On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 09:58:46 -0700, "Mr Wizzard"
wrote:

~~ snippage ~~

So thats IT? - their contribution to the above was a "zero" ?
(how ironic). But joking aside, this is "good". Is there more?
I mean, what you spelled out here is important (and thats good),
but lets build on that - lets see why there hasn't been more.

How do you define "more"? If I look around at the array of
individuals who provide me and my family with health care, three of
the doctors, including my internist, are Muslim and are very good at
what they do. I work with a Iranian on occasion who has made some
very interesting and valuable contributions to quantum physics -
notably in the area of quantum foam.

It's like asking what Americans have contributed to the world - space
science? Mostly Jewish physicists and conscripted ex-Nazi German
rocketeers. Medicine, certainly, but so have individuals who were
French, German, Japanese and the first heart transplant was done by a
South African.

You can't define a society by what individuals accomplish as
individuals.

At some point we need to look at this, and understand why
they fell out of the game so long ago, and see what it will
take to get them back in to the game (if they want to).

The Arabs have always been assimilators (you will be assimilated -
snerk) and as their society adapted to the influences of other
cultures and systems, advances were made everywhere from China to
Britain. They were the main trading group of merchants and
entrepreneurs throughout the Middle East and beyond and spread these
different ideas around igniting the scientific/industrial and other
revolutions.

if they don't, we need to find out why, and what to do with
a self-destructive culture that doesn't (that happens to want
to take out the rest of the world). We've seen other despondent
and self-destructive cultures before, but one that wants to also
take out the other side is something we're not used to.
(Hitler didn't want to take "out" the world, he just wanted
to control it - very different).

I understand what you are saying and I appreciate that view, but to my
mind, societies evolve, devolve and evolve once more. Certainly, the
current situation isn't the best, but this is basically a tribal
conflict similar to any number of ethnic/tribal conflicts that
continue to infest world order and peace.

I'm not at all sure there is an answer.