MIDEAST REALITY – SUPERB – AT 9:24 A.M. ET:  If you read one article on the Mideast this week, read this one.  It is one of the best expositions on what's happened to the Mideast that I've read...and it isn't even long.  From the Jerusalem Post: 

The Arab Muslim world has been going through a civilizational crisis for decades with low economic and educational performance, but the chaos in recent years has brought the region to a nadir.

The refugee crisis in Europe is evidence that the Arab world cannot deal with or contain what appears to be the collapse of the regional order.

For a region that is quick to blame the West or colonialism for its ills, it now appears that without a helping hand, the region will sink even further and bring Europe down with it.

“At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity,” argued Walter Russel Mead in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend.

Historian Bernard Lewis, trying to explain this crisis more than 20 years ago in What Went Wrong? described it this way: “The proud heirs of ancient civilizations had got used to hiring Western firms to carry out tasks that their own contractors and technicians were apparently not capable of doing.

Now they found themselves inviting contractors and technicians from Korea – only recently emerged from Japanese colonial rule – to perform these same tasks.

COMMENT:  Please read the whole thing.  It is clear and convincing.  It also gives the lie to the standard line that "it's someone else's fault."  But articles like this will not, I guarantee you, find their way into college courses on the Mideast.

September 20, 2015