Comment on Richard Landes' Comment on Yoel Silberman's Youtube™: "this is a ..."

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Richard Landes referenced Phillip Salzman's book, "Culture and Conflict" regarding the perpetual war between Bedouin Steppe raiders and farmers who sustain agricultural societies and ultimately urban civilization.

Islam as promulgated by Muhammad is a distillation of an almost purely extractive and exploitive mentality. Islam was designed to need non-muslim wealth producers who could be plundered. The mass conversions to escape serving as the hosts for the parasitical elite was on one level an unexpected flaw. It did however trigger the mass expansion of Islam in 7th - 8th centuries AD as the multiplying mass of believers fanned out in search of new victims.

Once the wealth of newly conquered infidels ceased being sufficiently available to support the Ummah then those who held closest to the role of the ideal Bedouin raider aristocracy had to resort to degrading the native laboring class. This resulted in the shattering of the Islamic myth of a society of equals. Originally the ideal had resembled Huey Long's "Every Man a King." It also by cementing the role of a rapacious and unproductive aristocracy with a Raider Parasite ethic fomented the stagnation of economic and intellectual activity. Farmers were reduced to subsistence peasantry and merchants became mere transporters and brokers of goods. Artisanship and experimentation declined after an initial surge stimulated by contact with non-moslem poulations.