Posted on 03/17/2004 1:43:41 PM PST by presidio9
The idea that what goes around comes around applies not only to individuals but to nations and whole civilizations. It was just a few centuries ago -- not long, as history is measured -- that China had the highest standard of living in the world and the Dutch were the world's largest exporters, while North Africans were enslaving a million Europeans.
Nowhere have whole peoples seen their situation reversed more visibly or more painfully than the peoples of the Islamic world. In medieval times, Europe lagged far behind the Islamic world in science, mathematics, scholarship, and military power.
Even such ancient European thinkers as Plato and Aristotle became known to Europeans of the Middle Ages only after their writings, which had been translated into Arabic, were translated back into European languages.
Today that is all reversed. The number of books per person in Europe is more than ten times that in Africa and the Middle East. The number of books translated into Arabic over the past thousand years is about the same as the number translated into Spanish in one year.
There are only 18 computers per thousand persons in the Arab world, compared to 78 per thousand persons worldwide. Fewer than 400 industrial patents were issued to people in the Arab countries during the last two decades of the 20th century, while 15,000 industrial patents were issued to South Koreans alone.
Human beings do not always take reversals of fortune gracefully. Still less can those who were once on top quietly accept seeing others leaving them far behind economically, intellectually, and militarily.
Those in the Islamic world have for centuries been taught to regard themselves as far superior to the "infidels" of the West, while everything they see with their own eyes now tells them otherwise. Worse yet, what the whole world sees with their own eyes tells them that the Middle East has made few contributions to human advancement in our times.
Even Middle Eastern oil was largely discovered and processed by people from the West. After oil, the Middle East's most prominent export has been terrorism.
Those who look at the world in rationalistic terms may say that the Middle East can use some of its vast oil wealth to expand its own educated classes and move back to the forefront of human achievement. They did it once, why not do it again?
All sorts of things can be done in the long run, but you have to live through the short run to get there. Moreover, even the short run, as history is measured, can be pretty long in terms of the human lifespan.
Even if the Islamic world set such goals and committed the material resources and individual efforts required, they could not expect to pull abreast of the West for generations, even if the West stood still. More realistically, it would take centuries, as it took the West centuries to catch up to them.
What will happen in the meantime? Are millions of proud human beings supposed to quietly accept inferiority for themselves and their children, and perhaps their children's children?
Or are they more likely to listen to demagogues, whether political or religious, who tell them that their lowly place in the world is due to the evils of others -- the West, the Americans, the Jews?
If the peoples of the Islamic world disregarded such demagogues, they would be the exceptions, rather than the rule, among people who lag painfully far behind others. Even in the West, there have been powerful political movements based on the notion that the rich have gotten rich by keeping others poor -- and that things need to be set right "by all means necessary."
These means seldom include concentration on self-improvement, with 19th-century Japan being one of the rare exceptions. Lashing out at others is far more immediately satisfying -- and modern communications, transportation, and weaponry make it far easier to lash out destructively across great distances.
Against this background, we may want to consider the question asked by hand-wringers in the West: Why do they hate us? Maybe it is because the alternative to hating us is to hate themselves.
Because we need someone to pump our gas, drive our taxis and man our convenience stores?
Didn't Europe only lag behind because Islam ransacked them and destroyed libraries and forced Europe to devote almost all of their resources in defending against the Islamic madness?
Islam didn't advance that much in medieval times, they just knocked everybody else down and stole their work. The only reason the great works had to be retranslated from Islam is because Islam had burned the Greek libraries.
Because they're a backward people now, bound up in tribalism, ruled by elites that reinforce their position with religious dogma and who don't even acknowledge a responsibility to the people they govern. Until the 20th century becomes something more than a better level of weaponry they use to live out their dreams of the greatness of millennia ago, they'll remain backward, brutal, and their own worst enemy.
The Muslims who are doing the killing are doing it for religious reasons, not because of jealousy,hate, or any other reason.
Osama bin Laden was worth at least 80 million dollars,probably more. The 19 young men who died killing 3,000 Americans were for the most part well educated, and came from relatively comfortable backgrounds.
The motivation for their behavior is because God wants them to kill infidels and they believe it.
Osama gave up his fortune and the Jihadis gave up their lives to follow their religious beliefs.
This is about laying up your treasures in heaven where moths and rust won't consume them. This is about what does it profit you to gain the whole world materially and suffer the loss of your soul.
This is about following what God wants done. Convert or kill the non- believers.
That's why the problem has never gone away an won't. -Tom
Well, social evolution isn't for some people, you know?
Sowell is a national treasure. If the black community used him as a role model rather than Jessee Jacka**, white people would need affirmative action programs to compete.
Take out their satellites and ground stations.
They want to live in the 7th Century; let us oblige them. No western medical technology. No computers. No generating stations. No spare parts of any sort.
Any nation attempting to break the embargo will have its ships/planes destroyed.
Give 'em a few decades of that and they'll be back to their old flea-bitten nomadic ways, roaming the deserts on camels.
--Boris
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