It’s about the Jews!
I am unable to get exercised about the Egyptian judo athlete who would not shake hands with his Israeli competitor.
Playing sports is goyish. Sports plays no role in Torah. While the New Testament is filled with sports metaphors, they are absent from Tanach and from the Talmud.
From a traditional Jewish perspective, a Jew competing in judo is like a black doing physics.
Good sportsmanship is an Anglo thing. I don’t expect non-Anglos to act like Anglos. I expect Arabs and Muslims to hate Jews and for Jews to hate Arabs and Muslims just like I expect the Koreans and Chinese to hate the Japanese and vice versa.
Good manners are a WASP thing. They are a product of island cultures like England and Japan. There’s no Hebrew word for etiquette.
If Jews and Arabs laid down their arms tomorrow and shook hands, Israel would boom and the Arab world would remain backward. How would Arabs live with the shame of being outshone by the Jewish state? It would kill them and they simply do not have the cognitive power to compete. It would take hundreds of years of eugenics for them to catch up to the Yiddishe kup.
So I don’t expect Arabs to simply shake hands with the Jews and accept third-rate status. A self-respecting Arab is going to have some negative feelings about the Jewish state and about Jews in general. That’s why the presence of two million Arabs in the Jewish state does not make Israel stronger.
Diversity usually weakens a country. The more united a nation, the stronger it is. The more cohesive, the less divided, the more effective it will be.
I was just watching the French documentary “Planet FIFA” about how the soccer federation became corrupt when it stopped being run by an Englishman in 1974 and was instead directed by a Brazilian.
I don’t expect Brazilians to be as free of corruption as Anglos. I don’t expect poodles to act like pit bulls and I don’t expect pit bulls to act like pussy cats.
As Maj. Kong put it in a comment at Steve Sailer’s website: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”
Jews have plenty of reasons to fear gentiles and gentiles have reasons to fear Jews. Different groups have different interests and different abilities. When you bring people or animals from one habitat into a non-native habitat, severe destruction for the native forms of life often results (see Wikipedia’s entry on “invasive species“). This is as true for rabbis in Australia as blacks in America and Muslims in Europe and for the Native Americans and Native Australians when the Europeans invaded.
One reason that Western Europe has a prosperous middle class and Eastern Europe does not, according to one theory, is that at various times, Western Europe threw out its Jews, allowing the natives to take over the middle-class jobs that Jews were doing. Eastern Europe did not throw out its Jews (until the Holocaust, when it killed most of them), and so superior Jewish intelligence meant that Jews dominated the middle-class jobs such as money-lending, doctoring, and running estates.
No group is universally superior or marked out as chosen unless you subscribe to a faith. Otherwise, the world consists of various forms of life struggling to survive and to perpetuate genes. Life is war.
When a professional athlete gets religion, it’s usually bad for his athletic performance (except for Tim Tebow). If Tony Romo, the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, were to become born again and a holy roller this season, it would turn off his team, hurt his performance, the Cowboys would win fewer games, but it would be great news for the opponents of Dallas. If Tony Romo were to break his leg today, it would be great news for the teams that play Dallas. What is bad for one group is often great for other groups.
A Jewish state of Israel is great for the Jews, but not so great, perhaps, for America (9/11 would not have happened if the US was not so entangled with Israel) and for Arabs and for Muslims. Arab unity is great for Arabs but lousy for the Jewish state. Japanese homogeneity makes Japan strong but that is not so great for countries that compete with Japan.
A big increase in Muslims in America is great for Muslims but perhaps lousy for everyone else in America.
Jewish power and influence tends to be great for Jews but it is sometimes bad for some non-Jews (just as Christian power and Muslim power tends to be great for those groups but not so great for outsiders). If America had fewer Jews, it might be more nationalistic, more homogeneous, more Christian, and more unified. On the other hand, it would have fewer of the great things that Jews make such as technological advances.
Arabs and Muslims are not backward because they hate Jews. They are backward because they have low IQs. Islam is a low-IQ religion.
Jews and Arabs have fundamental conflicts of interest (just like all groups tends to have conflicts of interest). Jews want a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab-Islamic world. Arabs and Muslims naturally consider this an affront. These conflicts of interest are why the groups hate each other. Most Arabs and Muslims want the Jewish state to disappear and most Israeli Jews want their enemies to disappear.
Donald Templer writes:
The present research found that the Muslim country mean IQ of 81 is half a standard deviation below the mean IQ of non-Muslim nations and is not related to strength of Muslim culture as defined by the percentage of Muslims in the country. The mean IQ of 84 in Arab countries is not associated with per capita income and is incompatible with the intellectual achievements of the golden age of the Muslim Empire. Possible explanations for this decline include hybridization with sub-Saharan Africans, dysgenic decrease in the more educated Muslims employing birth control as suggested by Meisenberg, the Muslim religion not fostering critical thinking, and the intellectual contributions being both exaggerated and made by non-Muslims.
1. Introduction
The purpose of the present study was to compare the mean IQs of Muslim and non-Muslim countries. The great intellectual achievements of the Muslim Empire from the 7th to the 12th century have been written about by numerous authors (e.g., Bloom & Blair, 2000; Lyons, 2009; Masood, 2009). These achievements have been especially noted in science, mathematics, architecture and medicine. However, the contemporary Muslim world is underrepresentated in highly creative contributions published in prestigious scientific journals. Lynn (1991) presented the total number of Nobel Prizes in science, literature, and economics combined with the Fields award in mathematics as a function of five major categories of ethnic origin. Europeans had a total of 541, North East Asians 23, South Asians and North Africans combined 10, Africans one (in literature), and Southeast Asians none. It is apparent that the predominantly Muslim countries are in the bottom three categories. Such a dearth of superlative scholarly achievement is consistent with the Lynn & Vanhanen (2006) Table 6.5 listing of mean IQs of the world’s countries. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, has a mean IQ of 87. If the standard deviation in Indonesia is 15, two standard deviations above the mean is only 117, which probably is not a high enough IQ to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from prestigious universities in high mean IQ countries. Even if mean IQ differences between two countries are modest, the disparity of extremely gifted persons can be huge.
The IQs of the Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries tend to be lower than those of the majority population (Lynn, 2008a). In the Netherlands, the mean IQ of Turks is 83, of Moroccans 81, and Indonesians 94 (Lynn, 2008a). Mackintosh (2007) reported that in the United Kingdom Pakistanis score 4 to 6 IQ points below the Indians. It is unlikely that this can be attributed entirely to minority status. The Chinese are a minority in many countries of the world and yet obtain higher mean IQs than the majority populations. They generate and/or control over half the wealth in Southeast Asian countries. In Indonesia the Chinese constitute 3.8 % of the population and generate/control 73% of the wealth. In Malaysia they constitute 28% of the population and generate/control 69% of the wealth (Lynn, 2008a). Caution should be employed because of the possibility of selective migration.
Special attention is given here to the Arab countries for two reasons. One is to examine the role of the great variation in per capita income. At the high end are Kuwait with $25,314, Qatar with $20,987, and the United Arab Emirates with $20,585. At the low end areYemen with $2,588 and Syria with $2,892. The second reason is to raise for consideration an incongruity between the achievements of the past and the state of the present. The Muslim Empire began in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arabs played a dominant role in its expansion and rise to greatness. Islam did not become established until the 15th century in Indonesia and in what is now Pakistan. The 16 countries regarded as Arab are Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Jews, like any group, find it flattering to imagine that they are hated for being so wonderful. The truth is more prosaic. Groups, including Jews, are hated when there are important conflicts of interest.
Bret Stephens writes in the WSJ:
An Israeli heavyweight judoka named Or Sasson defeated an Egyptian opponent named Islam El Shehaby Friday in a first-round match at the Rio Olympics. The Egyptian refused to shake his opponent’s extended hand, earning boos from the crowd. Mr. Sasson went on to win a bronze medal.
If you want the short answer for why the Arab world is sliding into the abyss, look no further than this little incident. It did itself in chiefly through its long-abiding and all-consuming hatred of Israel, and of Jews.
That’s not a point you will find in a long article about the Arab crackup by Scott Anderson in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, where hatred of Israel is treated like sand in Arabia—a given of the landscape. Nor is it much mentioned in the wide literature about the legacy of colonialism in the Middle East, or the oil curse, governance gap, democracy deficit, youth bulge, sectarian divide, legitimacy crisis and every other explanation for Arab decline.
Yet the fact remains that over the past 70 years the Arab world got rid of its Jews, some 900,000 people, while holding on to its hatred of them. Over time the result proved fatal: a combination of lost human capital, ruinously expensive wars, misdirected ideological obsessions, and an intellectual life perverted by conspiracy theory and the perpetual search for scapegoats. The Arab world’s problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.
As a historical phenomenon, this is not unique. In a 2005 essay in Commentary, historian Paul Johnson noted that wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline almost inevitably followed.
Spain expelled its Jews with the Alhambra Decree of 1492. The effect, Mr. Johnson noted, “was to deprive Spain (and its colonies) of a class already notable for the astute handling of finance.” In czarist Russia, anti-Semitic laws led to mass Jewish emigration as well as an “immense increase in administrative corruption produced by the system of restrictions.” Germany might well have won the race for an atomic bomb if Hitler hadn’t sent Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller into exile in the U.S.
These patterns were replicated in the Arab world. Contrary to myth, the cause was not the creation of the state of Israel. There were bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1929, Iraq in 1941, and Lebanon in 1945. Nor is it accurate to blame Jerusalem for fueling anti-Semitism by refusing to trade land for peace. Among Egyptians, hatred of Israel barely abated after Menachem Begin relinquished the Sinai to Anwar Sadat. Among Palestinians, anti-Semitism became markedly worse during the years of the Oslo peace process.
