The United Nations' recent one-sided condemnation of Israel reinforces the fact that Israel is in fact the Middle East's foremost problem.  It's not because Israelis are evil colonialists who want to steal the Arabs' land.  Israel's former and current enemies, in fact, have a long track record of ethnically cleansing Jews, and they are still in possession of stolen Jewish homes and land.  Israel occupies Arab land only because Arabs started or provoked four wars of annihilation against Israel.  That's three more wars than Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan started with the United States before having their cities firebombed and atom-bombed into heaps of smoking rubble.

Israel is the Middle East's foremost problem for the same reason that a school's only honor student is the foremost problem for the other kids who would rather hang out, drink, and do drugs rather than earn passing grades.  Israel is, in fact, a problem for the entire fundamentalist Islamic world because it is, whether it likes it or not, part of a regional experiment on the relative merits of Judaism, Christianity, and what a good part of the world calls Islam.

The Middle East's Experiment

Suppose that farmers want to compare the effectiveness of different fertilizers and seeds.  Standard practice is to divide an otherwise homogeneous plot of land into sections where different seeds and/or fertilizers are tested.  Any observed differences in performance can therefore be attributed to the seed and/or fertilizer selections, because all are tried on exactly the same kind of soil.

Now suppose we take similar, in terms of natural resources, plots of Middle Eastern land.  Jewish seeds are planted in Israel, Christian seeds in Lebanon, and fundamentalist "Islamic" seeds in the countries that started or provoked the 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars.  Militant "Islamic" seeds of the Shiite variety also are planted in oil-enriched Iran.  The Jewish seeds grow with incredible speed into the biggest and healthiest plants in the region.  The Christian seeds make Beirut into the Paris of the Middle East.  The militant "Islamic" seeds sprout into stunted and sickly plants and then stop growing.  Iran's gross domestic product per capita is $17.8K versus $34.8K for Israel even though Iran has oil, while Israel does not.

The fact that Israel stands out head and shoulders above its neighbors cannot be attributed to better natural resources, because Israel has few of them.  It can be attributed only to the superiority of Judeo-Christian seeds over militant "Islamic" seeds, and this is something the militant "Islamic" leaders can no more tolerate than the D-minus performers can tolerate from their school's honor student.

Loss of the Mandate of Heaven

The Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven says that a leader derives his right to lead through service to his people.  This concept was associated with religion when people attributed natural disasters and plagues to "something" they or their king had done to incur the wrath of God.  Modern people still seek to remove leaders associated with poor economic performance or disastrous wars.  The Russian Revolution took place, for example, because the tsar had lost two wars in roughly 12 years.

I recall reading, meanwhile, of an ancient Hebrew legend about a Jew who was trying to convince a pagan to accept monotheism.  The pagan boasted of having just purchased an idol of a powerful god to protect him, and he wanted no part of the Jew's invisible deity.  The next day, however, he came wailing to the Jew because a thief had stolen the idol.  The Jew admonished, "Your god is powerless to protect himself, let alone anybody else.  How about trying mine?"

Rank-and-file Muslims in Gaza, Judea, Samaria, Egypt, Syria, and Iran see similarly that Allah, his prophet, and more importantly the mullahs and ayatollahs who claim to speak for them can deliver little more than poverty, ignorance, superstition, and squalor.  The nearby "infidel pigs," meanwhile, live in beautiful houses and towering skyscrapers and manufacture technology the Islamic rank and file can barely imagine.  Jews and Christians build skyscrapers and passenger jets, and the best the Islamists can do is hijack the planes and crash them into the skyscrapers.  It's simply an issue of the D-minus students beating up the honor student who keeps making them look bad, but, as Osama bin Laden discovered the hard way, this does not work out well in the long run.

Militant "Islam" Is Inferior.  Live with It.

The political left will doubtlessly bleat "racism," its standard off-the-shelf argument, at the proposition that militant "Islam" is inferior to every other religion and philosophy on Earth.  I will therefore put matters into terms that even a political leftist can understand.

Suppose I divide a piece of excrement – and no, it doesn't have a clean end – into four equal parts.  Then I put one portion each into a white container, a black container, a brown container, and a yellow container.  Each will smell equally bad because, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, the stench comes not from the colors of the containers, but from the character of their contents.  If one similarly puts what Iran, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, and ISIS call Islam into a white skin, a black skin, a brown skin, and a yellow skin, one will get four equally primitive, superstitious, and violent savages who believe that their afterlife is a Great Mustang Ranch in the Sky where a Mack Daddy named Allah hands out free Viagra.

That Depends on What You Mean by "Jihad"

Now, before the left condemns this statement as an attack on all Muslims, it is to be remembered that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who believe that Allah wants them to perform the Five Pillars of Islam, which have nothing to do with "Islam" as practiced by the extremists.  When a genuine Muslim says, "My jihad (struggle) is to seek to be a better person every day," he is actually practicing the Japanese ideal of a struggle for continual self-improvement.  Hamas's or Fatah's jihad is to kill everybody not like themselves, including not only Jews, Christians, Hindus, and LGBT people, but also the Muslim whose jihad is to be a better person.  People create their deities in their own images, and that is simply what Hamas, Fatah, al-Qaeda, Iran, and ISIS did when they depicted Allah as a panderer who runs a celestial house of prostitution for those who die for the mullahs and ayatollahs who claim to speak for Allah.  The disrespect for what civilized Muslims call Islam therefore comes exclusively from the terrorists and not from anybody else.

Why the Middle East's Underachievers Have to Beat Up the Honor Student

The world's 1.5 billion Muslims have won a whopping total of twelve Nobel Prizes.  Of these, two must be vacated as politically correct and unearned, and another for being earned in spite of rather than because of militant "Islam."  Anwar Sadat was given a Nobel Peace Prize for agreeing to stop attacking Israel after his country lost four wars, and Yasser Arafat was a common terrorist whom Israel should have killed long ago.  Shirin Ebadi had to flee Iran because of the actions that earned her a Nobel Peace Prize.  This leaves the Islamic world with a total of nine legitimate Nobel Prizes.

The world's 15 million Jews – that's one Jew for every 100 Muslims – have received 185 Nobel Prizes.  The world's 2.2 billion Christians have meanwhile been awarded 427 Nobel Prizes.  If we account for the fact that there are more Christians than Muslims, the ratio still comes to 32:1 per capita.  The world's 127 million Buddhist and Shinto Japanese have earned 25 Nobel Prizes to the entire Islamic world's nine.

Tunisia and Senegal are the only Islamic-majority countries in the entire world that Freedom House rates as "Free."  Even Turkey, which has been a relatively Europeanized nation for centuries, is rated as only "Partly Free," while fundamentalist Islamic nations like Iran are rated "Not Free."  The reverse is true of Christian-majority nations, where unfree nations like Russia and partly free ones like Ukraine and Mexico are the exceptions rather than the rule.  The world's only Jewish-majority and Hindu-majority nations are, of course, "Free."

The reason for the inferiority of fundamentalist Islamic nations is simple. When a society relegates half of its people – namely, the female half – to second-class citizenship or even chattel status, it has already thrown away half its human potential.  Throw in religious claptrap about dying for Allah to get eternal life in the Great Mustang Ranch in the Sky, and your entire society will be riddled with ignorance and superstition.

The leaders of the world's most backward and primitive Islamic nations cannot afford to have their people want the kind of affluence that prevails in the Judeo-Christian world, much less wonder why their leaders cannot obtain it for them despite the purported favor of Allah.  When somebody's position depends on keeping his people in darkness and ignorance, no menace is greater than a light unto the nations right next door.  This is exactly why Israel is the Middle East's foremost problem.

William A. Levinson is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.