I don’t think you can equate Japan with the Arab/Muslim world in that regard. In Japan, women are about where women were in the US, in oh, say, 1950–able to enter most public spheres and with full civil rights, but excluded from the highest positions of power and still subject to a cultural perception of inferiority to men in many minds. Japan is a bit old-boy ingroup culturally, but it is also a pluralistic democracy. That strength more than compensates for its somewhat outdated and traditionalist cultural values.
I do think that if those traditional attitudes toward women were modernized–in Japan, China, and India–those nations would be able to overwhelm the West in terms of sheer productivity.
It’s not PC to point this out, but Israel has made myriad attempts to normalize relations with the Palestinians, and its demands have been nothing more than that the Palestinians acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and renounce their stated goal of annihilating Israel. That, and stop firing rockets into Israeli towns and killing people.
Of course, this unreasonable request has been rejected by the Gaza Palestinians, who will accept no solution other than mass suicide by the Israelis, or their migration to the moon, or something.
The Israelis have offered full Israeli citizenship in a combined state several times (there are over a million non-Israelis in Israel now), but the Palestinians have consistently rejected their offer, preferring instead to listen to the ravings of a guy who can’t even be bothered to shave.
Please. The Israelis keep attacking them semi-randomly, stealing their land and property, and in general making their life hell. And you seem to be confusing “the Palestinians” with sub-groups of them.
hey dude, I wasn’t talking about Palestine.
I was giving examples of how a nation (any nation) controls its own destiny by deciding its own cultural values.
In the same sentence, I mentioned 3 types of problems: women in burkhas, caste systems which encourage poverty, and Greece’s early retirement age (i.e lack of a work ethic).
My point is that none of these problems are due to Jared’s favorite subjects (physical constraints of climate, fauna, access to seaports). All these problems are due to simple social choices, which can lift a poor country out of poverty, or cause a rich country to collapse from civil unrest.
OK, there are two groups of Palestinians, the Gazans and the West Bank. The latter seem to be less extremist than the former.
The Israelis don’t “randomly attack” the Palestinians; when they do so, it is limited and only in response to an act or acts of violence. What is kind of unbelievable is how the world media doesn’t acknowledge just how restrained the Israelis have been in this regard. If the power balance were reversed, the Palestinians would certainly have killed every Israeli–as they have repeatedly stated is their goal.
Romney was sort of right, which is as close as he, or for that matter any politician, ever gets when attempting to reduce a complex topic to a vote-for-me sound bite.
Geography is the starting point. A culture with a geographical position inferior to another can catch up through superior cultural values, or a culture with a geographical advantage can squander it. Examples: Singapore, Russia.
Nothing Romney said convinces me he has even a superficial understanding of Diamond’s work. His attempt to paint himself as some kind of intellectual is laughable: his trying to debate on the same level as Diamond is like a chimpanzee arguing with Einstein.
And what makes you think the same isn’t true of the status of women in “Palestine”, Jordan, and Egypt?
Other than a few of the Gulf Emirates and Saudi Arabi which Arab countries have “medieval governmental systems”?
I suppose you could include the Constitutional monarchies of Morocco and Jordan but those are usually considered amongst the more advanced.
Considering the fact that with the exception of Saudi Arabia, Sudan and 1 or 2 other of the 21 plus Arab countries women are better off in Arab countries than in India that is an extremely odd statement.
For that matter, women are probably better off in most Middle Eastern countries than they are in PRC as well.
When have the Israelis ever offered “full Israeli citizenship” to the Palestinians in either the Gaza Strip or the West Bank?
The Israelis have offered Israeli citizenship to the Druze in the Golan Heights and to the Palestinians in East Jerusalem but anyone who told you they “offered full Israeli citizenship in a combined state several times” to the Palestinians in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip either was a fool or they were trying to fool you.
So the Palestinian Jews never offered the Palestinian Arabs a vastly larger state then the Palestinians would now receive if the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were an independent state after both the Peel Commission Report and following the UN declaration calling for an independent Jewish and Arab State in Palestine?
Similarly following the defeat of the invading Arab armies in 1967 the Israelis didn’t offer to negotiate withdrawing from the occupied territories in exchange merely for diplomatic recognition and promises not to attack them again to which the Arab governments and the PLO responded with their famous three nos “No negotiation, no recognition, no peace.”
And of course, you’re ignoring the Israelis under Barack, at Camp David offering virtually the entirety of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well as financial compensation for all the refugees to which Arafat refused, made it clear he’d accept no settlement that allowed for the continued existence of Israel, and then proceeded to send out Mujahids to engage in “martyrdom operations” turning Israeli schoolchildren in buses and pizza parlors into kosher hamburger.
Had you forgotten about those instances?
Don’t they blow a hole in your rather foolish claim?
Those that operate under Sharia law, and those that consider themselves to be “Islamic republics”–both governmental systems being artifacts of the Middle Ages. Also, the secular branches of such governments that are highly centralized plutocracies–not very different from the tenth-century caliphates.
Islamic society, once the mostly highly advanced on earth, stalled in the twelfth century, buckled under the Mongol invasions, and finally became ossified and brittle, oddly enough, just after its final military triumph over Christianity (the fall of Constantinople). Scholars debate why this was so, but many postulate that the highly centralized and religiously inflexible governments in the region caused the Western Renaissance to, in effect, pass the Arab/Muslim world by, a sad phenomenon that today manifests itself in a regional inferiority complex.
There is no one codification of “Sharia Law”. I don’t endorse it, but I don’t think it’s useful to use it as a scare term and pretend that Islamic societies are inherently incapable of change.
Er… I said, “aside from a few Gulf Emirates and Saudi Arabia.”
There are over 20 Arab nations. The only ones that I can think of off the top of my head that classifies itself as “an Islamic Republic” is Sudan. Saudi Arabia is an Islamic regime, but not an Islamic Republic, however for the purposes of not being pedantic, I’ll throw that one your way.
So what other ones were you thinking of. Be specific and name the Arab nations which call themselves Islamic Republics which aren’t any of the Gulf Emirates(which are lots of things but not poor).
Certainly none of the Arab nations Israel has clashed with are Islamic Republics.
