Gen 16:12--"And he will be a wild man; his hand [will be] against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren."

These words were spoken by God to Sarah about the son in her womb, who would be named Ishmael. We have all heard the expression like father, like son. We also know often a son is quite unlike his father. Yet in terms of typecasting, the characteristics of a founding father or original progenitor, carry down countless generations and become characteristic of the descendents in general.

Since Ishmael would only have one brother, Isaac, to dwell in the presence of, God must have been talking of his offspring who were to be twelve princes of twelve tribes and we would expect each of the sons to be a scrapper and a trouble maker. Anyone who has not witnessed this kind of behavior among many closely spaced brothers in one family is probably too young to have known a large family of boys.

Birth control being what it was in those good old days, we can imagine Ishmael’s grandchildren being rough and tumble scrappers and so it might go for more than 100 generations. Each generation hearing tales of the squabbles of parents and uncles and grandparents and grand uncles. Somehow the biblical God was very good at predicting what would likely occur.

We know modern Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael. Are they also wild men and scrappers, both among their tribes and outsiders? Had it not been for the prophet Mohammed, there may well have never been such a thing as Arab civilization. While we see sibling rivalries of relatively low intensities, what we seldom see is how easily these things can become sheer survival situations when no one is looking. Survivors get very tough, very quickly. They can take a lot of abuse and they can dish it out.

This very lifestyle creates super machismo. I am a survivor in a large family and I demand you respect me or I’ll cut off your head. If just twenty percent of a male population has this attitude, you will live in a violent society. You are living in a society where it is time for a fight any time, any place. The sad thing is, in such a society, anyone can set the pot to boiling. The only solution to the problem would be small families and the only reasons a society will accept small families is government force or threat (China) or economic prosperity. (North America – Europe - Japan) In a macho society, no government has much power unless they hoard most of the money and then it is a very uneasy balance. Then you have Osama Bin Ladens threatening the Saudi royal family. You have holy men threatening and you have the revolutionaries we call terrorists. Give an oppressed macho man a shortcut to paradise and we have explained the entire Middle East. Now how do we explain non Arabs who choose to live among them? Are there people who enjoy being victims and never knowing peace or security?