Politically Incorrect Nature of Man

From The Nature of Humans:

4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim – I think we already knew this, as I can’t remember any other type of suicide bomber. Almost all of them are Muslim. The author ties this to polygyny as mentioned above. Muslim society allows for polygyny, thus depleting the pool of available women for the guy on the street. There is also the mention of the 72 virgins available for Muslims who martyr themselves. Stay on Earth and have no wife and no sex or blow yourself up and find 72 virgins at your disposal?

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Translation – the lack of sex and promise of it in the hereafter makes men blow themselves into little pieces.

This statement was only one of 10 controversial ideas posted today over at Audience of One, a local Oklahoma blog by a Tulsa school principal. The idea ties into other ideas about power and sex in society. Here is another example from his post today:

2. Humans are naturally polygamous – I wrote about this some time ago in this post. There is certainly much in human history to indicate that monogamy does not come naturally. My friend Patrick (Patrick is the author of Optimus: Praetorian Guard and who is a regular commenter here. --OkieLawyer) commented on that post that monogamy evolved to keep men from killing each other in competition for women. Monogamy increases the number of available women as opposed to wealthy men monopolizing them in a polygamous society. The article agrees with Patrick’s assertion.

Among primate and nonprimate species, the degree of polygyny highly correlates with the degree to which males of a species are larger than females. The more polygynous the species, the greater the size disparity between the sexes. Typically, human males are 10 percent taller and 20 percent heavier than females. This suggests that, throughout history, humans have been mildly polygynous.

Translation – Tall dark handsome men get to have more sex and produce more children, thus increasing the average height of men as compared to women.

What constitutes "tall, dark and handsome?" Scientific studies seem to indicate it is related to symmetry. I wrote about it before, but only as a brief blurb. The basic idea is that people whose faces and bodies are more symmetrical make more money, have more sex, are more popular and enjoy more power than others. Kinda fits in with my Four Corrupting Influences.

Whatever the motivations are, it is worth talking about.

The Iran Problem

In an editorial in today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman asks us to take a small test:

Let’s start: Country A actively helped the U.S. defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and replace it with a pro-U.S. elected alliance of moderate Muslims. Country A regularly holds sort-of-free elections. Country A’s women vote, hold office, are the majority of its university students and are fully integrated into the work force.

On 9/11, residents of Country A were among the very few in the Muslim world to hold spontaneous pro-U.S. demonstrations. Country A’s radical president recently held a conference about why the Holocaust never happened — to try to gain popularity. A month later, Country A held nationwide elections for local councils, and that same president saw his candidates get wiped out by voters who preferred more moderate conservatives. Country A has a strategic interest in the success of the pro-U.S., Shiite-led, elected Iraqi government. Although it’s a Muslim country right next to Iraq, Country A has never sent any suicide bombers to Iraq, and has long protected its Christians and Jews. Country A has more bloggers per capita than any country in the Muslim Middle East.

The brand of Islam practiced by Country A respects women, is open to reinterpretation in light of modernity and rejects Al Qaeda’s nihilism.

Who is Country A? Answer: Iran.

Friedman suggests that we need to re-open a dialogue with Iran:

More important, when people say, “The most important thing America could do today to stabilize the Middle East is solve the Israel-Palestine conflict,” they are wrong. It’s second. The most important thing would be to resolve the Iran-U.S. conflict.

That would change the whole Middle East and open up the way to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict, because Iran is the key backer of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Syria. Iran’s active help could also be critical for stabilizing Iraq.

This is why I oppose war with Iran. I favor negotiations. Isolating Iran like Castro’s Cuba has produced only the same result as in Cuba: strengthening Iran’s Castros. But for talks with Iran to bear fruit, we have to negotiate with Iran with leverage.

How do we get leverage? Make it clear that Iran can’t push us out of the gulf militarily; bring down the price of oil, which is key to the cockiness of Iran’s hard-line leadership; squeeze the hard-liners financially. But all this has to be accompanied with a clear declaration that the U.S. is not seeking regime change in Iran, but a change of behavior, that the U.S. wants to immediately restore its embassy in Tehran and that the first thing it will do is grant 50,000 student visas for young Iranians to study at U.S. universities.

I understand the feeling. But how much connection is there between the people on the street and Iran's leadership? In a recent issue of National Geographic Adventure, a reporter published a report of a trip she had taken through the backcountry and the mountains in Iran. Included in the report were some photos of the old American embassy. Her guide was nervous about her fellow reporter's "transgression." The fellow reporter, a photographer that accompanied her, had taken a picture of the wall outside what used to be the American embassy, which has a mural of the Statue of Liberty with the face painted as a skull. The old embassy is now the headquarters of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. It is known locally as "the U.S. Den of Espionage."

A lot of this kind of imagery could probably be alleviated with dialogue. But here is something that concerns me more: yesterday on Charles Smith's blog Of Two Minds Charles mentioned how Iran's current leaders see Israel as a "one-bomb state."

The President of Iran has made no secret of his desire to destroy Israel, a small nation which zealots gloatingly describe as a "one-bomb state," meaning that one nuclear bomb would wipe the country from the map.

Thomas Friedman has previously stated somewhere that the Islamic militants need to learn to love life (or their children) more than they hate us. I think it is that kind of irrationality that we fear. The "one-bomb solution" would kill not just Israelis, it would kill all Palestinians, too. Not to mention a lot of Jordanians, Lebanese, Egyptians and others.

Instead of Sting's Russians, maybe we now need to say: I hope the Muslims love their children too.

One of the innovations in Christianity was the development of the belief in the Brotherhood of Mankind: the idea that God loves every person regardless of where they are from. It hasn't always been followed, but the concept was there in Christianity from the very beginning. Is it possible for this same concept to be adopted by Islam? Or is it there already, but we just never hear about it because the militants are just so vocal and sensational?

Or does Everybody Love a Holy War?

Another View of the Saddam Hussein Execution

Salon.com writer Juan Cole seems to think that Saddam's death was about revenge and not justice.

And, based on what Mr. Cole says, it appears that the execution had more religious significance than first thought:

The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam's hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday –- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.

It certainly should not be the policy of the U.S. to promote religious divisions, whether intentional or not.

Lex Taliones

Lex Taliones: literally, "Law as Revenge" (also known as "an eye for an eye").

News came late last night that Saddam Hussein was executed last night for crimes against humanity. I am still sorting out my feelings about the matter. One the one hand, I am not opposed to the death penalty; on the other hand, I think it should be used in only the most extreme circumstances. Having said that, lex taliones is not, in my mind, a good justification for the death penalty. I think that the death penalty should only be used as a means of protecting the public when no other means can be used.

I'll admit it is possible that Saddam was one of those cases. It is well-known that Saddam liked the Godfather movies and wanted to emulate the somewhat fictionalized crime-boss figure when he ruled Iraq. There is no doubt that Saddam was a bad guy and hurt -- even killed -- a lot of people wrongfully. But the question that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times asked was never answered: "is Saddam the way he is because Iraq is what it is, or is Iraq the way it is because Saddam is who he is?"

As I write this, I think of the short story The Lottery. And I wonder if Saddam Hussein became the scapegoat for an endemic problem in Iraq's culture. What if we find out that anyone who vies for power in Iraq simply becomes another Saddam-like figure?

The violence in Iraq has only gotten worse since we invaded. Law and Order have never effectively been established. You can say that it is partially our fault for taking in "just enough troops to lose." The country is falling, or has fallen, into civil war. Many Americans, like myself, cannot fully comprehend how people can have differences so great that they would be willing to kill entire neighborhoods -- even cities -- of residents because differences in race, tribal affiliation or religious beliefs. However, here in America we had a civil war over the issue of slavery -- which at the time had a connection to Southern Christians' reading of passages in the Bible that slavery was acceptable; and we enslaved an entire race of people because of the endemic belief that that race was inferior. We have come a long way since then.

Based on how things are playing out, things will only get worse in Iraq before they get better. That is, if they ever do.

***Update***

A commentator over at Daily Kos who is from Cairo, Egypt, pointed out that the execution was carried out "on the most important feast in the Muslim calendar: Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice." He continued: "My neighbors here in Cairo must have been slaughtering their sheep just as the trap door opened. I wonder if they appreciate the irony."

A very interesting post by MaxedOutMama

The post discusses the devolution of democracies and the treatment of children in Islamic countries. It is a somewhat lengthy post, and I am doing some thinking about its premises.

MaxedOutMama is a regular poster at Calculated Risk.

P.S. I noticed that CR mentioned me in his post today. If you are here from Calculated Risk, Welcome!

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Last week my I stayed with my sister when I played in a chess tournament over the weekend. While I was there, my nephew was on the computer playing certain "documentary" videos. The videos and web pages he was visiting discussed and postulated that the real reason why the twin towers came down was due to explosive charges being pre-planted in the buildings -- discounting the idea that fuel from the planes could have burned enough to cause the "pancake effect" to bring down the towers.

Let me just say that as a lawyer, the general rule is that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of its absence." If you want to search for the debunking explanation, just Google "9/11 conspiracy theory debunked" or something like that.

Interestingly enough, in much of the Muslim world, conspiracy theories rule the streets. Some pollsters theorize that a lot of Arab Muslims, where they have polled, actually accept the idea that Arab Muslims committed the acts on 9/11, but are not willing to admit it publicly.

This is what I don't understand about the Muslim world -- especially the non-Arab Muslim world: why do they hate the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East (or anywhere)?

Let me preface it to say that I know that there are good Muslims out there; the oncologist who treated my father for cancer seemed to be a genuinely devout and compassionate Pakistani Muslim. I would like to attribute it to his education, but there seem to be so many high-profile well-educated Muslim extremists that belie that explanation. Many of the 9/11 hijackers were very-well educated themselves.

In the Christian context, it is a fundamental teaching that there is a "brotherhood of mankind." And I am mindful that the saying goes that Osama Bin Laden is to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity. However, I am curious if there is a identical teaching in Islam as there is in Christianity that there is a brotherhood of mankind. Not a brotherhood of Muslims, but a brotherhood of all peoples -- regardless of whether they believe in Islam or not. If such an idea exists (or existed) I would think that it would be a lot harder for Muslim extremists to justify hatred of Israel based on sacred texts and appeal to faith. I would like to be able to say that Bin Laden's teachings are a perversion of Islam, rather than a "revival" of traditional Islamic faith, but for me, that remains to be demonstrated.

Anyway, if the Arab Muslim street polls are any example, appeal to logic and reason does not seem like a likely way to change Arab and Muslim minds. The question is then: how do we make inroads to change Muslim minds and win the "battle of ideas?"