State-of-the-art primitives

KARACHI (Reuters) - Mobile service providers in Pakistan have been inundated by calls from subscribers worried by a prank message that they could die of a deadly virus being transmitted via their phones.

The rumor was so effective that some mosques in the country's biggest city, Karachi, made announcements that people were being killed by a mobile virus and they should be aware of God's wrath.

In a prank reminiscent of the plot in the hit Hollywood movie "The Ring" in which people die within a week after watching a video, the prankster warned users that a deadly virus transmitted through phones had killed 20 people.

This reminded me of an incident Mark Steyn reported in his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. It seems that in 2003 a merchant in Khartoum reported that a stranger, a man from West Africa, came into his shop and "shook the store owner's hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body".

The story, as reported in the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds, continues. "The store owner became hysterical, and was taken to the hospital.". . .

"Tales of the vanishing penises ran rampant through the city. Sudan's attorney general, Salah Abu Zayed, declared that all complaints about missing dangly bits would be brought before a special investigative committee, though doctors had determined that the first plaintiff was 'perfectly healthy'. The health minister, Ahmad Bilal Otheman, said that the epidemic was 'scientifically groundless', and that it was 'sorcery, magic or an emotional problem'.

Steyn sums up his encounter this way:

"But here's the telling detail: the vanishing-penis hysteria was spread by cell phones and text messaging."

Think about that: you can own a cell phone, yet still believe that shaking hands with an infidel will cause you to lose your penis. That's a state-of-the-art primitive.

That is a good descriptive term for most of the people in the Islamic world, "state-of-the-art primitives".

That is an apt description of Iran with its ambition to become a member of the nuclear club yet has only one gasoline refinery in the entire nation, which it could not have built for itself. Its oil revenue is dropping like a stone because it lacks the competence to develop any of its own untapped oil reserves.

That is also a good description of Saudi Arabia whose air force pilots are trained in America to fly American aircraft which are serviced by American veterans who make almost more money on a one year contract to work in Saudi Arabia than they made in their entire military careers. Because Saudi Arabia doesn't have any natives capable of doing maintenance on a high performance fighter aircraft or an AWACS plane, unless they were educated in the West. This is because all of the institutes of higher education in the desert kingdom only teach Islamic studies.

I would hate to think that America which is in most of the ways that count the apex of human civilization could be brought low by a bunch of antediluvian goomers who are only one text message away from another castration riot.