Bush and Obama's Islamic Fantasy

"'My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives,' [US] President Barack Obama told an Arabic television channel on January 26. Really? What are their names? Word has come to the West of no extraordinary Muslim thinker since the 12th century. ... By 'extraordinary', to be sure, Obama means no more than Garrison Keillor meant in saying that the children of Lake Wobegon are all above average. ... In the real world, the ordinary depends on the extraordinary, for it is the extraordinary citizens of a nation who set the mark for the aspirations of ordinary people. ... But woe unto cultures whence comes no contribution to the rest of humanity. Where are the Muslim scientists, novelists, entrepreneurs, athletes and musicians? Apart from political leaders, a reasonably diligent reader of a quality newspaper in the West will not be able to name a single Muslim distinguished in any field of human endeavor. Excluding the politically awarded Peace Prize, Muslims have won only three Nobel prizes since their inception more than an century ago, or one for every 450 million Muslims alive today. By contast, there have been 169 Jewish Nobel Laureates, (excluding the Peace Prize), or about one for every 89,000 Jews alive today. During the past century a Jew was 5,000 times more likely to win the Nobel than a Muslim. ... Excepting Turkey, no Muslim country has a single industrial company that can compete on world markets. ... In dozens of essays during the past five years, I excoriated former president George W. Bush for imagining that he could fix the problems of the Muslim world by promoting American-style democracy. If Obama spends more time reassuring and less time trying to fix the Muslim world, he will do better, by default, America's policy towards the incurables should be to live and let die", Spengler, 2 February 2009 at:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KB03Ak03.html.

See my 6 February 2008 comments about Ahmed Ben Bella here: http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/02/woodrow-wilson-upside-down.html. Talk of hypocrisy. In 1972 I knew a resident at Columbia Presbyterian hospital in New York. He told me visiting Saudis insisted on Jewish surgeons. I asked him why. He said because they know Jewish doctors are the best. What frauds. Is the 5,000 to one ratio unexpected? Our friend, La Griffe du Lion sheds some light on this. His February 2000 and September 2003 posts, http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/dialogue.htm and http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/ashkenaz.htm are instructive. We learn Nobel Laureates average IQ is 144, or +2.93 SD. At +2.50 SD measured IQs exhibit "fat tails" and +2.93 SD is not .9983 or one in 596 but about one in 250. With Jews IQ at one SD about the caucasian mean, 144 IQ is .9734, one in about 38 or eight times as common. We're not done. From IQ and the Wealth of Nations, I estimate the Islamic world's average IQ is 84. We're still not done. In these countries, to the extent measured, IQ SD is about 13, so 144 is 60 /13 or + 4.615 SD, roughly .999998 or one in 500,000; estimating the fat tail effect at 10X, we get one in 50,000. How many Ashkenzim are there worldwide with IQs over 144? 9 million / 38 or 237,000. How many Moslems? 1.45 billion / 50,000 or 29,000. Coincidence? We don't think so. If the Islamic world wants to advance, it should beg Jews to relocate to Islamic countries and throw the Koran's anti-Jewish passages in the garbage.

Spengler's ratios are misleading as he compared "stocks" and "flows", i.e., the number of Nobel Prizes awarded over time to numbers of people alive today. This comparison would make sense if the ratio of Jews to Moslems was stable since 1900. It was not. In 1950 there were 12 and 361 million Jews and Moslems, today there are 13 and 1,450 million respectively. The ratio changed from 1 to 30 to 1 to 111. Assuming an average ratio since 1900 of 50, we get one Nobel Prize for every 76,000 Jews alive in a given year and one per 217 million Moslems, a 2,855 to one ratio.