“Majlis Speaker, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, on Sunday urged the Muslim World to boycott products from any country blaspheming Islam.” -- from this news article
Muslim societies and states are, despite being the recipients of the most fantastic transfer of wealth in human history -- some ten trillion dollars since 1973 alone -- economic failures, dependent still on oil and on the rentier economy of those whose rulers, and the well-connected courtiers of those rulers, have seized large amounts of that national wealth. Two generations have been raised with that vast wealth, and what has come of it? Saudi Arabia itself is still completely dependent on a vast and multifarious army of wage slaves. What art has come, what contributions to science, what signs of cultural life, other than the gold souk, and the jewelry souk, and the every-possible-kind-of-luxury car souk, and the Hediard-and-Fauchon deliveries of Parisian delicacies, and the private 747s, and the Maybachs in every other driveway of every other sheik? What? I keep quoting the observation of a Franco-Armenian architect who spent years in Saudi Arabia: "Money can buy everything, except civilization."
And they will not have to examine either the reasons for their economic failure, and cultural stasis, and penchant for despotism, if they are constantly allowed to find whatever they need -- medical care, access to education -- in the West.
It appears that no matter what funds are spent to conduct the Jihad that, while "non-violent," in the end there is a more dangerous weapon of Jihad, the Money Weapon. It is deployed against us through the funding of mosques, madrasas, campaigns of Da'wa, and pay for the armies of Western hirelings. These are ex-diplomats, ex-CIA agents, journalists, businessmen, even "scholars of Islam" of the MESA-Nostra esposito-feldman apologist type. Some MESA Nostra members may even have had the shamelessness to show up at a dinner of a group named for a great scholar of Islam, Joseph Schacht, the one held in Rm. 7 at the Harvard Faculty Club this past Saturday, as if the noah-feldman sammy-glicks of this world would ever have been given the time of day by the likes of Joseph Schacht.
Every member of the ruling elites all over the Muslim world devoutly wishes to send their children to schools in the West. They recognize the wretched state of "Muslim" education. Even within their countries, they try to send their children to Christian, usually Catholic, schools -- Baghdad College, for example, where Allawi and Chalabi both were students, or Victoria College in Egypt, where the Egyptian-"Palestinian" Said went, or the Catholic school in Pakistan that Bhutto went to. Her father attended a school in pre-partition Bombay, where not only Christians but Jews from the Iraqi diaspora were among his classmates. Imagine that you, and your children, are condemned to the solitary confinement of the Islamic world, that you can no longer travel to the West. Even if, as a ruler or propagandist or an editor at Al Jazeera, you spend all your time denouncing that West and blackening its name, you want to send your children to that West. Even the sinister Sheik Al Qaradawi, apparently the one whose words on Al Jazeera have become a murderous fatwa against Wafa Sultan (who has gone into hiding), has two daughters in school in England. This does not have to be.
Nor does Western medicine, the fruit of Western science and technology, and of ways of thought inimical to Islam (which discourages free inquiry), have to be made available to Muslims who are waging war against the West. Imagine if you were suddenly told that if you didn't change your behavior, you would no longer have access to Western doctors, Western hospitals. Such a threat would get your attention, wouldn't it?
Finally, there are those rich Arabs who regard the West as one big fun-fair, a place to send their black-robed wives and dozens of children shopping in well-guarded herds, while the menfolk enjoy themselves with paid ladies and every conceivable debauch. Les Arabes du Golfe en goguette -- the rich Gulf Arabs on a spree -- is not a pretty sight, as those with their eyes pealed in London or New York or Paris know perfectly well.
Boycott? An excellent idea. No access to education, medical care. And the arms that we sell them? Don't. Or if they are sold, let them be sold with the kind of fabulous markup -- fifty times the price of production -- that the Gulf producers enjoy in selling their oil. And make sure that the computer systems have been cleverly set so that if these airplanes, and other equipment, are ever employed against certain Infidels, in certain directions, if planes for example, pass into certain latitudes and longitudes, then their systems will go haywire, or possibly even self-destruct. And perhaps there are other ways to have their use monitored from afar. Just as there are electronic bracelets for humans, why not something similar for major weapons? There are all kinds of ways to deal with the huge arms buildup in the Muslim states, to ensure that they will not necessarily prove effective against Infidels and nation-states. Surely the arms sent to the Afghani muhajideen by the West, then diverted to other uses once the Soviet Union had left Afghanistan have provided a lesson.
Boycott?
Tax oil, and keep taxing it, as it ought to have been taxed, in steadily rising increments, beginning with the fall of 1973. Have as little to do with the world of Islam as possible, and certainly do nothing to make the lives of Muslims easier with infusions of Western money and Western know-how.
Make the poorer Muslims go to richer Muslims for aid. Let's see how long the Umma sticks together once those poorer Muslims either get what they ask for, and then ask for more, or don't. The amount of resentment will steadily grow, along with the pressure on the rich Arabs who, of course, are willing to spend to fight Infidels, or to give money for other Arabs to fight Infidels, but otherwise have little interest in the wellbeing of other Muslims. The cohesion of the Umma is only as against Infidels. And they certainly care nothing for the well-being of non-Arab Muslims, such as those in Pakistan, who are merely despised, though used -- just as Bin Laden and his fellow Arabs despised, and treated with contempt, but used, the Afghanis.
Boycott? An excellent idea.
RSS Feed
An idea whose time is long overdue. Decades. Where do I sign up?