Loudmouth & Joe,
An interesting vision of the future for Islam in the Middle East is Egypt.

Egypt being largely desert has just one source of food to support the
population. I believe at the time Napoleon was there the population
was around 10 million. For at least a thousand years Egypt was the
breadbasket of the Mediterranean.
The best information I have is that the population at the end of the
19th century was around 35 million. This population was supported by
the Nile, comfortably I believe.
Early in the 20th century oil was discovered and production increased
right up to 2000. During the 20th century Egypt was a significant
oil producer and exporter.
The government used the profits to subsidise food and fuel prices.
With ample income from oil & tourism the population grew to 85million.
All went well until oil production peaked and in the 2000 to 2010
period Egypt became an oil importer and the subsidies were cut back
despite very angry protests.

The disruption and protests resulted in the overthrow of Mubarak.
Egypt has a population of 85M and a river that can support 40M at a push.
They are living on charity from the Gulf states but that cannot
continue indefinitely. Egypt has to get rid of 25M people somehow.

This will be the patten in the other Middle East states as the oil declines.
It is interesting that Saudi Arabia's exports are affecting the way
they support their unemployed people, their internal usage has reduced
exports and is starting to worry their treasury.

As you said they have no skills at other industrial business nor do
they seem to have an aptitude for other than cottage industry.

Egypt will write the script for the rest of the Islamic world.

Hi James

I found and read the article you recommended by Nafeez Ahmed.

There is a lot of bold claims but whether or not its factual is questionable. Sure there is a spattering of historic hind sights but I'm not convinced the world is the way you see it, just because this guy says its so.

One thing I did glean from the article is Muslim extremists seem to be easily duped and manipulated by the West, if his accusations are correct. For instance his references to the West printing and distributing school books filled with violent images that advocated jihad against the Russians.

Why didn't the adherents of the 'religion of peace' reject, rather than embrace such propaganda if it didn't align with the Islamic philosophy?

Why do you want to defend religious radicals that are clearly as evil as anything we have seen in our life time? It doesn't matter how these thugs evolved, they are a menace to Islamic people more than to us, and they need to be destroyed.

Whoops I said;
Egypt has to get rid of 25M people somehow.

I should have said;
Egypt has to get rid of 45M people somehow.

Now think how excited that would make Senator Hansen-Young !

Hi CH,

I keep trying that URL but it doesn't work. But as you suggest, why does anybody think that Islamists are easily duped by anything from the West ? Why don't conspiracy theorists have enough respect for Islamist to at least consider that they will be able to think for themselves, to be able to think from inside their own square, if you like ? Surely, the last thing any Islamist would believe is anything published in the US ?

I love conspiracy theories for their sheer nuttiness and incredible naivety: they have to assume all manner of impossibilities and unlikely factors, and leap to ridiculous conclusions. In fact, they seem to invariably assume further, deeper, more devious and nefarious conspiracies, involving bigger and more powerful and insidious world forces.

But they always miss the obvious: the hand of the Swedes. Nobody ever suspects the Swedes. Notice that there is never any obvious evidence of the Swedes' involvement behind the scenes in any atrocity ? Why's that ? Because they are such clever b@stards, they have had centuries of learning how to cover their tracks, and eliminating any trace of involvement with anything. So everybody thinks they are pure and innocent while if the few intelligent people such as myself look carefully, one learns that that absence of evidence is clearly evidence of manufactured absence.

Not too many can see it. Just me and perhaps a few others. 9/11 ? Obviously, Swedish agents, operating under-cover from Minnesota, pinning the blame on a few Arab sight-seers. The 2004 tsunami ? Well, who would suspect Swedish testing of nuclear devices in the Indian Ocean, in the guise of some UN humanitarian body ?

The key to good conspiracies: look for the most unlikely, and you've got it: persevere and all sorts of unlikely facts fall out from all sorts of URLs.

Joe

Lego that is just insane
Democracy - Athens
Internal combustion engine - Austrian / german
Lighting - english
Penicillin - french
Absent the Second World War and the manufacturing boom it created the USA would remain the provincial backward racist hole it had been since its founding
The airplane is largely their ingenuity
But without the scientists who left war torn Europe they would remain the joke they were and are now reverting back to norm.
The yanks are marketers, salesman not thinkers
A simple people easily led with no sense of history or geography or morality or culture
They are crass in the worst sense of the word
The advantages they had post ww2 were mammoth and they have wasted them
To have world leadership and to regress the world into a medieval religious war is unforgivable
As for the Arabs they don't sell themselves as well but to the less ignorant they have made solid contributions in mathematics, astronomy, medicine...

When are you moving to the Middle East YEBIGA? If you honestly believe the crap you just posted then you are a total hypocrite if you don't move.

Flap on all you want; everyone except Ifitikar and perhaps James O'Neill sees straight through your emotional diatribes. America has done more for the world than all your tribal Bedouins will ever do in all of history.

Okay, I will bow to the one recognised good invention that came out of Arabia... the zero. Other than that and a few decent horses and oil which they didn't create, they've got nothing on the Yanks.