Donald Sensing has yet another fabulous post, Close, but no cigar. In this post he comments on an article by an Australian journalist:
Christopher Kremmer, writing on Australia’s SMH.com.au almost gets the root causes argument about terrorism right. He correctly discounts the Islamist cause as “fantasy hogwash,” which seems to align pretty well with Lee Harris’ exposition of Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.
But after a promising beginning, Kremmer falls back on the tried-and-true “blame the West” theme attributing the problems in the Islamic world to “lack of jobs, dispossession, disenfranchisement” without examining why these problems are endemic in that world.
This post really needs to be read in conjunction with Ralph Peters’s essential article Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States.
Peters characterizes the problems of non-competitive states:
- Restrictions on the free flow of information.
- The subjugation of women.
- Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
- The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
- Domination by a restrictive religion.
- A low valuation of education.
- Low prestige assigned to work.
A factor that Peters does not mention is that as women become more educated and more of a factor in the workplace fertility rates go down. Of the nations with the top ten fertility rates in the world, six are Islamic countries The inverse relationship is so strong that fertility rate is very nearly a metric for the status of women in a society.
This high fertility rate coupled with a lack of opportunity and job creation means that there is a large, young, desparately poor population in the Islamic world with little hope and not much to do except be dissatisfied with their lot and look for someone to blame.
There can be little dispute that all seven of these factors are present in the Islamic world. For those who believe that the problems of the Islamic world are mainly caused by a predatory and rapacious West, I have a few questions. Are Peters’s seven points material? If they are material how can the West affect these factors?
And if they are not material why are they not material and what needs to be done to address the real underlying problems in the Islamic world whatever they may be?
