Failure has been part of the human condition ever since the Fall of Man. Every one of us learns of the ubiquity of failure, almost from birth. Failure generally means that you tried something that didn’t work, with consequences all too often catastrophic. In a larger sense, you can also fail by not bothering to make an adequate effort in the first place.
During the past decade, the familiar word “failure” has become the Internet meme “FAIL”. The infamous Urban Dictionary defines Fail in various ways, including “The glorious lack of success.” The FAIL meme has propagated in tandem with the seemingly exponential growth of FAILure in the world at large.
I’ve occasionally experimented with the FAIL meme myself, both on deviantART and on 1389 Blog. The following example suddenly became more relevant after John McCain won the 2010 Arizona Republican primary election:
The unfortunately leftist online Slate Magazine contends that the growth of the FAIL meme reflects Schadenfreude, defined as pleasure at the misfortunes of others:
the good word
Epic Win: Goodbye, schadenfreude; hello, fail.
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2008, at 11:55 AM ET
…What’s with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be “epic”?
It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game’s obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: “You beat it! Your skill is great!” If you lose, you are mocked: “You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!”
Normally, this sort of game would vanish into the cultural ether. But in the lulz-obsessed echo chamber of online message boards—lulz being the questionable pleasure of hurting someone’s feelings on the Web—”You fail it” became the shorthand way to gloat about any humiliation, major or minor. “It” could be anything, from getting a joke to executing a basic mental task. For example, if you told me, “Hey, I liked your article in Salon today,” I could say, “You fail it.” Convention dictates that I could also add, in parentheses, “(it being reading the titles of publications).” The phrase was soon shortened to fail—or, thanks to the caps-is-always-funnier school of Web writing, FAIL. People started pasting the word in block letters over photos of shameful screw-ups, and a meme was born.
The fail meme hit the big time this year with the May launch of Failblog, an assiduous chronicler of humiliation and a guide to the taxonomy of fail. The most basic fails—a truck getting sideswiped by an oncoming train, say, or a National Anthem singer falling down on the ice—are usually the most boring, as obvious as a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos. Another easy laugh is the translation fail, such as the unfortunately named “Universidad de Moron.” This is the same genre of fail that spawned Engrish, an entire site devoted to poor English translations of Asian languages, not to mention the fail meme itself. A notch above those are unintentional-contradiction fails, like “seedless” sunflower seeds or a door with two signs on it: “Welcome” and “Keep Out.” Architectural fails have the added misfortune of being semipermanent, such as the handicapped ramp that leads the disabled to a set of stairs or the second-story door that opens out onto nothing. Even more embarrassing are simple information fails, like the brochure that invites students to “Study Spanish in Mexico” with photos of the Egyptian pyramids. These fails often expose deep ignorance: One woman thinks her sprinkler makes a rainbow because of toxins in the water and air.
The highest form of fail—the epic fail—involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well. Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory. Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.
Why has fail become so popular? It may simply be that people are thrilled to finally have a way to express their schadenfreude out loud. Schadenfreude, after all, is what you feel when someone else executes a fail. But the fail meme also changes our experience of schadenfreude.What was once a quiet pleasure-taking is now a public—and competitive—sport.
It’s no wonder, then, that the fail meme gained wider currency with the advent of the financial crisis. Some observers relished watching wealthier-than-God investment bankers get their comeuppance. It helped that the two events occurred at the same time—Google searches for failsurged in early 2008, around the same time the mortgage crisis started to pick up steam. And the ubiquity of phrases like “failed mortgages” and “bank failures” seemed to echo the popular meme, which may have helped usher the term out of 4chan boards and onto blogs.It’s rare that an Internet fad finds such a suitable mainstream vehicle for its dissemination. It’s as if LOLcats coincided with a global outbreak of some feline adorability virus. The financial crisis also fits neatly into the Internet’s tendency toward overstatement. (Worst. Subprime mortgage crisis. Ever.) Only this time, it’s not an exaggeration….
As with the gapers block phenomenon, we can never quite look away from failures that are not our own. Whether trivial or spectacular, whether humiliating or oddly heroic, whether well-deserved or the outcome of pure happenstance, failure gets our attention, and well it should.
I don’t think it’s always schadenfreude. Sometimes we laugh out of relief because the troubles belong to somebody else this time around, even though we know it could have happened to us.
Other times, we laugh about failure even when the failure DOES embroil us in its consequences, as with the ongoing political, social, and economic debacles in the US and the EU. (If you need a good laugh right now, check out the Sunday Funnies political cartoon series on Flopping Aces.) When we can share a good laugh, it not only underlines the lessons that we can learn from these failures, but also lightens the burdens that we all must bear as we work our way through.
Pamela Geller, who is leading the fight against the ground zero mosque in New York, has posted the following letter from Tom Burnett Senior.
To our fellow 9/11 families and to all who are concerned about the Ground Zero mega-mosque in New York:
We want everyone to know that the Park Service is right now building an even larger Islamic victory mosque atop the Flight 93 crash site. Many of you were outraged in 2005 when the Crescent of Embrace design was unveiled to be a half-mile wide Islamic shaped crescent:
Left: 2005 publicity shot of the Crescent of Embrace design. Right: typical Islamic crescent and star, viewed from a similar angle.
Few people know that this giant crescent actually points to Mecca, or understand the religious significance of this orientation. A crescent that points the direction to Mecca is a very familiar construct in the Islamic world. Because Muslims face Mecca for prayer, every mosque is built around a Mecca direction indicator called a mihrab. The classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Here are the two most famous mihrabs in the world:
Left: the Mihrab of the Prophet, at the Prophet’s mosque in Medina. Right: the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain.
Face into the crescent to face Mecca
As with the Medina and Cordoba mihrabs, a person facing into the Crescent of Embrace will be facing Mecca. In the image below, superimposed red lines show the orientation of the Flight 93 crescent. The green qibla circle is from an online Mecca-direction calculator:
A person standing between the tips of the crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing almost exactly in “qibla” direction (the Muslim prayer direction). You can verify the qibla direction from Somerset PA using any number of on-line Mecca-direction calculators.
To be precise, the Crescent of Embrace points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± a tenth of a degree. The final construction drawings alter this orientation slightly, so that instead of pointing a little less than two degrees north of Mecca, the actual crescent will point less than three degrees south of Mecca. Such small deviations from Mecca are insignificant by Islamic standards, which developed over a period of more than a thousand years during which far flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca.
The Park Service does not call the Crescent of Embrace a crescent anymore. Now they call it Circle of Embrace, but the only actual change was to add an extra arc of trees (planted to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing at Mecca.
This is the Park Service’s official explanation for the design: the terrorist attacks are depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant crescent. A clearer depiction of Islamic victory is hard to imagine, so no one should be too surprised that the d***ed thing points to Mecca, and actually turns out to be a mosque.
Other mosque features
Mosque design is based on a dozen typical mosque features, every one of which is realized in the Crescent/Circle design, all on the same epic scale as the half mile wide crescent-mihrab. Note, for instance, that the 93 foot tall minaret-like Tower of Voices is topped with another Islamic-shaped crescent, akin to the crescent-topped minarets seen in many Islamic countries:
An Islamic shaped crescent, soaring in the sky above the symbolic lives of the 40 heroes, which literally dangle down below. In Islam, there is only heaven and hell. Symbolic damnation?
The Flight 93 mosque needs to be stopped, along with the Islamic victory mosque at ground zero in Manhattan. May the fight against these two desecrations strengthen each other.
Sincerely,
Tom Burnett Senior
Loving father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Junior
Pamela’s Atlas Shrugs post includes a second letter from Mr. Burnett, thanking her for her help and passing on some information about the design selection process. (The vote for was 9 to 6 from a judging panel where family members were outnumbered 8-7 by left wing design professionals.)
Want to join our blogburst against the crescent mosque?
Quoth Muhammad: War is deceit.” “Insurgents attack 2 bases in east Afghanistan,” by Rahim Faiez for the Associated Press, August 28:
KABUL, Afghanistan – Insurgents wearing U.S. Army uniforms launched pre-dawn attacks Saturday on a major NATO base in eastern Afghanistan and a nearby camp where seven CIA employees were killed last year in a suicide bombing. NATO said there were no coalition casualties and the attacks were repelled. …
Afghan police said about 50 insurgents attacked using rifles, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons, but had been repelled.
After being driven away from the bases, the insurgents approached the nearby offices of the governor and provincial police headquarters but were driven off, said Khost provincial police Chief Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai.
“Given the size of the enemy’s force, this could have been a major catastrophe for Khost. Luckily we prevented it,” he said.
Small arms fire continued through the morning, while NATO helicopters patrolled overhead.
NATO said two insurgents had managed to breach Salerno’s perimeter, but were observed cutting the fence and killed immediately.
Dead insurgents were seen wearing camouflage jackets and pants seemingly identical to those warn by U.S. Army soldiers….
The following is an excerpt from a 1999 article about another false-flag operation carried out by the narcoterrorist/Islamist KLA, who, under various names and guises, were then, and still are, the local branch of al Qaeda in Kosovo.
This, of course, took place during the aftermath of the Kosovo War. For those not old enough to remember, Bill Clinton arm-twisted NATO into going along with him in his unprovoked war against the Christian Serbs, on behalf of the Muslim KLA.
The KLA obligingly helped him out by masquerading as Serb soldiers to commit acts of violence against civilians, so as to give Clinton some halfway-credible pretext to bolster his shaky rationale for committing the US and NATO militaries to make war on the Serbs.
On December 3, 1999, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that UN police and KFOR [that is, NATO] troops found illegal weapons, KLA uniforms, and Serb police uniforms in a house “inhabited by members of the future Kosovo Protection Corps” [the successor to the supposedly-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army or KLA].
Would someone please tell us: what are KLA operatives doing with Serbian police uniforms?
Remember all of those news stories about various war crimes and atrocities that were supposedly committed by Serbian police, often wearing masks, during the NATO bombing and before?
The stories completely contradicted other reports, such as official documents from the German Courts, which ruled that there was no persecution of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. [See note #2 at the end]
Of course, the stories did not offer any hard evidence that the culprits were actually Serbian police.
But these stories certainly were convenient for the NATO sales team, and the mass media, in terms of selling the war against the Serbs. What an effective way to turn public opinion against the Yugoslav nation and the entire Serbian people!
One thought we had at the time: ANYBODY can put on a stolen police uniform. And the KLA wouldn’t have to steal the uniforms either; they could simply manufacture identical uniforms in any clothing factory.
This is all especially eerie because we read a Reuters story dated December 4, 1999 about the fighting going on in Chechnya, in Russia. According to the story the “US-sponsored Radio Liberty” reported that “masked Russian troops had opened fire at close range on the column of refugees.”
“Masked Russian troops”? Again, why the masks? IF they were trying to disguise who they were, why wear Russian uniforms? Unless of course they really anti-Russian troops trying to provide negative media coverage to be played in the West, where the governments (especially the Clinton administration) are supporting the Chechnya rebels behind the scenes because they want to see Russia broken up into edible pieces.
Here is the first half of the AFP story about the uniforms:
Illegal arms cache found in homes of Kosovo Corps members
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Dec 3 (AFP) – A stash of weapons was found in a house in southern Kosovo inhabited by members of the future Kosovo Protection Corps, UN police said Friday. UN police officers and members of the NATO-led forces in Kosovo (KFOR) searched two houses in Stimje, where they said they found “anti-tank rockets, anti-personnel land mines, sub-machine guns, thousands of bullets, as well as Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serb police uniforms.” They arrested two members of the Kosovo Protection Corps, who police said would be charged with “illegal possession of military armaments.” Police did not specify the number of weapons found, only indicating that the number was “substantial.”
Never fight on behalf of Muslims, and be exceedingly wary of Muslims as enemies. Muslims can never be counted on to follow the ‘normal’ (i.e.,customary European) rules of warfare, though Muslims are always the first ones to complain whenever they can find a way to make it look as though we are not following our own rules.
KHAN BANI SAAD, Iraq — A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children’s hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets
As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted — more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency.
That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by auditors with the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. And it does not take into account security costs, which have run almost 17 percent for some projects.
We need to rebuild America, and we can do it only by restraining our spending, by cutting the deficit, by deregulating, and by lowering taxes.
“Foreign aid” is one place where we need to stop spending money. I do not mean that we should merely “cut” spending, I mean that we should stop entirely. That also means not a penny more for QUANGOs or NGOs such as USAID.
Nation-building = EPIC FAIL
Presidents in both parties like to use the often illusory and temporary benefits that the US government provides for overseas beneficiaries as a PR move and sometimes a backdrop for photo ops. Too bad nobody ever asks the American people whether we want or can afford to spend this money.
The amount of waste, graft, and simple incompetence taking place place on government projects overseas tends to be even higher than that which takes place on the same type of government project at home. One reason is that distance is always and everywhere the enemy of accountability. The other reason is that the US has so often been trying to modernize Islamic countries, which is inherently impossible to do without eliminating Islam. This is one area where I do fault George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Due to their backgrounds in the oil industry, and due to their indoctrination in the fraudulent Wilsonian ideology, neither one of them is intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually capable of comprehending the threat that is Islam.
Money sent to Islamic nations is not received with gratitude. It is interpreted either as an attempt at manipulation on the part of the Judaeo-Christian West, or as a form of jizya and a sign of weakness and dhimmitude.
Any US government spending overseas costs us heavily at home. We cannot afford it; more often than not, it is counterproductive; and the sooner we put an end to it, the better.
GWB and the Republican Party have paid the price for these fruitless attempts at ‘nation-building’.
Our politicians must be taught the lesson that ‘nation-building’ is always and everywhere doomed to fail. But that will happen if, and only if, people like ourselves hold their feet to the fire.
If you are an American, I ask that you write, call, or better yet, VISIT the offices of your US Senators and your US Representative. Tell them NO more tax dollars should go to foreign aid or nation-building, and that the money should go instead toward deficit and tax reduction. If you visit their district offices, you will usually be able to talk with a staffer. That’s just fine – the staffers relay constituent concerns to the legislator, and your message will get through.
Of course, so did the prophet of Islam: “Ibn Mughaffal reported: The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) ordered killing of the dogs, and then said: What about them, i. e. about other dogs? and then granted concession (to keep) the dog for hunting and the dog for (the security) of the herd, and said: When the dog licks the utensil, wash it seven times, and rub it with earth the eighth time.” — Sahih Muslim 551
Note also that just as unclean as dogs are unbelievers.
Sharia Alert from the Islamic Republic of Iran: “Iran bans pet ads, brands dogs ‘unclean,’” from NewsCore, August 27 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):
IRAN today banned all advertisements in the country for pets, pet shops, pet food and other pet products, claiming that people’s love for their dogs and cats may lead to “evil outcomes”.
The edict, announced by Iran’s powerful Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, is based on a fatwa issued by Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, 86, a hardliner who lives in Iran’s holy city of Qom.
Okay, I’ll admit it. Although I’m mostly a cat person, I like dogs too. But that isn’t the point here. The real issues here have to do with tyranny, and with the unreasoning hatred and disgust that some people feel toward innocent living creatures.
Whenever any government, at any level, arrogates the power to micromanage the lives of its citizenry to this extent, we have a problem. Evidently, in the case of San Francisco, they might have become a little embarrassed by the ridicule resulting from media exposure. Iran, on the other hand, has no such compunctions.
That commission last night, however, opted to put off discussion of its potential ban until 2011. The commission did come up with a new idea, however: Requiring would-be pet owners to obtain a license and take classes. This would ostensibly cut down on impulse purchases of guinea pigs and other small animals inundating the Animal Control office.
Let it be known that, as far back as last month, SF Weekly suggested alternatives: a “guinea pig fee” to offset the city’s costs in caring for hordes of abandoned rodents or a waiting period for potential pet buyers — “the Guinea Pig Brady Bill.”
These half-serious suggestions don’t look so outlandish anymore.
It takes a particular type of self-righteous and aggressive ignoramus to think that the real evils of this world will all go away if enough people can be shamed or bullied into denying that those evils exist.
Simmons’ apartment on Liberty St. overlooks Ground Zero. Each letter of the banner features different religious and spiritual symbols. Like Bloomberg, Simmons is a big supporter of the planned center: “I was trying to figure out ways I could reach people and promote a message of tolerance…The fact that it is a public discussion, that there’s so many against it is what I think is disappointing to me, that so many people don’t know that we founded our country on the First Amendment,” he told the AP.
By Charlie Sykes
Story Created: May 15, 2009
(Story Updated: May 15, 2009)
As John McAdams sums up the story so far:
It all started with a parody from Tom McMahon, who was aggravated by the extremely smug and intellectually slovenly bumper sticker in which a variety of religious symbols spell out “COEXIST.”
McMahon produced a parody bumper sticker with Nazi and Communist symbols substituted.
His point, of course, was that some religious views are simply impossible to coexist with, and must (like Nazism and Communism) be fought.
We Christians strongly believe in tolerance, and this is what British novelist Dorothy Sayers pointed out about “Tolerance”:
In this world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called indifference, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
If any viewpoint is equally as valid as any other, then no viewpoint has any meaning, and it matters not what any of us thinks, says, or does. This philosophy is truly satanic, and it is called nihilism.
Back in February, 2008, I blogged about Islam and Brain Damage. I offered evidence that the Islamic custom of proving one’s piety by slamming one’s head into the floor is dangerous to one’s mental and physical health. That blog post continues to draw occasional comments and considerable traffic.
The unwisdom of this activity should be so obvious as to need no explanation, but apparently those who have already spent their lives bashing their heads into the floor may be impervious to further attempts at reason.
…and to the health of your offspring
In a nutshell, the problem is that both the cultural traditions in Islamic lands, and Islam itself, encourage inbreeding.
Suffice it to say that there are excellent reasons why the descendents of the royal families of Europe no longer intermarry as they once did, and why some States in the USA ban first-cousin marriage. The Orthodox Christian Church takes it further, prohibiting marriage between first or second cousins. Yet cousin marriage remains customary, not only within Muslim countries, but also among expatriate Muslim populations elsewhere.
Charles II of Spain, mentioned in the article below, suffered throughout his short life from severe mental and physical disabilities.
…What’s the negative? Pedigree collapse. I’ve been talking about marriages between first cousins throughout this post, but that’s really a small issue next to this. Even first cousin marriages produce individuals with a fair amount of inbreeding. I ran a test for runs of homozygosity in my 23andMe genetic profile and I got 3 hits, while a friend whose parents are first cousins got ~70 (the parameters for the test aren’t important, just giving a relative sense). For inbred clans it gets much worse because people are related in many different ways, and genetically are far closer than first cousins. That is what happened to the Spanish Hapsburgs. As you can see from the pedigree of Charles II his parents were closer than typical first cousins. The Samaritans of Israel are a religious sect which seems to be going through pedigree collapse. Some of them are proactively marrying outsiders to prevent their extinction through high infant mortality rates. Others, “traditionalists,” oppose exogamy because intermarriage within the group is the custom, and diseases are God’s will.
The Samaritans are an extreme case. But we may be seeing a thousand Samaritan flowers blooming across the Middle East. From what I know cousin marriage in the Middle East is not limited to Muslims, Christians and Jews practice it as well. But among many Muslims it has some cachet because of particular hadiths which point to this practice as preferred. Setting religion aside, there are also social reasons why this practice is common. As I noted above sex segregation means that you may not know women outside of your family well, and in some societies where veiling is practiced it may be that you do not see many women you are not related to (even if veiling occurs at puberty, you may have seen your cousin at a younger age). Marriages are bonds which may tie a family into one operational social unit, and so produce a powerful inbred clan. This illustrates the cross-purposes of a cultural unit of selection vs. the individual unit of selection. In a society where clan vs. clan competitions are critical sorting mechanisms consanguineous marriages may serve as beneficial cross-linkages. Balanced against this of course are marriages across clans. On an individual level a first cousin marriage reduces the reproductive fitness, but higher potential reproductive fitness of two individuals who have no social support because of ostracism may be a moot point.
By Tazeen Ahmad
Last updated at 11:11 AM on 23rd August 2010
Sitting in the family living room, I watched tensely as my mother and her older brother signed furiously at each other. Although almost completely without sound, their row was high-octane, even vicious.
Three of my uncles were born deaf but they knew how to make themselves heard. Eventually, my uncle caved in and fondly put his arm around his sister.
My mum has always had a special place in her family because she was the first girl to live beyond childhood. Five of her sisters died as babies or toddlers. It was not until many years later that anyone worked out why so many children died and three boys were born deaf.
Today there is no doubt among us that this tragedy occurred because my grandparents were first cousins.
My grandmother’s heart was broken from losing so many daughters at such a young age. As a parent, I can’t imagine what she went through.
My family is not unique. In the UK more than 50 per cent of British Pakistanis marry their cousins – in Bradford that figure is 75 per cent – and across the country the practice is on the rise and also common among East African, Middle-Eastern and Bangladeshi communities.
Back when my grandparents were having children, the medical facts were not established. But today in Britain alone there are more than 70 scientific studies on the subject.
We know the children of first cousins are ten times more likely to be born with recessive genetic disorders which can include infant mortality, deafness and blindness.
We know British Pakistanis constitute 1.5 per cent of the population, yet a third of all children born in this country with rare recessive genetic diseases come from this community.
Despite overwhelming evidence, in the time I spent filming Dispatches: When Cousins Marry, I felt as if I was breaking a taboo rather than addressing a reality. Pakistanis have been marrying cousins for generations.
The effects of inbreeding are not limited to the incidence of obvious birth defects. Even those offspring who do not have overt congenital defects will, on the average, have lower intelligence and less ability to deal with life in the modern world.
Massive inbreeding within the Muslim culture during the last 1.400 years may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool. The consequences of intermarriage between first cousins often have serious impact on the offspring’s intelligence, sanity, health and on their surroundings
The most famous example of inbreeding is in ancient Egypt, where several Pharaonic dynasties collapsed after a couple of hundred years. In order to keep wealth and power within the family, the Pharaohs often married their own sister or half-sister and after a handful of generations the offspring were mentally and physically unfit to rule. Another historical example is the royal houses of Europe where royal families often married among each other because tradition did not allow them to marry people of non-royal class.
The high amount of mentally retarded and handicapped royalties throughout European history shows the unhealthy consequences of this practice. Luckily, the royal families have now allowed themselves to marry for love and not just for status.
The Muslim culture still practices inbreeding and has been doing so for longer than any Egyptian dynasty. This practice also predates the world’s oldest monarchy (the Danish) by 300 years.
A rough estimate shows that close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred: In Pakistan, 70 percent of all marriages are between first cousins (so-called “consanguinity”) and in Turkey the amount is between 25-30 percent (Jyllands-Posten, 27/2 2009 More stillbirths among immigrants”
Statistical research on Arabic countries shows that up to 34 percent of all marriages in Algiers are consanguine (blood related), 46 percent in Bahrain, 33 percent in Egypt, 80 percent in Nubia (southern area in Egypt), 60 percent in Iraq, 64 percent in Jordan, 64 percent in Kuwait, 42 percent in Lebanon, 48 percent in Libya, 47 percent in Mauritania, 54 percent in Qatar, 67 percent in Saudi Arabia, 63 percent in Sudan, 40 percent in Syria, 39 percent in Tunisia, 54 percent in the United Arabic Emirates and 45 percent in Yemen (Reproductive Health Journal, 2009 Consanguinity and reproductive health among Arabs.).
A large part of inbred Muslims are born from parents who are themselves inbred – which increase the risks of negative mental and physical consequenses greatly. … Low intelligence
Several studies show that children of consanguineous marriages have lower intelligence than children of non-related parents. Research shows that the IQ is 10-16 points lower in children born from related parents and that abilities related to social behavior develops slower in inbred babies:
“Effects of parental consanguinity on the cognitive and social behavior of children have been studied among the Ansari Muslims of Bhalgapur, Bihar.
IQ in inbred children (8-12 years old) is found to be lower (69 in rural and 79 in suburban populations) than that of the outbred ones (79 and 95 respectively). The onset of various social profiles like visual fixation, social smile, sound seizures, oral expression and hand-grasping are significantly delayed among the new-born inbred babies.” (Indian National Science Academy, 1983 Consanguinity Effects on Intelligence Quotient and Neonatal Behaviours of nsari Muslim Children“).
The article “Effects of inbreeding on Raven Matrices” concludes that “Indian Muslim school boys, ages 13 to 15 years, whose parents are first cousins, were compared with classmates whose parents are genetically unrelated on the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices, a nonverbal test of intelligence. The inbred group scored significantly lower and had significantly greater variance than the non-inbred group, both on raw scores and on scores statistically adjusted to control for age and socioeconomic status.” (Behaviour Genetics, 1984).
Another study shows that the risk of having an IQ lower than 70 goes up 400 percent from 1.2 percent in children from normal parents to 6.2 percent in inbred children: “The data indicate that the risk for mental retardation in matings of normal parents increases from 0.012 with random matings to 0.062 for first-cousin parentage.” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 1978 Effect of inbreeding on IQ and mental retardation“). The study A study of possible deleterious effects of consanguinity concludes, that “The occurrence of malignancies, congenital abnormalities, mental retardation and physical handicap was significantly higher in offspring of consanguineous than non-consanguineous marriages.”
