What happens when all the infidels are rich?
A few days ago we linked to the CIA report on 2020 and dsiplayed this graph on the growth of India’s and China’s economies:
We were reminded of the previous post when we saw this article on the Hajj, containing comments like this:
“O nation of Islam, the military, ideological, economic and media-related campaigns are led against Islam and our nation qualified as terrorist,” Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said in a sermon in the Namera mosque which was broadcast over loudspeakers to the camps of pilgrims in the area. “Muslims are also qualified as backward, violators of human rights and freedom, yet Islam is a religion of justice, equity and rights,” the kingdom’s highest religious authority said….
“I beg God to make the Americans leave our country and put an end to the occupation. The Americans are responsible for all the destruction that has hit out country,” said Abbas, who is from “Diyala, in the Sunni Triangle which resists the occupation.”
“I want to pray that God rids Palestine of the Jews,” AbdelKarim said. Khiari Mansuri, a 64-year-old Algerian, was to pray “that God bring victory to Muslims against the infidels.”
Absent oil revenues, the Arab countries’ total economies are less then Finland, and, with repression and the lack of capitalism, it is hard to understand how permanent gains will be made. By contrast, the Hindus, Confucians, Buddhists, Christians, and Jews, appear to be on on a terrific run of compounding prosperity — with a current world GDP of $38 trillion, and growth rates in India and China approaching double digits for many years. The nation of Islam would do well to get with the program. To continue to complain about the world’s 13 million Jews while 1.4 billion Chinese build an economy the size of the United States, is, to say the least, a sorely misdirected effort.