Arab Poet: Thinking Is A Crime In The Arab World

[JStone]

Syrian Poet Adonis

A word in the Arab world today is treated as a crime.

What is happening in the Arab world today has never been witnessed in its history You make a statement and its as if you've committed a crime and the opinion is treated as if it is a crime against the law. This is inconceivable. You can be jailed because of an article.

The conditions necessary for democracy are not present in Arab society. There are people who are afraid of freedom...because it is a great burden to be free. It is not something easy. When we are slaves, we do not have to worry about anything and just as God solves all of our problems, the Dictator will solve all of our problems.

I do not understand what goes on in Arab society today In comparing what the Arabs have done in the last 100 years, with what has been achieved by others in the same period, all I can say is that we Arabs are in a period of extinction. Extinction meaning that we no longer have a creative or innovative presence on the world state.

We [Arabs] are extinct.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2Y2ZcfUIZU&feature=related]Arab Thinker: Your Opinion is a Crime in the Arab World - YouTube[/ame]

 

[JStone]

BBC: How Israel Became A High-Tech Hub

Tiny Israel, a country embroiled in conflicts for decades, has managed to transform itself from a stretch of farmland into a high-tech wonder

Israel currently has almost 4,000 active technology start-ups - more than any other country outside the United States, according to Israel Venture Capital Research Centre

In 2010 alone the flow of venture capital amounted to $884m (£558m).

The result: high-tech exports from Israel are valued at about $18.4bn a year, making up more than 45% of Israel's exports, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics

Israel is a world leader in terms of research and development spending as a percentage of the economy; it's top in both the number of start-ups and engineers as a proportion of the population; and it's first in per capita venture capital investment. Not bad for a country of some eight million people - fewer than, say, Moscow or New York.

Over just a few decades, Israeli start-ups have developed groundbreaking technologies in areas such as computing, clean technology and life sciences, to name a few.

BBC News - How Israel turned itself into a high-tech hub

The Economist Magazine: Arab World Self-Doomed To Failure

WHAT went wrong with the Arab world? Why is it so stuck behind the times? It is not an obviously unlucky region. Fatly endowed with oil, and with its people sharing a rich cultural, religious and linguistic heritage, it is faced neither with endemic poverty nor with ethnic conflict. But, with barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they can.

One in five Arabs still live on less than $2 a day. And, over the past 20 years, growth in income per head, at an annual rate of 0.5%, was lower than anywhere else in the world except sub-Saharan Africa. At this rate, it will take the average Arab 140 years to double his income, a target that some regions are set to reach in less than ten years. Stagnant growth, together with a fast-rising population, means vanishing jobs. Around 12m people, or 15% of the labour force, are already unemployed, and on present trends the number could rise to 25m by 2010.

Freedom. This deficit explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciary (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment. The great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right. Freedom of expression and freedom of association are both sharply limited. Freedom House, an American-based monitor of political and civil rights, records that no Arab country has genuinely free media, and only three have “partly free”. The rest are not free

Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all. One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.

Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. How can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.

Arab development: Self-doomed to failure | The Economist