"Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover..."

I took this from this site :  

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/the-barbarians-within-our-gates-111116.html#ixzz3Ealk3V97

My comments follow. 
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The Barbarians Within Our Gates

Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.
 

By HISHAM MELHEM
 
With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama is doing more than to knowingly enter a quagmire. He is doing more than play with the fates of two half-broken countries—Iraq and Syria—whose societies were gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon. 

Obama is stepping once again—and with understandably great reluctance—into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down.
 

Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. 

The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. 

With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf—which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.
 

Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State? And that there is no one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our world but the Americans and Western countries?
 

No one paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last century. 

There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies and political movements that swept the Arab region: Arab nationalism, in its Baathist and Nasserite forms; various Islamist movements; Arab socialism; the rentier state and rapacious monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies. 

No one theory can explain the marginalization of Egypt, once the center of political and cultural gravity in the Arab East, and its brief and tumultuous experimentation with peaceful political change before it reverted back to military rule.

Nor is the notion of “ancient sectarian hatreds” adequate to explain the frightening reality that along a front stretching from Basra at the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Beirut on the Mediterranean there exists an almost continuous bloodletting between Sunni and Shia—the public manifestation of an epic geopolitical battle for power and control pitting Iran, the Shia powerhouse, against Saudi Arabia, the Sunni powerhouse, and their proxies.

There is no one single overarching explanation for that tapestry of horrors in Syria and Iraq, where in the last five years more than a quarter of a million people perished, where famed cities like Aleppo, Homs and Mosul were visited by the modern terror of Assad’s chemical weapons and the brutal violence of the Islamic State. How could Syria tear itself apart and become—like Spain in the 1930s—the arena for Arabs and Muslims to re-fight their old civil wars? 

The war waged by the Syrian regime against civilians in opposition areas combined the use of Scud missiles, anti-personnel barrel bombs as well as medieval tactics against towns and neighborhoods such as siege and starvation. For the first time since the First World War, Syrians were dying of malnutrition and hunger.

My views : Some of you village idiots have accused me of being anti Arab. That is not true. I am just anti stupid, no matter who it is. This is the issue. The writer of the article above is an Arab - Hisham Melhem. Would you accuse him of being anti Arab as well? I dont think so.

The difference is I have seen it coming for a long, long time, since the 1980s when I lived with Arabs and observed them from up close. I knew these were a people who were quite doomed.  Despite all the Arabs I knew being campus mates at one of the top engineering campuses in the US they were still dumb@sses when it came to simple etiquette and simple manners. And I think they were all racists. Or they had a supreme arrogance. And I believe they suffered this arrogance not because they were Arabs but because they were 'muslim'. They had this "religious" superiority complex.

The problem was they were not superior in any way. They did not even make their own underwear. Plus their so called superior religious beliefs were fake. These people were doomed. It takes time for a culture or a civilisation to become doomed. Finally a quarter century later in 2011 the Arab Spring aka Arab Doom happened.

Their beliefs were actually from the arab desert culture and had little or nothing to do with Islam. 

The problem is this arab desert culture is now being imbibed in large quantities by people all over the world, including here in Malaysia. So we are also doomed. 

When will we implode? 10 years from now? 20 years from now?  I think we will implode either when the oil money runs out or when the queue for free oil money becomes too long.