Thursday 14 January 2010

"The Tel Aviv Cluster"

David Brooks writes that Jews are a "famously accomplished group".  This contrasts (well, I contrast it, he doesn't) with the lack of accomplishments of Muslim Arabs, noted by Arabs themselves in the Arab Human Development Report, which I wrote about here .  As long as you have a culture which shouts -- which screams -- to Jews, to Christians, to all infidels:  "we love death more than you love life" and as long as they shout this without irony or self-examination; more, as long as they scream "you love life" as a curse, as a bad thing, as long as they have that attitude, as long as that's the default attitude of their culture, they're going to be a society of destruction, not a society of construction and invention.  How can it be otherwise?  And that world view -- of "loving death" -- comes directly, explicitly and exclusively from the Koran, from the Hadith and the Sirah of Muhammad, the blessed one.
Look a the first two paragraphs of Brooks' article...
Jews are a famously accoplished group.  They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.
Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthorpists, 41 percent of the Pulizer Prize winners for nonfiction.

Read on...  (if link rots, there's pdf here ).