yegiba: Jayb, Amazing, thank you for setting me straight.

You're welcome. See you learnt something today. It wasn't wasted banging your head on the ground for nothing after all.

yegiba: All this time I thought it was the invasion and dismemberment of the region by various European countries and more lately the USA.

It's nice to see that you can admit when you are wrong. Well done.

Yegiba: How could I be so wrong teddy?

It's that banging the head on the pavement that'll do it every time.

Ya all knew that was comin' din cha? Left himself so open. ;-)

Who said people in turkey had high IQ's. At least their slightly higher than the rest of the ME.

yegiba: Is it the water or the religion and yet Jewish fundamentalist beliefs are almost indistinguishable from Muslim fundamentalist beliefs.

True but you are talking about fundamentalist Jews & they're just weird. The rest of them don't believe the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth.

Mate, you haven't answered any of my questions. you just divert. Goodness I couldn't have made it any easier for you. Please don't divert again it's not polite.

What say you. I dare you to get some guts & answer the questions. I'm sure everybody here would love to know just where you stand on the Quran verses Modern Science. Are you a real moslem or an Infidel?

Maybe if you can't work it out already - my answers might harm you

Yebiga,
Something like 90% of the Jews in the middle east (and the world) are Ashkenazim from Europe, the Y paternity genetics show a mid east origin in the fairly recent past, what that indicates is that relatively small numbers of mainly male Jews emigrated to Europe and intermarried with local women.

Ashkenazi Jewish matrilineages mainly of European origin
http://dienekes.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/ashkenazi-jewish-matrilineages-mainly.html
Analysis of Ashkenazi Jewish genomes (Bray et al. 2010)
http://dienekes.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/analysis-of-ashkenazi-jewish-genomes.html

"Researchers looked for close to one million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs): common alternative spellings in the genome, analogous to American and British spellings of words such as organize/organise. One measure of genetic diversity in a population is heterozygosity, or how many of the SNPs inherited from the mother and father are different; a more inbred population has less heterozygosity.
"We were surprised to find evidence that Ashkenazi Jews have higher heterozygosity than Europeans, contradicting the widely-held presumption that they have been a largely isolated group," says first author Steven Bray, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Warren's laboratory.
High linkage disequilibrium can come either from an isolated population (for example, an island whose residents are all descendents of shipwreck survivors) or the relatively recent mixture of separate populations. Bray and his colleagues did find evidence of elevated linkage disequilibrium in the Ashkenazi Jewish population, but were able to show that this matches signs of interbreeding or "admixture" between Middle Eastern and European populations.

The researchers were able to estimate that between 35 and 55 percent of the modern Ashkenazi genome comes from European descent."

Yes, Yerbiga, we're all mind-readers out here, we know what you are on about. Typical four-year-old logic.

Meanwhile, back to topic: maybe it is sheer fortuitousness, but our governments have, willy-nilly, invited Muslims from many different backgrounds, Sunni, Shia, Ahmadiyyah, Sufi, etc. ,and from many different countries, backgrounds and circumstances, along with many of their fellow-countrymen and -women who are Christian, Yazidi, Shabak, Jewish and Baha'i, etc., some skilled migrants, some via family reunions, some refugees. To most of us Anglos, they all look the same, but they really are a very diverse, disparate, population.

Not to mention that what seem to us ignorants out here to be similar (and 'therefore' all somehow united against 'us'), they may come from Sierra Leone or Turkestan or the Philippines and a multitude of countries in between. Only a small minority would speak Arabic, most would be as much locally-cultural as strictly Muslim, often more locally-cultural THAN Muslim.

Yes, of course, there would be a small, very disaffected minority, who see slights and slurs and insults in all sorts of ways, and translate that into some Muslim/anti-Muslim dichotomy, and who may dream of hacking someone's head off. But I sincerely hope that the vast majority of us are mature enough to all get along, and not give way to either some idiotic anti-Other hysteria on the one hand, or to an equally idiotic butchery of a random non-Muslim Other on the other hand.

This next year or two may be crucial in the history of the world, and in Australia. A struggle between civilization and barbarism, between rights and freedoms and equalities, versus surrender, retreat, darkness and terror. We'll see.

Joe

Yebiga,

Inbreeding depression and IQ in a study of 72 countries
Michael A. Woodley
School of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
http://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/inbreedingdpression.pdf

Precisely what this study found was that inbreeding had a negligible impact upon IQ levels overall but that even a small handicap in cognitive ability was compounded by consanguinous pairings and that such populations were more likely to be impoverished, which has a dramatic effect on intelligence and general cognitive abilitiy due to poor nutrition, lack of education, a tendency toward autocratic systems of social organisation in those societies etc.
As I said it's self perpetuating, most of the people in the Middle East are poor and dumb, the only way to keep dumb, poor people from destroying their living space and then turning on each other is a combination of strict religious law and a government with secret police and other goon squads to stomp on the knuckleheads as soon as they start acting up. You can see the amount of top down state management the Arabs of Western Sydney require to keep them from killing each other and wrecking their surroundings and the people of Blacktown live like kings compared to their bumpkin relatives back in the Levant, they have a much better environment with access to every modern convenience yet they're still dumb, violent and mindlessly destructive.

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

Your words have touched my heart and given me
hope. Well done! We need positive outlooks.
We need people such as yourself who look for
things that unite us, not divide us. This country
has survived so many different changes over the
decades and managed quite well. We have a system
of laws that we're all expected to abide by. We have
programs that assist new comers and make them feel
welcome. What we don't need is scare-mongering,
slogans, and the politics of fear. We need leaders who
will have the spine to take on the task of education,
persuasion, and consensus-building.