That'll teach me to skip the cover of a print magazine's cover story. Damnable web-version articles! I thought I was getting a fairly straightforward analysis of Western shibboleths and misconceptions about the Middle East in this month's Prospect, that is, until I got to this paragraph:
That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.
A oil-saturated regional economy where the wealth gap is continent-wide; where oligarchs pay off religious radicals to export their only commodities — violence and misery — to the West; where illiteracy rates stagger the statistician; where Jew hatred, that reliable bellwether of civilizational decline, is the cultural norm; where a nuclear arsensal is being developed by at least one messianic regime we know of…. Yeah, what's worth paying attention to there?