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1. Extreme amounts of wealth in the hands of a handful of Arab sheiks, who have nothing better to do with it than "be liberal" and build castles in the sand, while poor Arabs flood Europe and pick over garbage heaps in Egypt and Gaza for ten cents a day and Israel next door invests in R&D, is...

Good counter

TED is a mess of misinformation and propaganda. Let me point out a few things to you: 1) China has three times the population of the US, but the US is still far, far ahead in terms of R&D, rule of law, innovation and quality of life. And despite massive industrial production and horrid...

Why do you believe that unschooled Westerners usually can read English but unschooled Arabic-speakers usually cannot read Arabic?

You didn't really address my question. In the absence of monarchy or casteism, how does a society decide who has leadership potential and create the conditions for effective and credible leaders to emerge? How do you ensure that those who are to become leaders have the character and education to...

Where do you believe leaders come from?

Three reasons. First, the founders of the State of Israel wanted to make the new country as inclusive as possible. Although mostly Ashkenazim themselves, they dreamed of an Israel that would be a home for all Jews, with no preference towards any ethnic group, including their own, so they felt...

Cool. I would say "use the Phonecian or Hebrew scripts because they're Semitic scripts that are phonetically similar but easier to read" but that would be much more offensive than using the Roman script and reassigning the pronunciation of some letters. Some Germanic and non-Cyrillic Slavic...

The point is that the evidence is that Roman script is easy enough to learn that it is possible to pick it up from reading the back of a cereal box, without ever actually attending school, and that Romanizing written Modern Arabic would therefore greatly facilitate mass literacy. The truth is...

What California native are you referring to? Bush II is very Texan. Californians and Texans generally resent each other's culture. Cheney and Rumsfield were from the Midwest. Podhoretz and Wolfowitz were from New York. According to UNICEF, KSA's literacy rate is 87%. KSA can afford to urinate...

Do Mexicans count?

Israel had the same debate 75 years ago about Hebrew vs Yiddish and/or German. Israel's leaders wanted to make the country more inclusive of the Sephardim (who spoke Ladino) and the Mizrahim (who spoke Arabic). I remember reading a funny story about the triumph of Modern Hebrew: The point is...

I remember my high school history book saying, "Romans honored strength more than beauty, power more than grace, usefulness more than elegance, and steadiness more than quickness of mind." Latter-day Classical scholars in the West tend to be very dismissive of Romans and Romanists because they...

Japanese and Korean are not pictographic languages as Chinese is, and the letters are easier to visually distinguish than Arabic letters. Actually Japanese is a good example of reforming a language to facilitate mass literacy. The Japanese language has gone through reforms to reduce reliance on...

I live in Cincinnati, but I don't think I'll ever say I'm "from" Ohio. I enjoy yardsailing and buying stuff off Craigslist, so I get out a lot and observe the different communities. A few months ago, I bought some light fixtures apparently intended as grow lamps from some Appalachians for three...

As I understand it, the Quran is written in Classical Arabic, not Modern Arabic - same as the Torah and Biblical Hebrew vs Modern Hebrew. So it would not be necessary to edit or otherwise change the Quran, nor give up the Arabic language itself - just change the writing system used for...

I am a native of California living in Ohio. As the redneck culture is much more mainstream here than it is in my native state, I often find myself making cultural comparisons between rednecks and Arabs. Although the two cultures are far removed from each other by tens of thousands of klicks, and...

I agree with most of what you say, except I think the problem is indeed organic to Islam and manifest in the content of the Quran and the person and methods of Muhammed.

Terrorism is an Islamic problem in the same sense gun homicides and hardcore poverty are American problems. Not all Pakistanis are terrorists, but the basic ideology predominates in Islamic countries and its institutions etc are, if not supported, seen as non-issues compared to various petty...