The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (35 page)

What’s more, the economic system that interlaces the human race is undergoing a radical change. Mega-organisms are giving birth to utterly new emergent properties. One of these is mega-markets . In the mid-to-late 20th century, European companies that wanted to go for the big bucks knew they couldn’t limit themselves to selling their goods in countries like Germany, France, and England—nations with paltry populations of a mere 40-60 million apiece. Instead, the Europeans aimed for the big profits of a supersized market, the United States, a nation of over 200 million buyers on a perpetual spending spree. One consequence of this sort of economic interdependence: from 1630
⁸⁸²
to 1981
⁸⁸³
, when one nation’s economy stumbled and fell, it could drag all the others down with it. In 1929, America experienced a Great Crash in the stock market, a plunge in stock values that wiped the investments of many a family and tycoon out completely. Then, in September 1931, 305 American banks collapsed. The problems in America were contagious. In 1932, Austria’s Creditanstalt bank—a bank that owned most of Austria’s major companies—crumpled. A banking panic spread to Germany, then England.
⁸⁸⁴
Eventually all of Europe and even the Asian markets to which Japan sold its exports staggered. The result was the Great Depression of 1932. Lesser domino effects produced ten smaller depressions—recessions--in the 20
^th
century
⁸⁸⁵
.

Then came a sign that the world’s economy was going through a phase shift, that the global population of producers and buyers was birthing a new emergent property. In late 1997, the economies of the “Asian Tigers”, the fabulously successful late 20
^th
century Asian electronics-manufacturing nations from South Korea and Taiwan to Hong Kong and Japan
⁸⁸⁶
, were shaken by an economic earthquake
⁸⁸⁷
. The trembling in each country rattled the others. Asian banks were swamped with loans whose payments they couldn’t collect. There was a serious risk of another domino-effect of bank collapses, another worldwide depression like that of 1931 and 1932.

But one Asian nation pulled off the impossible. It continued to grow at a wildly explosive rate—between 7% and 9% a year.
⁸⁸⁸
The one nation that stood so dramatically outside the stack of dominoes was China. China was a total newcomer to hi-tech manufacturing. It had just emerged from the poverty of Maoism. Its embryonic capitalism should have made it the weakest of the Asian economies. Yet one trio of experts from Washington’s Center For Strategic Studies claimed that China’s growth rate during Asia’s economic crash had been a staggering 10%
⁸⁸⁹
.

Why? Why was China the only Asian nation able to dodge recession so astonishingly? Partly because China actually
caused
the recession.
⁸⁹⁰
China had sucked the wind from the sails—and sales--of its Asian neighbors.
⁸⁹¹
China offered skilled labor at incredibly low wages and a market so big it made the eyes of foreign investors pop. The result: China pulled in the investment capital that a decade earlier had gone into the Asian Tigers.
⁸⁹²
In the early 1990s, over 70% of the foreign investment funds attracted to East Asia went to the Asian Tigers and less that 30% went to China. By 2001 that ratio had done a back flip. Over 70% percent of the capital attracted by East Asia went to China and less than 30% went to the Tigers.
⁸⁹³
And the future head of the World Trade Organization, Supachai Panitchpakdi, said that 70% was an understatement. In his opinion, the percentage of Asia’s foreign investment soaked up by China was 80%.
⁸⁹⁴
What’s more, China was now exporting the goods that the Tigers had formerly specialized in, thus taking the Tigers’ profits away.
⁸⁹⁵

But there was another factor that made China recession-proof in the late 1990s. China was one of the world’s first mega-markets. With its 1.2 billion people, China had an internal ocean of consumers four times the size of the world’s previous biggest pool of buyers, the United States.

Other national economies like Japan’s depended on what they could buy from or sell to other nations. When the nations they depended on for customers ran out of cash, the shortage drained these export-dependent countries of their vitality. But when the nations around China ran low on funds, China had nothing to worry about. When she couldn’t sell her products to the citizens of other nearby countries, she could sell them to Europeans and Americans. More important, she could turn inward and sell those goods to the billion consumers within her own borders. Her internal consumers, her internal mega-market, provided her with a buffer, a flotation cushion.

And China was not alone. By the year 2000 India had a middle class of 300 million, bigger than the entire population of the USA.
⁸⁹⁶
India, too, dodged the Asian crash of 1997. Why? Partly because India sold new services like answering your phone call for help when your computer goes down. And partly because India, too, was becoming a self-contained mega-market.
⁸⁹⁷
A market with 300 million affluent consumers…a market whose number of well-heeled spenders was rapidly growing. [^^while our number of affluent consumers was shrinking??]

This is just one of the earliest manifestations of a world that is radically new—an environment of a kind no human being, and no being of any kind—has ever experienced before.

Thanks to these radical changes, the mega-organisms of China, Islam, and the West are in a pecking order struggle of unparalleled dimensions. That competition is brilliantly creative when it is commercial, artistic, and scientific. So brilliant that it produces entirely new forms of human senses and limbs…from Google, iPod, home wireless systems, and the biggest searchable library of all time—the World Wide Web--to bullet trains, commuter passenger jets, space-based telescopes probing the fringes of the cosmos, and six-wheeled landers
⁸⁹⁸
sending home panoramic postcard pictures from their travels on Mars.

But if the battle of the global mega-organisms turns to all-out violence, to the sort of no-holds-barred mass murder of early Islam’s conquests or to the bloodshed of the Western World’s massively industrialized killing in Word War I and World War II, the consequences will be catastrophic. In an age when nuclear weapons have gone retail, Islam’s global jihad and America’s counter-jihad could destroy humanity.

Militant Islam’s response to the shift from superpowers to megapowers has been what we call “terrorism”. That word radically under-rates the militants’ true aim--a thrust for a revival of the pecking order supremacy Islam held from roughly 637
⁷
AD to 1827
⁸
—a renewal of the global battle between Dar el Harb and Dar el Islam. As one handbook for jihad--
The Management of Savagery
by Abu Bakr Naji--puts it, it’s time to build a “bridge to the Islamic state which has been awaited since the fall of the caliphate” by running non-believers through,

“
The stage of ‘the power of vexation and exhaustion’, then the stage of ‘the administration of savagery’, then the stage of ‘the power of establishment – establishing the state’”
⁸⁹⁹
.

But this time the weapons and the tools of communication of the Jihad-makers, of the modern mujahedin, are 21
^st
century state of the art: websites with steganographic code
⁹⁰⁰
—code hidden in the site’s contents; DVDs with MTV-like recruitment videos; website-based and inexpensively-printed manuals on how to make the materials for guerrilla, chemical, biological, and nuclear war; and inspirational DVDs with videos of the beheadings of Westerners. Then there are explosives set off by cellphone; suicide bombers with hi-tech, high-power, lightweight explosives under their coats; suicide drivers at the steering wheel of explosive-laden cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles; airborne suicide bombers using passenger jets laden with fuel as flying bombs; and Iran and Pakistan’s missiles, submarines, and nuclear warheads (we’ll dive into
them
in a minute).

Thanks to the Internet, this new jihad went global as early as August 23, 1996, when Osama bin Laden’s “First Bayan (Statement)”, his “Declaration Of War Against The Americans”, was spread by the World Wide Web. In the next decade, the dot.com Jihad murdered victims and terrorized non-believers in India, Kashmir, the Philippines, Thailand, South Africa, Bosnia, Chechnya, Moscow, China, Kenya, the Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, New York, Washington, Madrid, London, and even in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, where the nation’s militant Moslems, led by the group Jama'at al Muslimeen, attempted a violent takeover of the government in 1990.
⁹⁰¹
. Western newspapers shut their eyes and pretended that this worldwide Holy War was merely a series of local “separatist” incidents. It was not.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, whose words are revered in Iran as the founding principles of today’s Iranian Islamic Republic, put it best when he said, "Moslems have no alternative... to an armed holy war against profane governments. ...Holy war means the conquest of all non-Moslem territories. ...It will ...be the duty of every able-bodied adult male to volunteer for this war of conquest, the final aim of which is to put Qur’anic law in power from one end of the earth to the other. ...all other wars of conquest... are unjust and tyrannical and disregard the moral and civilizing principles of Islam."
⁹⁰²

Just in case you and I thought that we weren’t targets of this “war of conquest”, Khomeini told us exactly where we stood in his world and in the world of the leaders of the Iranian Republic he founded: "The leaders of the USSR and of England and the president of the United States,” he said, “are ...infidels...” Ok, so our leaders are on the Ayatollah’s hit list. But surely those of us who demonstrate for peace and human rights will be spared. Or will we? Said the Ayatollah, “Every part of the body of a non Moslem individual is impure, even the hair on his head and his body hair, his nails, and all the secretions of his body. Any man or woman who denies the existence of God, or believes in His partners [Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the Virgin Mary], or else does not believe in His Prophet Mohammed, is impure (in the same way as are excrement, urine, dog, and wine)[sic]." Impure—that isn’t too bad.