'It is not "demographic pressure" that feeds the growing emigration to Europe and the West, or into Israel within the "green line" (aptly named, for you can see it from the air: where the green ends and the desert begins, right at the border). It is rather the failure of productive enterprise, the fatalistic spirit that expects all wealth to be delivered without effort and as a matter of right; or seized if it is not delivered.
'It is not "demographic pressure" that sends emigrants from vast, empty, resource-rich Morocco, towards crowded little Holland below sea-level. It is rather a deeper question of human ecology. For the countries of the Arab world that must live without oil, live by foreign aid (Morocco especially) -- or else slide into the most abject poverty.
'This has nothing to do even with natural resources -- Japan has almost none of those, nor Taiwan, nor Denmark, nor many other European countries. What they have instead is a culture of makers and traders, as opposed to raiders; traditions of enterprise that took centuries to build up (and may take centuries to be extinguished).' Muslim societies, especially the Arabs, hate to be told stuff like this. They hate it for the same reason the 18-year-old high school dropout, sitting in front of MTV for 12 hours a day applying his Clearasil, hates Mom telling him to get up off his dead ass, get a job, and make something of himself. And their respone is much the same: resentment and digging deeper into sloth and self-justification. |