By 1978, Marxist class war was largely passé, and was in the process of being replaced by ethnic- and gender-based hostility to the established order. Although this hostility differed from Marxism in its arguments, it shared Marxism’s hatred of Western values and, like it, aimed at their destruction. Said’s post-colonialist theory was closely allied to other postmodernist and “post-structuralist” critiques, sharing their rhetorical claptrap and their common aim at ideological destruction. Said’s post-colonialist views had the additional merit in that probably 98 per cent of its Western advocates had no direct personal knowledge of “the Orient”, the subject they were writing about. The success of Orientalism was immediate and international, making Said one of the best-known and most influential public intellectuals in the world. The many ironies embedded in Said’s own limited engagement with Middle Eastern culture and society were only pointed out by critics much later.

Said’s contention is that Islam and its societies are portrayed inaccurately in the Western media. He is quite correct: the Islamic world is arguably a dozen times worse than it is depicted, especially by the politically correct Western Left. To take just one aspect of the effects of its culture, consider the inability of the Islamic world to produce top scientists or significant scientific research. There are 1.6 billion Muslims alive today; exactly three Muslim scientists have won Nobel Prizes in science, compared with, for instance, eleven winners who were born, educated or worked in Australia (population 25 million today), and fifty-seven who were educated or taught at Columbia University in New York, where Said taught. This paucity of top-flight scientific talent in the Muslim world has occurred despite the fact that there are no fewer than 1800 colleges and universities in the forty-six countries with Muslim majority populations. If the Islamic world did indeed see a scientific golden age when Europe was in darkness, this has now vanished without trace. According to Hillel Ofek:
Today the spirit of science in the Muslim world is as dry as the desert … Forty-six Muslim countries combined contribute just 1 per cent of the world’s scientific literature; Spain and India each contribute more of the world’s scientific literature than those countries taken together … Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg has observed “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading” …

A study in 1989 found that in one year the United States published 10,481 scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab world published only four. This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke, but when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world in 2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which the Islamic world excelled: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction.


https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/anti-semitism/the-middle-eastern-fantasies-of-e...

Bobby. wrote on Mar 4^th, 2026 at 4:31pm:


Quote:


Taxes are as common in capitalism as in any other ism ?

At the moment the undisputed world leader in Tarrifs (that extreme tax ragime) is that awful communist Donald Trump.