Egyptian op-ed: "Muslims will not win"

Mohammed Dweik, writing in liberal Egyptian party paper Al Wafd, decries how the Jews are better than Muslims at just about everything.

A terrifying statistic indicates that Jews alone received a quarter of the Nobel prizes since its founding in 1901. The number of Jews in the world does not exceed 14 million. Almost less than the population of the city of Cairo.

[The world] does not hear anything from us in the field of scientific research and in the production of knowledge. Statistics say that the patents issued by the entire Arab world (22 countries) of inventions are less than what is produced by a small European country like Finland.

The question must be asked widely: Why are Muslims no longer capable of creativity in philosophy, literature and art? Why are we no longer offering something new in the field of empirical experimental sciences? I'm talking about a billion and a half Muslims occupying 57 countries in the world. A huge figure representing a quarter of the world. Yet the number of Nobel prizes received by Muslims is only 9 before adding Tawakul Karman. Only two of them are in the sciences. While Jews, who represent only one country, whose numbers in the whole world are tiny, not more than 14 million, received 200 prizes! Over 50 prizes in physics and a similar number in medicine and physiology. Each Jew's accomplishments is the equivalent of 2,000 Muslims!

Shame on us. God will not forgive us for what we did with the minds of people ... The problem is that some people still believe that religion will be victorious if only we apply hijab for women or beards for men...

In Al-Anfal, Allah said to the believers that one fighter-believer can triumph over ten of his opponents, because faith is a work of force and determination. ... If we apply the equation contained in the Koran, we must have left the faith of Islam long ago, even if some women wear headscarves and men pray constantly.

...There is a saying: You may find a poor Jew, but you will not find an ignorant Jew.

...Israel occupied the Sinai peninsula in 1956 during the tripartite aggression against Egypt, and in 1967 occupied the Sinai again using the same strategy which was carried out in 56. They asked Moshe Dayan, wasn't he afraid the Egyptians had developed countermeasures? He answered lightly: Arab people do not read!! This is dagger stabbed through to the handle on our honor. And then turned the dagger blade into the wound so it won't heal.

The story begins when 197 Jews met in the Swiss city of Basel, led by the journalist Herzl in 1897 and they set a specific target: to create a Jewish homeland in 50 years. Exactly fifty years later in 1947 the UN decided to partition the land of Palestine to a Zionist state that suddenly arose out of nowhere. With hard work they achieved the idea in half a century. Although the founding father Herzl died in 1904, his work and the struggle persisted under the leadership of Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born chemist, who was able to to devise industrial acetone, and during World War I he helped the British manufacture gunpowder guns in large quantities, because acetone is a major ingredient in it, making the British feel grateful to the man who made ​​a scientifically invaluable discovery that impacted the fate of the war, and they began to support the ambitions of Zionism. So said Lord Balfour and the British Foreign Secretary months later: "We have embraced Zionism at the hands of acetone."

Nuclear power that changed the fate of the world ... but all of the work in the U.S. initiative named the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb and ensured victory for America against Japan, were done by Jewish physicists.

Victory [of the Jews] did not come as just a coincidence. Men of science are changing the world, as well as enlightened clerics .. The lovers and book of poetry, composers and novelists make glory of man. The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was pivotal to launch a call for the liberation of slaves, and the novel A Doll's House was the beginning of the liberation of women, the enlightened "liberation theology" in Latin America were the engines that have liberalized their homelands from slavery.

Where are the Muslims in all of this? Often they are zero. If you want to win, embrace science, write a poem or a novel that enraptures the world... The Nobel Prize bears the name of a Swedish man who invented dynamite, and called for peace since a century ago; why is there not a Muhammad Award as the messenger whose name should be synonymous with peace? Muslims must be alert to the purposes of their religion. And to be aware of the world as a whole. And to create an award that bears the name of our religion and the name of the Prophet: Mohammed - peace - unification.

We are a nation doomed to either forgetting or defeat.