children, and then to claim that those children are suffering because Israel has forced a famine on Gaza (the real lie). Yesterday, I commented to a friend that the reason Hamas has been able to feed its useful idiots so many of these photos is that Muslim Middle Eastern culture, which is often tribal, encourages cousin marriage, which in turn leads to an unusually high level of deadly genetic defects. That was an “off the top of my head” comment. I’m not the only one thinking along these lines, and the truth offends the Israel haters.
Last week, the New York Times used one of those false photos in a despicable piece of anti-Israel propaganda, a thought-crime so obvious that the Times eventually sort of retracted it. That’s not the only photo of that kind, though. Another fake famine propaganda attack came using the photo of Osama al-Rakab, who also has a serious genetic disease.
Image by ChatGPT.
What made the al-Rakab blood libel against Israel even worse was that Israel had evacuated al-Rakab so that he could be treated. That’s not the kind of thing genocidal nations do.
It was photos such as these that saw me make my comment about the prevalence of genetic diseases in many Arab and Muslim societies. According to the BMJ (the former British Medical Journal,
In some South Asian, Middle Eastern, and north African countries, as many as half of marriages are consanguineous. In Pakistan, half of the population marry a first or second cousin, more than in any other country. In rural areas this can be 80%, says Hafeez ur Rehman, an anthropologist at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. Emigrants from these regions sometimes maintain these traditions.
The custom in all of these countries is similar, he told The BMJ, as marrying within the immediate family guarantees that wealth stays in the family. Partners will have similar socioeconomic status and similar family customs. A good relationship may already exist among parents in law. And divorce rates are believed to be lower. [Endnotes omitted.]
The average IQ in Pakistan, when ranked on the American IQ scale (average=100), is 80 or 81—although some say Pakistanis are amongst the most intelligent people in the world. Presumably, these high-IQ Pakistanis are not in the 50% or more of the population that’s generationally inbred.
The degree of consanguineous marriages in Gaza isn’t quite as high as that in Pakistan, but it’s still pretty darn high. According to a decade-old study, 39.9% (i.e., 40%) of marriages in 2014 were between first or second cousins, although that was better than their parents’ generation, which had an inter-marriage rate of 45.2%.
Western society has long prohibited consanguineous relationships. Historically, one didn’t need advanced scientific degrees to see that children whose parents were relatives were often defective, with the defects getting worse from one generation of inbreeding to the next. When populations relentlessly intermarry, whether because of a lack of choice (an isolated region) or a cultural bias (the Arab world), the general defects include lower IQs, reduced fertility, facial asymmetry, high infant mortality, defective immune systems, and cardiovascular risks.
In addition to those generic risks (which once gave the isolated Appalachians such a bad name), children who are products of inbreeding are vulnerable to a whole host of genetic diseases. One could say that consanguinity in 19th-century Europe, when all the royal families were marrying Queen Victoria’s children, and then having the next generation marry their cousins, led directly to the Russian Revolution, and all the horrors it bred across the 20th century.
Queen Victoria’s recessive hemophilia gene got a boost from cousin intermarriage, resulting in the heir to the Russian throne, Alexei, having hemophilia. The royal family’s efforts to keep Alexei alive led to their disastrous association with Rasputin, and a possible lack of focus on the dangerous forces building in their in the nation. In addition, Nicholas, the product of massive European intermarriage, wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box himself.
Tobias Huch, a journalist who worked in the Middle East and Africa (which also has its fair share of inbreeding), made the same point I was thinking about:
Nachdem wir in den letzten Tagen so viele Kinder mit Erbkrankheiten in #Gaza gesehen haben, für deren genetische Erkrankungen #Israel nicht verantwortlich ist, sollten wir vielleicht mal den Menschen in Gaza erklären, dass man nicht mit seinem Cousin oder seiner Cousine ersten…
— Tobias Huch (@TobiasHuch) July 28, 2025
Nachdem wir in den letzten Tagen so viele Kinder mit Erbkrankheiten in #Gaza gesehen haben, für deren genetische Erkrankungen #Israel nicht verantwortlich ist, sollten wir vielleicht mal den Menschen in Gaza erklären, dass man nicht mit seinem Cousin oder seiner Cousine ersten Grades oder allgemein Verwandten heiraten sollte. Auch wenn das angeblich Mohammed (der "Prophet") gemacht haben soll.
Das ist der u.a. der Grund für die vielen kranken Kinder.
Hinzu kommt, dass solche Cousin-Ehen für einen niedrigeren IQ (zwischen 5 und 13 Punkten) sorgt, die Kindersterblichkeit bis zu 50% höher ist und es zu körperlichen Fehlbildungen kommt.
The Grok translation:
After seeing so many children with hereditary diseases in #Gaza in recent days, for which #Israel is not responsible, perhaps we should explain to the people in Gaza that one should not marry their first cousin or relatives in general. Even if Mohammed (the "Prophet") is said to have done so.
This is, among other things, the reason for the many sick children.
In addition, such cousin marriages lead to a lower IQ (between 5 and 13 points), child mortality is up to 50% higher, and it results in physical deformities.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, a woman whose antisemitism would have charmed Hitler, said that this simple factual statement “is one of the most disgusting things I have read in the last months of genocide...” (Albanese, by the way, is the subject of a U.S. sanction order because of her campaign against Israel.)
No, Frau Albanese, the disgusting thing is that primitive societies are still intermarrying, even though humans have known for thousands of years that this is dangerous. And the evil thing is that Hamas and its fellow travelers are using this destructive cultural habit to launch a thousand defamatory claims against Israel.