HEAVEN -- Heaven has admitted that it is suffering a severe shortage of virgins following a huge increase in Muslim martyrs. A spokesperson for Heaven claimed that paradise is struggling to meet the martyrs' demands that their acts of terror are rewarded by "the favours of 72 virgins in heaven".

"Normally around this time of year you've just got a few Palestinians and the occasional Egyptian who has shot up a tourist bus," reported Heaven's spokesperson. "But the attacks on America have really pushed us to our limit."

In the face of the crisis, Allah yesterday said He could not recall making the 72 virgins promise and blamed clerics on earth for beating up expectations.

"I mean 72 is a ridiculous number of virgins anyway," said Allah. "It's not like heaven is overflowing with virgins and we are sent less every year."

I received the above in an email this morning. While it's amusing, there is a serious point to be made here. Take a patriarchal society in which the wealthy few get multiple wives, in which virginity is valued far beyond reason, in which much of the populace is poor, and the males have lousy prospects (in economic terms) for getting any female, let alone a virgin, from the pool reduced by the polygyny. Combine that with the promise of not just one, but seventy-two virgins upon martyrdom, and you have a recipe in which death by the killing of innocents becomes much more attractive than life for many young men. This is the poisonous culture with which we're dealing.

Follow up

Michael Lynch of Reason Online has a little piece titled, "No Freedom, No Prosperity," expanding on the theme that the problems of the Middle East lie not in the stars, or in the west, but in themselves.

Yet if the root causes of terrorism are open to debate, the root causes of this poverty is no mystery: That?s what countries get when they combine socialist economists with totalitarian politics.