Worldwide Java Jag: 2011-02-06

Monday, February 07, 2011

Look in the Bedroom

Who may have lost Egypt? That is the question among the West’s intelligence services. Evidently the CIA and NSA failed to tell Obama what was up on the Nile, ditto Mossad to Netanyahu. France, who once owned these joints, appears clueless too. While recent Wikileaks show that some knew instability was a possibility, it named the usual suspects: corruption, lack of jobs and opportunity, plus grinding poverty. The world seems taken by surprise. No one saw the truly explosive underpinning beneath the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts.

If anyone in Western intelligence had only asked Oussam Benchikha, he could have explained it all. As identified and quoted in the New York Times last week he is an 18-year-old Algerian pizza maker trying to sneak into Greece and then the E.U. from Turkey. To what purpose? Does he want to blow things up? Is he a jihadist? No, it turns out his reason for crossing the border is, “I want to be married.” He further explained, “You need money to be married. I want to get a job right away.” In that brief and baleful summation of his wants and needs is the key to understanding why Arab youths from Rabat to Cairo and beyond have “gone wild.” They are not having sex, and they want to.

A generation ago most Arab youth were living much like their grandparents, in rural traditional villages and small towns. The population of Cairo in 1950 was 2.4 million.It is now 20 million. Life in those rural places followed the timeless tradition of very early marriage to nearby neighbors. A small dowry, usually composed of livestock or other useful items, was the bride price, and after the marriage the newlyweds immediately set up housekeeping. To accommodate them, a new room was simply built onto the family compound and everyone lived and worked to contribute to the family enterprise.

This ageless pattern has been totally disrupted by urbanization and the youthful population explosion. According to Arab News, 50 percent of all Arabs are under age 25 and 20 percent are ages 15 to 25. This is hormone central, this is the age of sexual awakening and desire. Think of our free love, sex, drugs and rock-and-roll ’60s. The problem is, these young men and their families find themselves unable to pay the inflated urban dowries, and without jobs have no income to find an apartment, get married and start a family. In an attempt to replicate the housing expansion of a village, Cairenes try and add extra floors, but one can add only so many floors to a house till it collapses. There are some 8,000 buildings in Cairo right now that are in danger of collapse. Houses fall down there every week. So these men sit in cafés and public places, jobless, hopeless and sexless.

Europe knows this phenomenon well, but there is a key difference. The unemployment rate in Spain and Italy among this young age group is also over 30 percent, and it is only a little lower in France and Germany. In all those countries, it is normal for men and women to live in their parents’ homes and apartments well into their 30s. The difference is they can go out and…have sex. Madrid’s discos are filled every night till 4 a.m. with ecstasy-infused 20-somethings. When they’re done dancing and hooking up, they’re not going to church. There are very few Italian virgins past their teens. Sex among the French and the northern Europeans is so natural and normal people hardly think about it. There is a lot of unemployment in Brazil, but lots of sex. MTV tells you all you need to know about America’s teens and sex. Don’t ask your teenage kids what’s going on—if you don’t know, you won’t want to.

None of this is happening in the Arab world. There, even though urbanization has taken place, the social mores have remained rural and fixed. Virginity until marriage among Arab woman is a nonnegotiable requirement. Draconian honor killings against a girl’s lover by her father or brothers is the norm even in supposedly modern countries like Jordan. These kids don’t go to clubs, they don’t date, they have no friends with benefits. There is absolutely no free and easy discussion of sex in greater Arabia. I don’t think it was an accident that a youth rebellion happened in Tunisia. Topless French, Italian and German beauties have been going there for years to sunbathe on the famous beaches. They must have been quite an eye-opener to the Tunisian youth.

This is where the Internet and Facebook may have played the most powerful role of all. Arab youth can now see that their age peers are having sex. They can go on Facebook and see flirtatious teens and lingerie-clad college students clearly unconcerned about their “reputations.” Sexually provocative images made by ordinary-looking girls are a link a dozen. The Mid-East is said to have the highest per capita consumption of porn in the world. Talk about being inflamed—the images and downloads coming from the Internet are like links to another planet for these sex-starved Arab youths.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is unlikely to put a lid on all this. It takes an Iranian-style response to put this genie back in the bottle: beatings, jailings, torture and hanging. That may do the trick for a while, but long term I would bet on the hormones. Just ask the Catholic Church anywhere in the Western world how that “sin” thing is going. Seen the “Do you attend church?” survey numbers for Italian and Spanish youth lately?

So Oussam Benchikha, wherever you are now, there are two things I want to say to you. First, I sincerely hope you find a job and a wife. They are both useful things to have; you have identified life’s priorities well. Secondly, if someone from a Western intelligence agency or a Mossad agent finds you and wants to interview you, please do me a favor. Explain to them that your unhappiness with Algeria and your need to leave is not about jihad or the restoration or the Caliphate. Just be open and honest with them and tell them you want to be like others who have intimacy with women. They might not understand at first because they searched the other rooms of the house and forgot to look in the bedroom, but please, you set them straight.