Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t think it’s the world’s 13 million Jews who are oppressing Iran and the 1.4 billion people in the Islamic world. He said it came down to a mere 2000 Jews when he spoke at the UN last month:

President Ahmadinejad…moved on to the question of Iran’s nuclear program. “If, God forbid—God forbid—we budge on this issue, they’ll next say, ‘You have to give up your chemistry departments in your universities, and your physics departments too.’ Then even the medical schools.” The president’s tone wasn’t bombastic; if anything, it was very matter-of-fact. “It’s clear that they don’t want us to progress”…“Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world. You can do it elsewhere,” he said, as if speaking directly to the mysterious 2,000, “but not in Iran. It’s impossible—it’s not doable.”

Oh, those pesky Jews, whether 2000 or 13 million. They manage to oppress Iran and Ahmadinejad with their occult powers. Yet they didn’t seem so effective in preventing the rise of, for example, China, which has done extremely well over the last 25 years. This is a period in which Iran’s ecomony stagnated for a quarter century at around $100 billion, while China rose from nothing to a $2 trillion economy:

For comparison’s sake, let’s include the US and Israel in the graphic (you will observe that Iran’s GDP has doubled in the last couple of years — but solely as a function of high oil prices):

Like many countries in the Arab and Islamic world, Iran is an economic basket case — steeped in gnawing poverty and beset with 30-50% unemployment among the young. However much Ahmadinejad wants to blame the Jews, Israel and the US, it is self-delusion to do so. As the case of China (and India and South Korea, etc) demonstrates, capitalism and free markets work extremely well to create wealth. Sharia societies are dreadful in wealth production, technological innovation and full employment for reasons we have explained. If these people would cut out the whining and complaining and conspiracy theories, and realize that sharia has to be radically reformed to fit itself into the modern world, the world would be a much better place — alas, there’s little hope of that. (HT: Doug Martin)

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is filed under business, China, EU, General, idiots!, Iran, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.