The Primitive Mentality of the Middle East

The world we live in today is full of primitive beliefs that are difficult to comprehend for anyone who prefers to use scientific logic as their guiding thought process.

There is the primitive belief that keratin, the material that makes fingernails, can do the jobs of antibiotics, antifungals, antiparasitics and even sedatives.

There is the primitive belief that keratin, the material that makes fingernails, can do the jobs of antibiotics, antifungals, antiparasitics and even sedatives. All you need is a few shavings of it, so goes the theory. This belief has led to more than 500 specimens of an endangered member of Africa's big five, the rhinoceros being butchered for only their horns.

We are left totally perplexed and speechless by the carnage left behind by the primitive Asian belief that rhino horn is powerful muti (medicine) for everything from broken bones to the common cold. I personally am completely dumbfounded the total senselessness, as carcass after carcass of the majestic rhino is left to rot in the African veld.

If keratin has such powerful medicinal qualities, why don't they cut off their own fingers and toes instead of so senselessly and cruelly butchering our rhino.

Of course talk of primitive beliefs can never be complete without mentioning the cabinet of my own country, Zimbabwe, who were prepared to discuss the extraction of pure refined diesel from a granite outcrop in Chinhoyi. I wonder how they were going to tell the ancestors that they want diesel with a sulphur content of 50ppm.

It is a story that could have been easily dismissed as a fanciful urban legend had it not been for widely available pictures of senior government officials being washed with diesel by a school drop-out n'anga (traditional healer).

Perhaps the most deadly primitive belief we are faced with in the world to day is the apothegm that a two state solution is possible in the Middle East.

Perhaps the most deadly primitive belief we are faced with in the world to day is the apothegm that a two state solution is possible in the Middle East. My career is rather ironical in that I was first introduced to computers by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (at an event called the Afro Arab Computer Camp in Harare in 1988). Twenty years later, I ended up working as a software engineer for a company owned by an Israeli. I have maintained some of interest in the goings on of the middle East for the past two decades.

I like going by simple logic, and my logic tells me that a two state solution will never ever be possible in the middle east. There are only two possible solutions, either a single state with equal rights for all human beings living in it, or genocide of the one group by the other.

In the modern era, the only way forward, is a single state with equal rights for all human beings. In my twenty years of interest in the Middle East, I have never been able to fathom why Israelis and Palestinians choose to remain marooned a couple of millennia in backward history. It simply doesn't fit in with the common sense of a right thinking modern era enlightened person.

A separation based on religion is irrelevant in the modern era where simple humanism is the cornerstone of future morality. A separation based on ethnicity and regional origin is also irrelevant five decades after Yuri Gagarin circumvented the globe in one and a half hours. This is an era when someone born in the Sahara can decide to make a living in Siberia and vice-versa. Either way, one can physically relocated in a couple of days.

When will the Middle East come to its senses?

To me it is therefore totally illogical and primitive, that religion and ethnicity are the main cause of divisions in the Middle East. Of course we can nit pick over the various other reasons now commonly cited for all the primitive senselessness that goes on in the Middle East. We can cite the occupation, blockage or the rocket firing and go into a chicken and egg debate, not about which comes first, but about which should end first.

However everything has its foundations in the fact that we have mainly Jewish Israelis on the one hand and mainly Muslim Arabs on the other - religion and ethnicity.Would countries like South Africa ever be able to exist if we were to quibble so much over ethnicity and religion.

When will the Middle East come to its senses? And realize one state is the only viable solution.