May 10, 2005: It turns out there are there are Islamic "Weapons of Mass Destruction" after all. In particular, biological weapons. But these mass killers have been developed within Islamic nations, and are doing most of their damage there. The war on terror has taken many American doctors to Islamic nations, and they have discovered a heretofore hidden AIDS epidemic. This is not the first time this has happened. AIDS quietly entered India, and South East Asian nations, but was finally discovered, and received attention. But in most Islamic nations, AIDS is not supposed to happen, and the governments, religious leaders and general population will not even admit the disease is there. But it is, and in large numbers. While promiscuity and prostitution are common in Islamic nations, talking openly about it is not. As a result, AIDS has spread for years through the Middle East and other Islamic nations without much, if any, official or media attention. This is nothing new. Same thing happened in Africa, even in nations with few, if any, Moslems. Cultural traits made it difficult for many African nations to admit AIDS, and its favorite methods of transmission (drugs, homosexuality, promiscuity) existed. Now some African nations have a third or more of their adult population infected. Billions has been donated by Western nations to provide medical assistance to African nations that now admit they have a problem, but infrastructure and corruption problems are preventing many of the infected from getting any care. Same pattern is developing in the Islamic world. No official statistics yet, but the medical underground hints at high, and rising, infection rate. And little, if any, local willingness to recognize a problem exists.
But it's not just AIDS. In Nigeria, faith based paranoia on the part of Islamic clergy, and politicians, caused a polio epidemic, which is now spreading to other Islamic nations. The UN has been trying for years to wipe out polio (which has been eliminated in most Western nations). In the last few years, UN medical resources were massing to wipe polio out in one of the last places where it still thrives; northern Nigeria. But some local Islamic clergy got the idea that these foreigners and their medicine (polio vaccine) were actually out to poison young Moslem females and make them sterile. Yeah, it's nuts, but it went over big in northern Nigeria and stopped the polio eradication program cold. The Islamic clerics finally relented (after the UN brought in Islamic medical experts, and jumped through a lot of hoops), but by then it was too late. The polio was moving to areas where it had earlier been eliminated. Since you can track where a polio strain came from, it is now known that the "Nigerian strain" is responsible for outbreaks as far away as Indonesia. So far, there are only about 1,300 cases in Nigeria and elsewhere. Polio is not nearly as bad as AIDS. Many of those infected with polio never know they have it, but they can spread it. About one half of one percent of those who get it can end up paralyzed for life, usually in the legs. Polio mostly hits young children.
Many Islamic radicals continue to blame Western conspiracies for the polio outbreaks, which are hard to hide. AIDS, on the other hand, causes a breakdown in the immune system, and the actual cause of death is always something else (that makes you sicker, quicker, because your weakened immune system cannot deal with it.) But the Islamic radicals, when confronted with the AIDS outbreak in their midst, blame it on outsiders. This sort of things does not happen in an Islamic culture. |