Stardate 20040114.1241

(On Screen): David mailed me a pointer to an article by John Derbyshire in NRO, who discusses a long article from The New Yorker written by Lawrence Wright. About a year ago, in January of 2003, Wright was hired to spend three months in Saudi Arabia at a newspaper there, to try to train the reporters. He discusses the experience, and it makes for painful reading.

I have always contended that the primary reason "why they hate us" is because they are utter failures who are lashing out at us because our success casts their failure in stark contrast. In September of 2002, I wrote:

The nations and the peoples within the zone of our enemy's culture are complete failures. Their economies are disasters. They make no contribution to the advance of science or engineering. They make no contribution to art or culture. They have no important diplomatic power. They are not respected. Most of their people are impoverished and miserable and filled with resentment, and those who are not impoverished are living a lie.

They hate us. They hate us because our culture is everything theirs is not. Our culture is vibrant and fecund; our economies are successful. Our achievements are magnificent. Our engineering and science are advancing at breathtaking speed. Our people are fat and happy (relatively speaking). We are influential, we are powerful, we are wealthy. "We" are the western democracies, but in particular "we" are the United States, which is the most successful of the western democracies by a long margin. America is the most successful nation in the history of the world, economically and technologically and militarily and even culturally. ...

We're everything that they think they should be, everything they once were, and by our power and success we throw their modern failure into stark contrast, especially because we've gotten to where we are by doing everything their religion says is wrong. We've deeply sinned, and yet we've won. They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours because we are the standard of success, and in every important way they come up badly short. In most of the contests it's not just that our score is higher, it's that their score is zero.

They have nothing whatever they can point to that can save face and preserve their egos. In every practical objective way we are better than they are, and they know it.

That particular post ultimately has gotten a great deal of attention. I learned later that it ended up on the email circuit, without attribution. Eventually a few people who received it googled to find the original source and mailed me about it. And someone named Muhammad Oueiny ended up plagiarizing it.

Reaction to that article from all poles of the political spectrum was extraordinary. What was most impressive about some of the leftist castigation was that it didn't even try to deal with the issues. Instead, it dismissed the claim of Arab failure as being unacceptable to even consider. It was insensitive, even racist, to even entertain the possibility that they were somehow worse than us in any way, even in terms of objective evaluation, let alone that they themselves realized it. For example, Hesiod Theogeny wrote me email which said:

It's time for an intervention. Take a day or two away from your blog.

Then go back and read your manifesto again. This time substitute the words "Jew" and "Jews" for the words "Arab" and "Muslim."

If it doesn't send a chill up and down your spine, check yourself into a mental hospital, or seek professional counseling.

And I'm not being sarcastic about this.

You accuse the Arabs of living in the 14th century. Arguably, your "solution" comes right out of the 20th. Roughly from the years between 1932 and 1945 to be precise.

It's not to late to wake up and re-think things.

In other words, my discussion of Arab failure indicated nothing whatever about the Arabs; it only demonstrated my moral depravity.

We won't get anywhere if we refuse to look at unpleasant truths. We cannot solve a problem if we don't truly understand it. If we hope to win this war without resorting to nuclear genocide, then we have to understand what we're actually fighting against. Arab/Islamic failure in practical terms is something we cannot ignore, because it's the primary reason "why they hate us". It's the real "root cause" of this war.

Wright's article is an important look into life in Saudi Arabia, because it makes clear just how pathological it has become. Increasing dominance of religious extremists has created a society which strangles the human spirit.

Since the [attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979], religion has become a steadily increasing part of the Saudi school curriculum, so students have less exposure to science, art, and