So… Who really should be blamed?

Posted on January 3, 2007
Filed Under History, International, James Baker, Kofi Annan, Liberty, Terrorism, education, islam, women | 3 Comments

I found the following 2002 Special Report in The Economist which will shed light on the situation in the world today:

WHAT went wrong with the Arab world? Why is it so stuck behind the times? It is not an obviously unlucky region. Fatly endowed with oil, and with its people sharing a rich cultural, religious and linguistic heritage, it is faced neither with endemic poverty nor with ethnic conflict. It shook off its colonial or neo-colonial legacies long ago, and the countries that had revolutions should have had time to recover from them. But, with barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they can.

A people that during the Middle Ages stood at the forefront of mathematics, medicine and sciences, in general, have regressed drastically. The Western World, by contrast, which has learned and adapted so much of Muslim development is advancing by leaps and bounds. What gives? The Report prepared by a group of Arab scholars from various Arab countries for the United Nations Development Pragramme goes on to say:

One in five Arabs still live on less than $2 a day. And, over the past 20 years, growth in income per head, at an annual rate of 0.5%, was lower than anywhere else in the world except sub-Saharan Africa. At this rate, says the report, it will take the average Arab 140 years to double his income, a target that some regions are set to reach in less than ten years. Stagnant growth, together with a fast-rising population, means vanishing jobs. Around 12m people, or 15% of the labour force, are already unemployed, and on present trends the number could rise to 25m by 2010.

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.

“The transfer of power through the ballot box is not a common phenomenon in the Arab world,” the report says politely. Moreover, senior public servants, from ministers down, are seldom appointed solely on the basis of merit. People are given jobs not because of what they know, but because of whom they know. The result, all too often, is an unmoving, unresponsive central authority and an incompetent public administration.

Freedom of expression and freedom of association are both sharply limited. The report quotes Freedom House, an American-based monitor of political and civil rights, in recording that no Arab country has genuinely free media, and only three have “partly free”. The rest are not free.

Civil society, in the Arab world, has a terribly long way to go. NGOs are hobbled by legal and administrative obstacles laid in their path by authorities deeply suspicious of what they might be up to. But they also suffer from internal weaknesses, often getting their money either from foreign sources, which adds to the suspicions, or from the government, which defeats the object of their creation.

•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.

Another, no less grave, result is the dearth of creativity. The report comments sadly on the severe shortage of new writing, and, for instance, the decline in the film industry. Nor are foreign books much translated: in the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, say the authors, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in one year.

•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.

In other words, the Arab World is an area riddled with repressive totalitarian regimes, lack of women’s rights and above all a lack of education that will bring their people into the 21st century. Worst of all… since political freedom is almost nonexistent, since the lack of women’s rights are not the concern of many, and as far education… well… “65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all.” To put this number in perspective… there were 280 million people within the 22 member nations of the Arab League in 2002 as the report says, ranging from 68 million in Egypt to 565,000 in Qatar.

But what caused the regression of the once proud and enlightened Arab world?

The most delicate issue of all, again carefully skirted by the authors of the report, is the part that Islam plays in delaying and impeding the Arab world’s advance towards the ever-receding renaissance that its intellectuals crave. One of the report’s signed articles explains Islam’s support for justice, peace, tolerance, equilibrium and all good things besides. But most secularists believe that the pervasive Islamisation of society, which in several Arab countries has largely replaced the frightening militancy of the 1980s and early 1990s, has played a significant part in stifling constructive Arab thought.

From their schooldays onwards, Arabs are instructed that they should not defy tradition, that they should respect authority, that truth should be sought in the text and not in experience. Fear of fawda (chaos) and fitna (schism) are deeply engrained in much Arab-Islamic teaching. “The role of thought”, wrote a Syrian intellectual “is to explain and transmit…and not to search and question.”

Such tenets never held back the great Arab astronomers and mathematicians of the Middle Ages. But now, it seems, they hold sway, discouraging critical thought and innovation and helping to produce a great army of young Arabs, jobless, unskilled and embittered, cut off from changing their own societies by democratic means. Islam at least offers them a little self-respect. With so many paths closed to them, some are now turning their dangerous anger on the western world.

Interestingly, unlike James Baker, unlike Koffi Annan, unlike Tony Blair, unlike the new Secretary General of the UN – Ban ki Moon… and a whole slew of illustriouos biggots or useful idiots. “The Arab authors of the survey avoid making the Arab-Israeli conflict either a cause of, or an excuse for, their region’s failings.”

The Arab authors of the survey avoid making the Arab-Israeli conflict either a cause of, or an excuse for, their region’s failings. The report contains references to the particular circumstances of the Palestinians living under occupation or as refugees, and its overview has a section that refers to the pall cast by the conflict over the political and economic life of the entire region.

And yet, the West seems so obtuse in its understanding of the Arab world by blaming everything on Israel and its struggle against Palestinian terror. At worst, the Arab authors of the report say, it is a distraction, it is not the cause of the problems!

Neocon Express quotes a Jerusalem Post article exposing the whole hypocrisy:

To suggest, as Prime Minister Blair in particular does, that settling the Israeli-Palestinian issue is a necessary precondition for peace in the Middle East which would take the wind out of radical Islam’s sails is unsupported by the facts.

Let’s assume for a moment that Israel did not exist. Would that have changed the basic story line of the bulk of events in the Middle East?

Would Iraq and Iran have chosen not to pursue an eight-year war that cost more than a million fatalities? Would Iraq have decided not to invade Kuwait in 1990? Would it have rethought its use of chemical weapons against both its own Kurdish population and Iran?

Would Syria have refrained from slaughtering over 10,000 of its own citizens in Hama in 1982? Would it have relinquished its hold on Lebanon, as demanded by multiple Security Council resolutions?

Would Saudi Arabia have stopped exporting its Wahhabi model of Islam, with its narrow, doctrinaire view of the world and rejection of non-Muslims as so-called infidels, across the globe? Would al-Qaida not have attacked the US in 2001, when, it should be remembered, the Israeli-Palestinian issue was never even mentioned among Osama bin Laden’s main “grievances”?

Would the danger posed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan magically disappear absent the Israel factor? Would Iran today abandon its hegemonic ambitions in the region? Would the Shi’ite-Sunni split, with its profound political and strategic ramifications, evaporate into thin air? Would the Sudanese government stop its collusion with the Arab Janjaweed militias to end the massive murder and displacement in Darfur?

Would the desperate poverty and widespread illiteracy that dampen hope and create a fertile recruiting ground for radical Islamic movements suddenly be alleviated? Would Saudi women instantaneously have the right to drive, would non-Muslims finally enjoy equal rights in all those Arab countries where Islam is the official religion, and would the Baha’i no longer experience persecution at the hands of the Iranian government?

In reality, the destabilizing factors in the Middle East run far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Strikingly, while most Western political leaders mince their words, the courageous Arab authors of the annual Arab Human Development Report have not. They have spoken of three overarching explanatory factors for the region’s unsatisfactory condition: the knowledge deficit, the gender deficit and the freedom deficit.
By David Harris
writing for the Jerusalem Post

Unfortunately, the West is also full of apologists for Islamo-Fascism… it seems fashionable and in a way it distracts from having to deal with the changing demographics in Eurabia or Amerabia… Yid With Lid quotes from a MEMRI report:

I think that the Western media and the world have given Osama bin Laden more weight [than he has in reality] and exaggerated in depicting the danger he poses. Likewise, I do not find any evidence that would make me agree that Osama bin Laden was behind the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. All we heard from him was praise and acclaim for those who carried out the operation.

An “academic” who taught at Brandeis and at Boston College, a “distinguished Professor” charged with educating our youth, our future leaders, can get away making such an idiotic statement? Should such an “academic” trend continue unabated, the US too will one day be known not for its scientific advances, not for its enlightened thought, not for its freedom, but the backwardness the Arab world finds itself in! Professors like the above quoted Dr. Natana DeLong-Bas, and many other leftist academics with an agenda very far removed from real teaching, will propel us on the downward spyral that will destroy our civilization, our freedoms, our creativity and sap the West’s very zest for life!

It isn’t the Zionist Entity, nor is it dem Jooz who are to blame for the problems in the world, not even for the problems in the Arab world. The sooner the West realizes who the real culprit is and takes the proper steps, the sooner we can reverse the course of the horrors heading our way. The sooner we can help the Arab world climb back to the intellectual heights it dwelt on in the Middle Ages, the more the world at large will benefit and human rights will flourish. Wake up, America! Wake up, America! Wake up, America… while we still can…

Chaim

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