The Towers of Barbarism

The Saudis have unveiled a plan to define Mecca as the center of the world by building a giant clock tower in Mecca. The Bin Laden group's Royal Mecca Clock Tower which reads "In the Name of Allah", aims to replace GMT time, with "Mecca Time". The Royal Mecca Clock Tower, which looks like something you expect to pass on the way to Disneyland, like Dubai's Burj Tower, or its world islands are pathetic attempts to buy the facade of civilization with petrodollars.

The Royal Mecca Clock Tower is emblematic of the inability of the Muslim world to do the hard work of actually becoming civilized. Instead they build Pharaoh-like monuments to their own glory using imported slave labor. And they finance all that using money given to them by civilized countries in exchange for a particular resource that happens to be located on their territory. A resource that was discovered and developed for them by companies belonging to civilized countries.

The barbaric thinking behind the Royal Mecca Clock Tower is that if they build a really big clock tower, it will become a global standard and the infidels will acknowledge the Koran's Islamic science "zero magnetism zone"  claims for Mecca. That sort of thinking demonstrates a basic incomprehension of how civilization works. It shows no understanding of why Greenwich Mean Time serves the function that it does, which isn't because England spent money given to it by more civilized countries to build a really big ugly tower that impressed everyone.

This same kind of ignorance lies behind Dubai's frenzied construction projects, in which modern skyscrapers are plunked down in the middle of a backward country. Where Western skyscrapers were the natural product of expanding economic and technological frontiers, Muslim skyscrapers are desperate attempts to buy superiority. A product of the same need to be superior to the infidels, that caused Islamic law to ban synagogues and churches from being taller than mosques. And now that they have the money, Muslim rulers are determined to build bigger buildings than the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower, or the World Trade Center, which they destroyed.

9/11 was at its heart motivated by that same bigoted need to suppress the infidels, that drive the Saudi, Malaysian and UAE construction projects. That same drive is behind the Ground Zero mosque. It is the combination of an inferiority complex and a hatred for non-Muslims, that same combination which causes the left and some on the far-right to urge us to feel ashamed of how badly we must be treating Muslims, for them to feel that way. But the reason that Muslims feel this way is because they cannot accept non-Muslims as equals. It was the reason why they banned synagogues and churches from being taller than mosques. It is why non-Muslims are still not allowed into Mecca.

Bigotry drives Muslims to prove that non-Muslims are inferior. When Jews or Christians or Hindus demonstrate that they are not inferior, the reaction is furious as Muslims strive to prove that the infidels are beneath them after all. This motivates everything from the frenzied Muslim campaign against Israel, to the pathetic need to promote the wonders of "Islamic Science", from Al Queda's terrorism, to the Saudi financed Islamization of Europe. All that energy directed into showing non-Muslims their proper place.

Imagine the KKK with hundreds of billions of dollars, running entire countries and commanding over a billion followers. That is what the Muslim world looks like today. Incredible wealth in the service of incredible bigotry. And all of it fueled into an unending obsession with returning their Dhimmi slaves back to their former status. Seen from that vantage point, their terrorist attacks are crosses burned on the lawn of the civilized world, a warning to mind their proper place, which is under Muslim rule. Their ambition to import Sharia law into the West is an attempt to restore slavery through a legal system under which non-Muslims are inferior to Muslims.

Islam's inferiority complex is as pathetic and dangerous as that of the Nazis, whose parades and showy construction projects aspired to an imaginary Aryan superiority, in order to compensate for the outcome of WW1. The showplaces of Dubai are the Muslim world's 1936 Berlin Olympic games, an attempt by brutal dictatorships to show off how much has been accomplished under their rule. But those games which attempted to non-violently demonstrate Nazi superiority, would culminate in WW2, a violent attempt to demonstrate the same thing. Similarly Saudi Arabia and the UAE's construction projects are one face of a two-faced campaign to prove Islamic superiority. The other face leers with hate. It detonates bombs in major cities. It beheads innocent people. It murders non-Muslims to remind them of their place. And the money for it comes from the same cities where those towers are being built.

In the 1930's, civilized people had trouble believing that the same Nazis who ran Berlin, were the same ones carrying out brutal murders and battening on the corpses. Similarly the West has a great deal of trouble believing that the Gulf royals are the same people who dispatch suicide bombers to murder Americans, Israelis and Australians. But the Nazis were really cheap murderous thugs, fueled by vicious insecurities and a lust for power. The Gulf elite are jumped up barbarian chieftains who are playing a 6th century game, using 21st century tools. They know exactly where their money and power comes from, and they are driven to control that tap, before it gets shut off. And their best weapon is Islam, a billion men and women who more or less believe that their religion gives them the right to kill non-Muslims in order to create a kingdom of heaven under Islamic law.

The Royal Mecca Clock Tower may be tacky and pathetic, Disneyland architecture plopped down in the middle of sand and dirt, but it represents something uglier in the Muslim psyche. All those minarets and skyscrapers play the same role that a mid-life crisis Porsche does. They are attempts to buy something they can't have. All the skyscrapers in the world can't give them civilization, and the tragedy is that they don't understand that. The billions being lavished on building towers, as Saddam built his palaces, represents wasted energy and resources by people whose only real asset is a non-renewable resource currently in demand in civilized countries.

Building a tall tower for self-glorification is not what makes a civilization great. That is a project of the Ozymandias Construction Company. Nor does it make anyone else inferior. Building towers with borrowed technology using slave labor is not an act of greatness, but of barbarism. Trying to do it in order to have the world affirm the delusions and superstitions of a book supposedly dictated by an illiterate 7th century warlord, is a whole other level of barbaric backwardness. Doing all this in order to make yourself feel superior to non-Muslims is so irredeemably backward that it is positively hopeless. It misses the point of civilization as thoroughly as possible, viewing the tools and techniques of the modern world only as means of putting everyone who doesn't follow their 7th century warlord back in their place.

When the hour finally strikes for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, what will remain behind except ruins and fat savages squatting in the sand who can't do anything for themselves without their Filipina maids? World-changing ideas, great works of art and literature, new technologies and scientific discoveries-- of course not. Only the ruins of people who never progressed beyond a 6th century civilization, and when the day comes will be happy to return to it, away from the complexity and clamor introduced into their lives by the civilized world.

The towers of Mecca, Ridyah and Dubai will fall. The sands will sweep in and cover it all. As the vast sands have covered the ruins of many ancient cities in the desert. And none will remember what stood here or why. Only relics. Scraps of metal and plastic. And records in more civilized countries will recall the time they traded with them. When they bought oil and shipped goods to sheikdoms and kingdoms that could have aspired to civilization, but instead chose to spread misery and oppression, while building towers dedicated to their own greatness. They could have learned to be civilized, but they never saw the point.