Wars
are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A
nation is never really beaten until it sells its
women.
The French sold their women to the
German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and
Japanese sold their women to the Americans after
World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union
are still selling themselves in huge numbers.
Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian
"tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign
minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards
in
1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the
world's fastest rate of population decline. On a
smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women
explains Iran's predicament.
To understand
Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the
fate of Iranian women sheds light on the
eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By
Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men
and women of every place and every time deserve
each other. A corollary to this universal law
states that the battered Iranian whore is the
alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.
In the interest of balanced reporting, I
cite the history of Jewish prostitution before
delving into the Persian example. The Jews have
lived long enough to be defeated more often than
any other people. After Spain expelled them in
1492, the Jews sold their women so widely that the
character of the Jewish prostitute figured
prominently in 16th-century literature, notably in
one of the earliest novels, La Lozana
Andaluza (1528), a story of refugee
Spanish-Jewish whores in Rome. After Russian
pogroms drove Jews out of the Pale of Settlement
in the late 19th century, Jewish women became the
raw material of the white-slave traffic, supplying
Argentina as well as Western Europe. [1] Jewish
prostitutes are almost unknown today, a measure of
the revival of the Jewish nation.
These
distasteful facts bear directly upon Iran's
national decline, and the impulses that push the
Iranian leadership toward strategic flight
forward. Iran's plunging birth rate, I observed in
essays past, will burden the country with an
elderly population proportionately as large as
Western Europe's within a generation, just at the
point at which this impoverished country will have
ceased to export oil. By 2030, Iranian society
will collapse.
One does not have to
destroy an opponent's military forces to defeat
him. Russia collapsed without a single shot fired
when Mikhail Gorbachev and his generals understood
that they could not compete with Ronald Reagan's
United States. The Islamic world also has been
defeated, by a globalized economy in which the US
dominates the top, and China blocks entry at the
bottom. As the most urbane people of Western Asia,
the Persians grasped the hopelessness of
circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors.
That is why they have ceased to bear children.
Iran's population today is concentrated at
military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers
will be pensioners, and there will be no one to
replace them.
That is why it is folly to
approach Iran as a prospective negotiating
partner, and meaningless to offer the clerical
government security guarantees, for the threat to
its security arises from within. Once a people has
determined to extinguish itself, nothing will
prevent it from doing so. There is no doubt as to
the demographic data, which come from the
demographers of the United Nations. But it is one
thing to read the statistics, and quite another to
consider the millions of intimate decisions that
together sum up to national suicide.
What
is it that persuades women to employ their bodies
as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way
of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty,
for poor women bear children everywhere. In the
case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair
impel millions of individual women to eschew
motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic
suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the
national death-wish, the hideous recognition that
the world no longer requires Ukrainians or
Moldovans.
Iranians already
behave like a defeated people. That is why they
are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian
Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a
wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor
that drive Iranian women into the brothels of
Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with
neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double
in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online,
according to the CIA World Factbook.
Half of Iranians do not speak Persian, and
half of those speak Azeri. Azerbaijan's oil wealth
is a giant magnet; it must attract either the
largest national minority in Iran, or the military
attentions of Iran itself. If a Kurdish state
asserts itself out of the ruins of Iraq - a
long-delayed justice for that ancient and
resilient people - Iran's Kurds will be tempted to
throw off the Persian yoke.
The
proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western
Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the
country's population trends. The European
Commission's most comprehensive surveys of human
trafficking found that Iranian women made up
10-15% of the prostitutes working in Belgium, the
Netherlands and Italy. [2] "Fatima" from Persia
has become as familiar as "Natasha" from Belarus.
Iranian whores long have been a scandal in the
Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which
periodically round up and expel them.
It
is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution
inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence
suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad
became president last year. Anti-regime
sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are
whoring in Tehran alone. The ADNKronos website
reported on April 25:
Prostitution is on the rise in Iran
... Sociologist Amanollah Gharaii Moghaddam told
ADNKronos International (AKI) that he believes
Iran's deteriorating economy and the high
unemployment rate among youths to be the main
causes of this worrying phenomenon. In Iran, 28%
of young people between the ages of 15 and 29
are unemployed ... The age of prostitutes is
increasingly younger, and girls as young as 12
are selling their bodies on Iran's streets.
Overall, the number of prostitutes is also on
the rise and there are an estimated 300,000 of
them in Tehran alone ... Nevertheless, Gharaii
Moghaddam says "the number isn't so high when
compared [with] the 4 million unemployed only in
Tehran and the 5 million drug addicts today in
Iran".
The clerical regime vacillates
between repressing prostitution and sanctioning it
through "temporary marriages", an arrangement
permitted under Shi'ite jurisprudence. In the
latter case the Muslim clergy in effect become
pimps, taking a fee for sanctioning several
"temporary marriages" per women per day.
These numbers cannot be verified, to be
sure, but the spillover of Iranian prostitutes
into Western Europe and the Gulf states suggests
that the actual numbers must be very large indeed,
so large, in fact, as to help explain the
frightful rate of Iran's demographic decline.
Along with Albanian, Chechen and Bosnian women,
Iranian prostitutes are living evidence of the
dissolution of the traditional Muslim society that
purports to shield women from degradation.
Islamism (or what George W Bush has called
"Islamo-fascism") responds to the crisis of faith.
As I wrote on November 8, 2005:
The crisis of modernization first of
all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of
religious faith is the root cause of the
birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional
society is everywhere fragile, not only in the
Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by
values and expectations handed down from the
past, to which individuals must submit. Once the
bands of tradition are broken and each
individual may choose for herself what sort of
family to raise, religious faith becomes the
decisive motivation for bringing children into
the world ...
The collapse of
traditional society has brought about a collapse
of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that
fail to reproduce themselves by definition are
failed cultures, for the simple reason that they
will cease to exist before many generations have
passed.
That is why the Islamists -
Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a
sense of extreme urgency. They are not
conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim
society as it exists as corrupt and decadent.
They are revolutionaries who want to create a
new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders
every detail of human life. [3]
Nothing is more threadbare than the
claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood.
Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage
mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific
pimps. The same networks that move female flesh
across borders also provide illegal passage for
jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking
often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to
Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals
who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks.
Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number
of capacities, including suicide bombing. The
going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a
European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more
than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the
camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a
pact of national suicide.
