A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE.

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal of January 13, 2009 by Gunnar Heinsohn, Head of the Raphael Lemkin Institute at the University of Bremen, Europe's first institute devoted to comparative genocide research.

ENDING THE WEST'S PROXY WAR AGAINST ISRAEL.

"As the world decries Israel's attempt to defend itself from the rocket attacks coming from Gaza, consider this: When Hamas routed Fatah in Gaza in 2007, it cost nearly 350 lives and 1,000 wounded. Fatah's surrender brought only a temporary stop to the type of violence and bloodshed that are commonly seen in lands where at least 30% of the male population is in the 15-to-29 age bracket.

In such "youth bulge" countries, young men tend to eliminate each other or get killed in aggressive wars until a balance is reached between their ambitions and the number of acceptable positions available in their society. In Arab nations such as Lebanon (150,000 dead in the civil war between 1975 and 1990) or Algeria (200,000 dead in the Islamists' war against their own people between 1999 and 2006), the slaughter abated only when the fertility rates in these countries fell from seven children per woman to fewer than two. The warring stopped because no more warriors were being born. In Gaza, however, there has been no demographic disarmament. The average woman still bears six babies. For every 1,000 men aged 40-44, there are 4,300 boys aged 0-4 years. In the U.S. the latter figure is 1,000, and in the U.K. it's only 670.

And so the killing continues. In 2005, when Israel was still an occupying force, Gaza lost more young men to gang fights and crime than in its war against the "Zionist enemy." Despite the media's obsession with the Mideast conflict, it has cost many fewer lives than the youth bulges in West Africa, Lebanon or Algeria. In the six decades since Israel's founding, "only" some 62,000 people (40,000 Arabs, 22,000 Jews) have been killed in all the Israeli-Arab wars and Palestinian terror attacks. During that same time, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars and terror attacks -- mostly at the hands of other Muslims.

What accounts for the Mideast conflict's relatively low body count? Hamas and their ilk certainly aim to kill as many Israelis as possible. To their indignation, the Israelis are quite good at protecting themselves. On the other hand, Israel, despite all the talk about its "disproportionate" use of force, is doing its utmost to spare civilian deaths. Even Hamas acknowledges that most of the Palestinians killed by Israeli air raids are from their own ranks. But about 10%-15% of Gaza's casualties are women and minors -- a tragedy impossible to prevent in a densely settled area in which nearly half the people are under 15 and the terrorists hide among them.

I do actually not agree with the gist of the author's article, but then Mr. Heinsohn is a European academic and generally, persons of this category outside the technical and scientific sphere are even more liable to mindclouding than their American counterparts. Towards the end of the article Mr. Heinsohn even advocates that the West should take in a couple of hundreds of thousands of young Gazan males to ease tensions in that hellhole. Mr. Heinsohn also fails to grasp the paramount importance of one factor in the Gazan equation yielding the unstoppable body count among young males, namely islam plain and simple. To be sure, he does mention the muslim religion, but almost as an aside, and basically focuses uniquely on the anthropogenous character of the self-inflicted bloodletting. This argument of his fails to explain why there are then no more violent mini-genocides among the world's poor populations with an unhealthily high percentage of testosterone driven jobless teens and tweens.

That being said, I DO feel sorry for a fifteen year old who had the misfortune to grow up in a barren overpopulated strip of land under the shadow of a barbaric "religion". He can't help it either. But it's no use crying over his fate as long as the core problems are not correctly diagnosed and addressed. Let us repeat the one paragraph where Gunnar Heinsohn comes closest to the ultimate truth as can be. Wait... let me put it in bold for you:

"In the six decades since Israel's founding, "only" some 62,000 people (40,000 Arabs, 22,000 Jews) have been killed in all the Israeli-Arab wars and Palestinian terror attacks. During that same time, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars and terror attacks -- mostly at the hands of other muslims."

Hat tip Luc Van Braekel.


MFBB.