Two years ago the left launched a major assault on Haliburton over its mishandling of two sexual assault cases by or against its civilian contractors. Al Franken successfully introduced a bill to bar defense contracts from going to companies who behave likewise. Left wing media boasted that they were the defenders of rape victims, while Republicans support rape.
Now for the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, it's been revealed that over a 1,000 female volunteers have been raped in the last decade. Numbers that are positively 9/11 in scope. And that the idealistic Peace Corps leadership acted like the evil Haliburton leadership, blaming the victims and discouraging them from seeking legal action. There are no cries that Democrats support rape. No bills to defund the Corps, that awkward legacy of New Frontierism. This time it's Republicans like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen stepping up to demand accountability. And it's the Democrats who are standing in the way.
Similar parallel stories involve female activists who head to the Palestinian Authority to combat Zionism, and the assault on Lara Logan in the middle of what was billed as a democracy celebration. Each time the assault was minimized, until the woman in question decided to speak out.
It's an old story about the naivete of Western liberals who imagine that the Third World is somehow better than because it is less materialistic, finding themselves in cultures where the inequality of women is a given, meeting a man's eyes is considered a sexual invitation, and the only justice system that matters is kinship based. Crimes are acted on depending on family influence. And Westerners in Africa or the Middle East have no family there. Which means crimes against them can go unpunished if no pressure is applied.
The Peace Corps' coverup of over a 1,000 assaults is disturbing, but also ideologically necessary. Its function depends on its image. To admit that over a thousand of its idealistic volunteers get raped in the countries they are coming to help, might make Americans think that those countries aren't worth helping. That maybe they aren't noble souls who happen to lack proper irrigation and classrooms, but that they lack those things because there is nothing noble about their cultural backwardness.
Most liberals would concede that a European man ten centuries ago was not spiritually nobler than a man today, just because he was part of a less technologically advanced culture. But then why insist that the people of Benin or Bangladesh are better than us, because they lack fast food and GPS satellites. The Peace Corps was built on the moral and physical fetishization of the exotic. The orientalism of a liberalism that claims to be progressive, yet worships at the altar of reactionary cultures.
In his memoir, Obama described watching his mother get lost in a showing of Black Orpheus, and its fetishization of black people, and the accompanying realization that its effect on the sixteen year old Ann Dunham is what had brought her to the man who would become his father. "I suddenly realised that the depiction of the childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different."
But Dunham didn't find a warm, exotic and sensual life with Barack Obama Sr, she found a serial philanderer, bigamist and alcoholic. And so many other girls who joined the Peace Corps hoping to find a meaningful life waiting for them, have discovered much worse. Liberalism fosters a discontent with civilization, but what is waiting outside civilization is far worse. The Corps knows its volunteers and plays on their dreams, while hiding the reality of what is awaiting them. It is a big world out there and most of it does not value tolerance or equality. Going out there is an adventure, but the further you travel from lands governed by Western values, the more dangerous it becomes.
Western liberal activists pay tribute to the spiritual power of the Third World, but when they discover the atrocities and abuses underneath try to bring it in line with Western values. Whether it's Western countries trying to bring democracy to the Muslim world or Kate Puzey, a Peace Corps volunteer, murdered after she got a Benin local dismissed for raping native schoolgirls in a country where sexual assault rates hover around the 50 percent mark, the pattern is the same as Westerners discover that there isn't a single abuser in the form of a dictator or a rapist, but that the problem is buried in the culture.
The unwillingness of liberal activists to honestly confront the cultural problems of the Third World leaves them with nothing but charity tourism, Microfinance, Peace Corps, One Laptop Per Child, Buy-a-Village-a-Goat, Change Advocacy Training and all the usual efforts of pouring money down a great big hole.
Sure you can buy a village its own goat, but it might be better to ask why the village is so short of goats. You can send Western volunteers to build classrooms, but is there really any part of the world where the locals aren't capable of constructing them? And you can send off American girls to try and empower women in a culture where they are a commodity and their murderers often go unpunished. A culture they can't even begin to relate to, because its assumptions about human worth and liberty are at odds with their own.
It's not about poverty, lack of resources or technology. If it were, then we would be sending volunteers to build classrooms for the Japanese. But the Asian countries dramatically bootstrapped themselves in a short time to become our technological and economic equals. Japan took off like a rocket despite its resource shortages and former isolationism. China is breathing down our necks, even though it had the same population growth issues that are used as an excuse for Third World debility, and was colonized, invaded and turned into a Communist dictatorship.
Liberal geopolitical narratives assign responsibility for Third World debility to external factors. A country isn't poor because of its culture, but because of colonialism, dictators supported by the West, labor exploitation by Western companies, World Bank debts, Global Warming and that all time champion excuse, because people living in First World societies "just don't care enough" to help them. While societies may fail on occasion for external reasons, they go on failing for internal ones.
A culture has to want to change. It has to reward achievement and transcend the wishful thinking that prevents so many societies from moving forward. Most of the places where the Peace Corps sends its volunteers don't want to change. They're happy the way they are. Oh they would like aid money, cars and Coca Cola. They'll listen to Hip Hop and wear Lakers jerseys. But they won't stop keeping most of their population illiterate, aborting baby girls or maintaining a pseudo-feudalism in which most of the important enterprises are in the hands of the ruling family and their friends.
The issues are not racial. They never were. Go back far enough and you'll find that our ancestors didn't behave much better. That our societies don't behave that way is a testament to their cultural vitality. The rights we enjoy today didn't spring to life overnight, they are the outgrowth of cultures which remained committed to self-improvement through self-examination. And who accordingly evolved beyond the rule of power and toward the rule of law.
Law is more than words in a book, it is the absolute application of principles to human affairs. Without the law of principles, there is only the law of power and no individual rights or freedoms. Which ends any prospect of equality. The treatment of foreigners in such a society depends on how much fear there is of their country and how much benefit is derived from their presence. That risk/reward formula is the closest thing to code protecting them. If the rulers and elders officially extend their protection, making it clear that a crime against volunteers or tourists is a crime against them, some degree of safety is assured. When government authority breaks down, as it did in the "democracy protests", the people act out their democratic wishes. Lara Logan was a victim of this brand of Arab Democracy.
Even when the authorities do protect foreigners, they are still considered inferiors, doubly so if they are women. Their attackers restrained not by any moral code, which rarely protects outsiders, but by practical considerations. Can they do this and get away with it. The foreigners don't live here. Their women are unchaperoned and friendly. Therefore they don't have any rights worth respecting. Horrible things happen and and Western diplomats help the native authorities cover them up, because no one wants an incident on their hands.
The real burden of guilt falls on the liberal fetishization of the exotic, their distaste for their own culture and their obsessive cultural exogamy. That is how we ended up with Obama. And it's also how we ended up with a selective multiculturalism that damns native cultures and promotes foreign ones.
The assaults experienced by Peace Corps volunteers are no longer limited to women who travel abroad. With aggressive Third World migration, the ratios are even worse in Europe. In Oslo a study showed that two of three rapists were non-Western immigrants. Malmo's huge immigrant population has turned it into one of the rape capitals of Europe. In Denmark, the number is closer to three out of four. In Sweden it hovers around 85 percent. And Third World immigration will bring those same statistics to America as well.
As bad as the 1,000 Peace Corps rapes are-- the number of such incidents at home committed by immigrants from non-law abiding cultures, including Islam, is certainly far worse. Numbers like these are a wake up call of the cost of liberal orientalism. The consequences of what happens when a dominant ideology turns its back its own culture and embraces barbaric cultures instead. Only by recognizing how far we have come, can we understand the need to protect ourselves from those still left behind in the dark ages.
Similar parallel stories involve female activists who head to the Palestinian Authority to combat Zionism, and the assault on Lara Logan in the middle of what was billed as a democracy celebration. Each time the assault was minimized, until the woman in question decided to speak out.
It's an old story about the naivete of Western liberals who imagine that the Third World is somehow better than because it is less materialistic, finding themselves in cultures where the inequality of women is a given, meeting a man's eyes is considered a sexual invitation, and the only justice system that matters is kinship based. Crimes are acted on depending on family influence. And Westerners in Africa or the Middle East have no family there. Which means crimes against them can go unpunished if no pressure is applied.
The Peace Corps' coverup of over a 1,000 assaults is disturbing, but also ideologically necessary. Its function depends on its image. To admit that over a thousand of its idealistic volunteers get raped in the countries they are coming to help, might make Americans think that those countries aren't worth helping. That maybe they aren't noble souls who happen to lack proper irrigation and classrooms, but that they lack those things because there is nothing noble about their cultural backwardness.
Most liberals would concede that a European man ten centuries ago was not spiritually nobler than a man today, just because he was part of a less technologically advanced culture. But then why insist that the people of Benin or Bangladesh are better than us, because they lack fast food and GPS satellites. The Peace Corps was built on the moral and physical fetishization of the exotic. The orientalism of a liberalism that claims to be progressive, yet worships at the altar of reactionary cultures.
In his memoir, Obama described watching his mother get lost in a showing of Black Orpheus, and its fetishization of black people, and the accompanying realization that its effect on the sixteen year old Ann Dunham is what had brought her to the man who would become his father. "I suddenly realised that the depiction of the childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different."
But Dunham didn't find a warm, exotic and sensual life with Barack Obama Sr, she found a serial philanderer, bigamist and alcoholic. And so many other girls who joined the Peace Corps hoping to find a meaningful life waiting for them, have discovered much worse. Liberalism fosters a discontent with civilization, but what is waiting outside civilization is far worse. The Corps knows its volunteers and plays on their dreams, while hiding the reality of what is awaiting them. It is a big world out there and most of it does not value tolerance or equality. Going out there is an adventure, but the further you travel from lands governed by Western values, the more dangerous it becomes.
Western liberal activists pay tribute to the spiritual power of the Third World, but when they discover the atrocities and abuses underneath try to bring it in line with Western values. Whether it's Western countries trying to bring democracy to the Muslim world or Kate Puzey, a Peace Corps volunteer, murdered after she got a Benin local dismissed for raping native schoolgirls in a country where sexual assault rates hover around the 50 percent mark, the pattern is the same as Westerners discover that there isn't a single abuser in the form of a dictator or a rapist, but that the problem is buried in the culture.
Sure you can buy a village its own goat, but it might be better to ask why the village is so short of goats. You can send Western volunteers to build classrooms, but is there really any part of the world where the locals aren't capable of constructing them? And you can send off American girls to try and empower women in a culture where they are a commodity and their murderers often go unpunished. A culture they can't even begin to relate to, because its assumptions about human worth and liberty are at odds with their own.
It's not about poverty, lack of resources or technology. If it were, then we would be sending volunteers to build classrooms for the Japanese. But the Asian countries dramatically bootstrapped themselves in a short time to become our technological and economic equals. Japan took off like a rocket despite its resource shortages and former isolationism. China is breathing down our necks, even though it had the same population growth issues that are used as an excuse for Third World debility, and was colonized, invaded and turned into a Communist dictatorship.
Liberal geopolitical narratives assign responsibility for Third World debility to external factors. A country isn't poor because of its culture, but because of colonialism, dictators supported by the West, labor exploitation by Western companies, World Bank debts, Global Warming and that all time champion excuse, because people living in First World societies "just don't care enough" to help them. While societies may fail on occasion for external reasons, they go on failing for internal ones.
A culture has to want to change. It has to reward achievement and transcend the wishful thinking that prevents so many societies from moving forward. Most of the places where the Peace Corps sends its volunteers don't want to change. They're happy the way they are. Oh they would like aid money, cars and Coca Cola. They'll listen to Hip Hop and wear Lakers jerseys. But they won't stop keeping most of their population illiterate, aborting baby girls or maintaining a pseudo-feudalism in which most of the important enterprises are in the hands of the ruling family and their friends.
The issues are not racial. They never were. Go back far enough and you'll find that our ancestors didn't behave much better. That our societies don't behave that way is a testament to their cultural vitality. The rights we enjoy today didn't spring to life overnight, they are the outgrowth of cultures which remained committed to self-improvement through self-examination. And who accordingly evolved beyond the rule of power and toward the rule of law.
Law is more than words in a book, it is the absolute application of principles to human affairs. Without the law of principles, there is only the law of power and no individual rights or freedoms. Which ends any prospect of equality. The treatment of foreigners in such a society depends on how much fear there is of their country and how much benefit is derived from their presence. That risk/reward formula is the closest thing to code protecting them. If the rulers and elders officially extend their protection, making it clear that a crime against volunteers or tourists is a crime against them, some degree of safety is assured. When government authority breaks down, as it did in the "democracy protests", the people act out their democratic wishes. Lara Logan was a victim of this brand of Arab Democracy.
Even when the authorities do protect foreigners, they are still considered inferiors, doubly so if they are women. Their attackers restrained not by any moral code, which rarely protects outsiders, but by practical considerations. Can they do this and get away with it. The foreigners don't live here. Their women are unchaperoned and friendly. Therefore they don't have any rights worth respecting. Horrible things happen and and Western diplomats help the native authorities cover them up, because no one wants an incident on their hands.
The real burden of guilt falls on the liberal fetishization of the exotic, their distaste for their own culture and their obsessive cultural exogamy. That is how we ended up with Obama. And it's also how we ended up with a selective multiculturalism that damns native cultures and promotes foreign ones.The assaults experienced by Peace Corps volunteers are no longer limited to women who travel abroad. With aggressive Third World migration, the ratios are even worse in Europe. In Oslo a study showed that two of three rapists were non-Western immigrants. Malmo's huge immigrant population has turned it into one of the rape capitals of Europe. In Denmark, the number is closer to three out of four. In Sweden it hovers around 85 percent. And Third World immigration will bring those same statistics to America as well.
As bad as the 1,000 Peace Corps rapes are-- the number of such incidents at home committed by immigrants from non-law abiding cultures, including Islam, is certainly far worse. Numbers like these are a wake up call of the cost of liberal orientalism. The consequences of what happens when a dominant ideology turns its back its own culture and embraces barbaric cultures instead. Only by recognizing how far we have come, can we understand the need to protect ourselves from those still left behind in the dark ages.
Comments
"These problems are not racial." Sure thing amigo. Jared Taylor outlines why it's genes, not "Culture" far better than I ever could: http://www.vdare.com/taylor/110318_japanese.htm
ReplyDeleteFor a site I rely on to provide to provide a sharp antidote to the liberal warped vision of reality, and for an author who repeatedly condemns the left for being unwilling to give up on fantasy, that was an astoundingly naive thing to say. Sorry chap. =\
Nightwatchstate: Yes, the problems are cultural, not racial. I read the link you provided. It overlooks the behavior of the Japanese in China (the rape of Nanking, e.g.), when the Japanese proclaimed themselves superior to everyone they overran. It’s an ideology that drives men to murder, rape, and loot, not their genes. The same can be said about Muslims; if they sanction rape, or overlook it, it’s their ideology that permits them to become third-party accessories to the crimes. The Bolshevik “revolution” was supposed to raise Russians to a “superior” level; all it did was serve as the ideology that sacrificed millions. When the Russians overran Germany, they went on a rape festival, assaulting even 90-year-old German women. That was ideology and vengeance at work, not Russian genes. Sounds like you’re a acolyte of Houston Chamberlain. The site you directed us to was rationalistic rubbish.
ReplyDeleteNightwatchstate,
ReplyDeleteWhen citing figures occurring in Europe it is the culture that is at fault and not race because a particular culture that is the core problem is composed of various races that have emigrated for example, to Sweden, African, Asian and Arab.
In Germany they have the added Turkish Delight.
nightwatchstate,
ReplyDeleteif you want a dose of reality, consider that many of the same conditions abounded in Europe at one point. The genes didn't change, the culture did.
Regarding your article,
There's no serious argument, just some handwaving toward IQ as a measure of intelligence. But higher IQ doesn't equal lower criminality, so much as more intelligent criminality. White collar crime over looting.
Whether looting happens depends on social acceptability.
Theft was taboo among the Incas. Yet their descendants have no such problem.
Taylor is forced to admit that the Brazilian-Japanese have varying crime rates due to culture. The Japanese themselves certainly think so.
Japan is the way it is because it has a very rigid culture. In times of stress, the standards of social acceptability can unravel.
But looting or not looting in Japan comes down to social acceptability. Just as it does in America.
Taylor is correct to note the effects of a fragmented society, but that's culture, not genes. The bulk of Taylor's article effectively admits that it's culture that defines behavior more than genes.
Ah, but the Peace Corps has formed an interdisciplinary group, instituted a set of core principles, hired a victim's advocate, implemented and trained staff on new guidelines, formed a panel, improved staff training, established a case tracking system and consulted with other organizations. http://multimedia.peacecorps.gov/multimedia/pdf/documents/Peace%20Corps%20Fact%20Sheet%20on%20Sexual%20Assault%20Prevention%20and%20Response.pdf
ReplyDeleteWhat you have to wonder about is not so much the idealistic kids, or even the way such programs prey on their youthful idealism, but the fact that their parents willingly let them go!
They've dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's, and when it happens again, no one can possible hold them responsible.
ReplyDeleteHeartbreaking, when you consider, for instance ... http://chelsiepc.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteIt's sad. Even Rachel Corrie is sad in her own way. These kids are brainwashed into thinking that they're saving the world, when they're really cheap unwanted labor in a country where they often aren't even wanted, all in order to feel good about themselves.
ReplyDeleteThis is really quite interesting because it stirs up memories from my youth when I was not aware of the nature of the world outside the US, and I saw both the Peace Corps and the world they served as a benevolent and idyllic world. Serving was something I might not have minded if I wasn't on a track doing other things.
ReplyDeleteOn foreigners being considered as inferiors, I think this must be a Muslim supremacy issue because in my travels I have only been to countries where American exceptionalism is admired, which left me wondering if I would have been liked as much and treated as well if I were not American.
I appreciate the link between fetishization of the exotic and biased multiculturalism. It's another "Aha" moment when dots are connected between two concepts I'm already acquainted with, but didn't realize they were related. This type of service rounds out our worldview.
I really don't understand why the high immigrant rape figures have not caused a law and order backlash. You would think even the first victim, or victim's family, would have stirred an outrage.
John K: You said, "I really don't understand why the high immigrant rape figures have not caused a law and order backlash. You would think even the first victim, or victim's family, would have stirred an outrage." The first victims or their families may have been outraged, but their outrage obviously hasn't stirred the authorities to anything so much as a slap on the wrist, never mind a backlash. Multiculturalism, political correctness, and the fear of the "kin" of immigrants running amok in demonstrations and of accusations of racism or religious bigotry stay the hands of the authorities. The same goes for the European press. The first time a French, British, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, or German newspaper ran a headline that read, "Muslim youth gang abducts, rapes, beats [Caucasian of your choice] schoolgirl or woman,” would find its offices picketed and its employees threatened with violence, very likely followed by lawsuits.
ReplyDeleteThat is the way of inculcating dhimmitude in the countries to be conquered. Observe what is being done to Geert Wilders and other Europeans for exercising their freedom of speech. Fundamentally, race is not the motivator in these cases, but the ideology that permits the immigrants to practice a violent “reverse racism,” yet the authorities dare not claim that the rapes and beatings were racially or religiously motivated, because that would be deemed “racist” or “bigoted.” A Catch-22 the West has devised by apologizing for its rational values.
I don't think every third world country fits this description. But whatever. well written.
ReplyDeleteenough of them do that safety is an issue
ReplyDeletefor that matter being a foreigner is dangerous even in parts of the US
You compare people who went to a country with weapons committing rape, to the volunteers of a organization promoting peace and getting raped by the hard right religious zealots in the foreign country they are helping.
ReplyDeleteNo one buys your bs, you should be ashamed since you are again defending the rapists and attacking the organizations the victims belonged to.
Jimmy, you're not making any sense. I suspect that's not a new phenomenon for you.
ReplyDeleteA real insight into current Western delusions. It should be required reading for senior school students but I fear their teachers would riot or suffer seizures.
ReplyDeleteJimmy/Toyota: No, you're not making any sense. Daniel wrote an incisive essay here excoriating not only rapists, but rose-colored minds of the Peace Corps and Doctors Without Borders and Gaza Flotilla volunteers from the West who think their altruistic presence will magically transform a pisshole country and its culture into a Laguna Beach of the Mid- and Far East. Their rose-colored minds are not given reality checks by the organizations that send them to these horrid places, and any reality checks these people get are what Daniel discusses here, in the most personal, invasive, and perilous way. These same do-good organizations usually ask the victims to keep it quiet, for the sake of the organization, which is incredibly irresponsible, not to say callous.
ReplyDeleteIn definition, culture and race are different but with regards to their accepted social behaviors, they are not so different. Let's look at real examples: EVERY African-based and Arab country is corrupt,brutal and anti-woman (and this includes a western hemisphere country such as Haiti, and a percentage of American blacks and Arabs). EVERY Caucasian-based country is advanced, democratic and pro-woman. With the Asians, it is a mixed-bag, but as you stated, they are allowing their old vices to end and are embracing democracy. The Asian exceptions are especially severe when that race encompasses a race-based fascism such as Islam. Hispanic countries, although are not all advanced, most do show forms of democracy and a higher degree of respect for women. Although many of the now democratic races that I have mentioned were semi-barbaric at one time (and a large part was in defending against Islam), they are certainly not now, whereas the war-mongering races of Africa still are--whether it was thousands of years ago only to be suppressed by colonialism, to once again be freed to be barbarianism; this is the major difference between your statement that Europe et al, were also alike. Having said all this, race behavior is not naturally/inborn with destructiveness, nor immutable, but can be influenced by culture, and that is where hope lies. But in the worst cultures, the races are also behaving their stereotypical worst which makes for a permanent disorder.
ReplyDeleteJohnL - That's just plain wrong. Studies have shown that new-born infants are truly citizens of the world, and can be moved to any country and will acquire the cultural trait of the country they grow up in.
ReplyDelete"I suspect that's not a new phenomenon for you."
ReplyDeleteOh my, pure gold - lol :)
The numbers in this story are incorrect. Peace Corps has not had 1,000 rapes in the past decade -- that number refers to sexual assaults of all kinds, including such things as groping. Of the 1,000, 221 have been rapes or attempted rapes. All that information is available on the Peace Corps website. Please make this correction. --Anonymous
ReplyDeleteOnly 221 out of them have been rapes? Why, this changes everything - I'm going to send my sister there right away!
ReplyDeleteI really like your posts, but this one I don't like. I wanted to keep my mouth (fingers?) shut because I understand your over all goal (Islam bad; us good. like yourselves enough to fight the oncoming Islamization). but I truly resent the way you categorically threw all the third world countries under the bus in your great attempt to achieve your goal.
ReplyDeleteVERY WRONG. There are people in third world countries who want good, who want to succeed. And you are not painting a true picture of the fight. Shame on you for this one.
Just had to say my peace.
I didn't throw all of them under the bus. I know quite well that not everyone is the same anywhere. But the factors I identified do for the most part prevail. They would have prevailed in Europe not too long ago as well. Even parts of America.
ReplyDeleteMy point is not that people in the third world are evil, but that liberalism lies about the gap between countries that have made some progress and those that aren't there yet.
Why do think it isn't racial? Arabs, Blacks and Mexicans (to name a few) behave in the same abominable fashion in the West even when they were born and raised here? Almost all rape in the US is Hispanic or Black men raping White women. The Arabs and African and Haitian Blacks rape White women in America and in their native lands.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is race. Culture isn't born in a vacuum. It is the product of a the interaction between race and environment. You can change the environment, not the race. And when a race demonstrates identical behaviour in disparate environments, it is logical to conclude that its behaviour is determined by race and not environment.
Culture and race are not entirely distinct categories. While social factors--ideology, traditions, local attitudes--affect people's behavior collectively, individual and group genetics strongly influence it as well, and in part, shape the culture that then helps shape individual behavior.
ReplyDeletePsychological studies suggest that about 85% of personality is innate (genetic); only 15% influenced by the environment, including parents, education, social forces. Identical twins separated at birth and adopted into different families, even in different countries, turn out to be more like each other as adults than each is like the adopted siblings he grew up with.
So--while it's not 'politically correct' to say so, I agree with JohnL above, in observing that there are broad generalities that seem to be consistent in the collective behaviors of some genetic groups ("race" being an inaccurate term, as all humans are technically one race)--across time periods and continents. And I give him credit--along with you, sultan, of course--for having the courage and discernment to think and express nonconformist thoughts.
I wrote a comment, but I don't see it. In case it got lost, I'll paste it in again (if it didn't get lost...no need to print it twice!). Here it is:
ReplyDeleteCulture and race are not entirely distinct categories. While social factors--ideology, traditions, local attitudes--affect people's behavior collectively, individual and group genetics strongly influence it as well, and in part, shape the culture that then helps shape individual behavior.
Psychological studies suggest that about 85% of personality is innate (genetic); only 15% influenced by the environment, including parents, education, social forces. Identical twins separated at birth and adopted into different families, even in different countries, turn out to be more like each other as adults than each is like the adopted siblings he grew up with.
So--while it's not 'politically correct' to say so, I agree with JohnL above, in observing that there are broad generalities that seem to be consistent in the collective behaviors of some genetic groups ("race" being an inaccurate term, as all humans are technically one race)--across time periods and continents. And I give him credit--along with you, sultan, of course--for having the courage and discernment to think and express nonconformist thoughts.
Regarding the overlap of genetics and culture, this article on inbreeding in Islam is relevant.
ReplyDelete1400 Years of Inbreeding. Very Enlightening & Very Frightening!
A huge Muslim problem: Inbreeding
By Bryan Fischer
Nicolai Sennels is a Danish psychologist who has done extensive research into a little-known problem in the Muslim world: the disastrous results of Muslim inbreeding brought about by the marriage of first-cousins.
This practice, which has been prohibited in the Judeo-Christian tradition, was sanctioned by Muhammad and has been going on now for 50 generations (1,400 years) in the Muslim world.
The practice of inbreeding will never go away in the Muslim world, since Muhammad is the ultimate example and authority on all matters, including marriage.
The massive inbreeding in Muslim culture may well have done virtually irreversible damage to the Muslim gene pool, including extensive damage to its intelligence, sanity, and health.
According to Sennels, close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred. In Pakistan , the numbers approach 70%. Even in England , more than half of Pakistani immigrants are married to their first cousins, and in Denmark the number of inbred Pakistani immigrants is around 40%.
The numbers are equally devastating in other important Muslim countries: 67% in Saudi Arabia , 64% in Jordan , and Kuwait , 63% in Sudan , 60% in Iraq , and 54% in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar .
According to the BBC, this Pakistani, Muslim-inspired inbreeding is thought to explain the probability that a British Pakistani family is more than 13 times as likely to have children with recessive genetic disorders. While Pakistanis are responsible for three percent of the births in the UK , they account for 33% of children with genetic birth defects.
The risk of what are called autosomal recessive disorders such as cystic fibrosis and spinal muscular atrophy is 18 times higher and the risk of death due to malformations is 10 times higher.
Other negative consequences of inbreeding include a 100 percent increase in the risk of stillbirths and a 50% increase in the possibility that a child will die during labor.
Lowered intellectual capacity is another devastating consequence of Muslim marriage patterns. According to Sennels, research shows that children of consanguineous marriages lose 10-16 points off their IQ and that social abilities develop much slower in inbred babies. The risk of having an IQ lower than 70, the official demarcation for being classified as "retarded," increases by an astonishing 400 percent among children of cousin marriages. (Similar effects were seen in the Pharaonic dynasties in ancient Egypt and in the British royal family, where inbreeding was the norm for a significant period of time.)
In Denmark , non-Western immigrants are more than 300 percent more likely to fail the intelligence test required for entrance into the Danish army.
Post a Comment