Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: observation

Transcript context

…Yes. All those countries that you mentioned have a lot of mineral wealth, oil mainly, but some other mineral wealth, and the people who are in charge of the state want to keep a hold of the wealth. They don’t necessarily care about the morality or the laws. They just want to keep control of the wealth. The man who ruled Indonesia for so long, Suharto, he had billions in the bank. This corruption is endemic in the Islamic world, and the people in charge in the Islamic world say, “Well, we try to rule justly,” but it’s not. The family of the ruling party or the ruling clique, whatever it is, they get the priority on goods, services, and resources. Everybody else can go to hell. That is really what the problem is in the Islamic world. There isn’t a real democratic distribution of wealth, and there isn’t a real equality of opportunity. The way they think — . They have a kind of segregation problem, right?…

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