Geyer spans globe to get the story; foreign correspondent Georgie Anne Geyer has a good knack for tracking down history makers and a keen eye for discerning the next dangers that the world may face

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

There are ideologies on both the left and the right that want to break down the sense of citizenship. On the far left, it's the multiculturalists who really hate this country and do not want us to be the nation-state we have been. On parts of the right, it's the open-borders crowd that wants cheap labor.

But citizenship is the only commitment that everyone living in a nation can make, and it is the cornerstone of every other right. So whatever threatens citizenship, whether it is multiculturalism or an open-borders policy, poses a very basic threat to America.

Insight: Earlier you mentioned how the large and rapidly growing populations of such countries as Egypt and Pakistan are going to pose a problem for the future. To what extent is the greatest crisis of the 21st century going to come from demography?

GAG: I think demography is destiny, and the statistics are terrifying. Only 4 percent of the investment money in the entire world goes into the Middle East, and the numbers of young people there are going up exponentially. The Palestinians in the occupied territories have gone from 2 million to 3 million in 10 years.

These are tiny, tiny territories -- Gaza is 30 miles long and 10 miles wide. We're not fighting over the Rockies here. And people keep making the mistake of thinking in a way I keep hearing on television, that: "Well, they become terrorists because they're poor."

No, they don't become terrorists because they're poor. They become terrorists because they've been educated, and when they get out of the universities they have no place to go. There's no investment and so there are no jobs. It's not the fellahin of Upper Egypt in long white robes; it's the fellahin's sons who went to Cairo University and came out and found no jobs.

And the worst terrorists of all? If you look at it, it's very clear. They're the ones who came to the West to be educated and became culturally alienated through that experience.

They are completely deracinated. They go to these little mosques in, say, Jersey City. They know how to operate and talk and pretend that they are part of American society, very American, but they are culturally confused and deeply alienated.

Insight: Is this true throughout the Arab world?

GAG: You can't talk anymore just about the "Arab world." It's going a lot of ways. A country like Tunisia is going through the roof economically, having worked out a very adept process of change through democracy.

I remember talking to the Tunisian foreign minister in 1992, and he said, "When we got our independence in 1957, we had 4 million people. We now have 9 million, and we can deal with that." Oman, which is an enlightened autocracy, has done similar things, as have some of the [Persian] Gulf countries.

Some experts talk of a "clash of civilizations," Islamic against Christian. I think it's less a clash of civilizations than a clash within civilizations. It's the clash within the Islamic countries that can't decide between a religious state and secularization.