, attached to the island's main trunk. Nakheel will hand keys to owners of 1,350 homes by Nov. 30, Kazim said.

Source.


According to informed sources, living is good in Dubai, even for foreign workers. Skilled westerners can expect to be paid significantly more for their skills than at home, often with considerable tax advantages. Businessmen from outside UAE must get an emirati as a partner and nominal owner, as a condition for tapping into the booming economy there.

UAE is attempting to escape the " ideological straightjacket" that makes life in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other muslim oil states so constricting. As long as the jihadi troublemakers from UAE are concentrating on making trouble elsewhere, life is good inside the emirates. UAE is also trying to move seamlessly from the oil economy to the "post-oil" economy, which is why it welcomes more investment and ideas from overseas than its less enlightened arab brother nations.

Given that arabs are a minority population in the UAE, it is easy to think of UAE and Dubai as "gateways to the world" for the arab people. Lebanon functions as such also, when it is not being embroiled in civil wars, Hizbollah inspired wars of stupidity, or other self-inflicted problems.l

Arab Backwardness: Societal Suicide Bomb?

Arabs are lagging in education, economy, democracy and freedom of expression, and computers. 2003—In Arab countries, with a combined population of 284 million, a “best seller” may have a print run of just 5,000 copies, due to censorship and other constraints on independent publishers. Translations of foreign works into Arabic lag far behind figures in the rest of the world: five times more books are translated yearly into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. Just 53 newspapers per 1,000 citizens are published daily in the region, compared to 285 papers per 1,000 people in the developed nations, and there are only 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world, as compared to the global average of 78 per 1,000.

The first Arab Human Development Report in 2002 was a bombshell dropped onto the entire arab world. The report notes that while oil income has transformed the landscapes of some Arab countries, the region remains "richer than it is developed." Per capita income growth has shrunk in the last 20 years to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is declining. Research and development are weak or nonexistent. Science and technology are dormant.

Intellectuals flee a stultifying -- if not repressive -- political and social environment, it says.

Arab women, the report found, are almost universally denied advancement. Half of them still cannot read or write. The maternal mortality rate is double that of Latin America and four times that of East Asia.

The followup report in 2003 showed the situation to be no better. A group of Arab intellectuals issued a report yesterday that found the Arab world lacking in three areas they deemed fundamental to development: freedom of expression, access to knowledge and women's rights.
The group, criticized by Arab officials for a similar report last year, said the challenges caused by the deficiencies "may have become even graver" since 2002.
After dismal reports in 2002, 2003, and 2004, the UN HDR appears to have given up on the arab world. Who can blame them? Since World War II, the Arab world has lagged the rest of the planet in economic growth. For example, 300 million Arabs, and all that oil, generate less economic activity than Spain, and its population of 40 million. The main problem has been bad government. Too many dictators, and too much government restrictions on the economy. Too much corruption and waste. Even higher oil prices don't help, as it simply provides more money to be wasted on consumption, rather than business investment.

An Economist article, titled "Self-Doomed to Failure," captures the pathetic state of the arab world. The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.

•Freedom. This deficit, in the UNDP's interpretation, explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciary (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment.

The area is rich in all the outward trappings of democracy. Elections are held and human-rights conventions are signed. But the great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right.


....•Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all.

One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.

....•Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. The report sees this as an awful waste: how can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.

Governments and societies (and sometimes, as in Kuwait, societies and parliamentarians are more backward than their governments) vary in the degrees of bad treatment they mete out to women. But in nearly all Arab countries, women suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements. The UNDP has a “gender-empowerment measure” which shows the Arabs near the bottom (according to this measure, sub-Saharan Africa ranks even worse). But the UN was able to measure only 14 of the 22 Arab states, since the necessary data were not available in the others. This, as the report says, speaks for itself, reflecting the general lack of concern in the region for women's desire to be allowed to get on.

...With so many paths closed to them, some are now turning their dangerous anger on the western world.

Meanwhile in an ethnically divided Iraq with sectarian divisions, the first tentative steps have been taken toward democracy, as the rest of the arab world looks on with a wary curiousity. A few cautious voices believe that, in time, the Iraqi elections will put pressure on neighboring countries to democratize.

In Cairo, Hisham Qassem, chairman of a human rights organization and chief executive officer of a new Arab daily newspaper, believes that both the Iraqi and Palestinian elections have given impetus to democratic reform.
"Once people feel there are positive effects from the democratic process, they will want the same. Especially countries like Egypt who felt they were ahead of Iraq but are now lagging behind,” he said. Many arabs must be wondering if it takes an emasculating invasion from abroad and low level civil war to bring democracy to an arab country.

It takes more than democracy to bring the arab world out of the stone age. It will take economic reform. Since Saddam was tossed out in 2003, the economy has been governed by Western rules. As a result, GDP per capita doubled by the end of 2005, and the GDP is expected to grow another 49 percent by 2008. All this despite continued attacks by Sunni Arab rebels on oil facilities and other economic targets. It's much easier to start a business in Iraq now, even though there's still a lot of corruption. The big change is that now the corruption is illegal, and there is even progress in prosecuting the government officials who take bribes or try to shake down businessmen. Lebanon is the only other Arab state to run its economy in a Western fashion, and they have thrived.

It takes education reform and freedom of expression and the press. It will take implementation of full freedoms for women. Finally, it will take religious reform. Stone aged customs, traditions, and religious restrictions virtually guarantee that arabs will remain backward, laggards of the world.

Update: Here is more from a recent World Bank report. Arabs living in the middle east and north africa are oddly resistant to modernisation and transitioning out of the stone age. Very strange, when you see how successful arabs can be when they migrate to a free environment. I suppose blaming the US and Israel will gain them at least another half century of stone age existence.