Top Highlights

• Eight Israeli scholars have won Nobel Prizes in the sciences or economics (I’m skipping over the highly politicized prizes for peace and literature); Egypt, with a population tenfold bigger, has one. No other neighboring country is even on the list.82
• The “number of books translated in the Arab world is one-fifth of the number translated in Greece,” according to a report issued by the United Nations.
• The aggregate “total of translated books from the Al-Ma’moon era”—that is, since the ninth century—“to the present day amounts to 10,000 books—equivalent to what Spain translates in a single year.”83
• In the last half-century, for example, the U.S. rate dropped from 22.7 to 5.6. Today in Israel, the number is 2.9, close to Germany and France (both 3.2), and slightly ahead of the U.K. (3.7). In Saudi Arabia, where stupefying amounts of wealth slosh around within the royal palaces, the infant mortality rate (11.1) is on par with Libya (11), a fail...
• Given the international chorus of denunciation