Spiritual Bubbles

If you get up from a satellite map of the bulldozers and cranes now in action on the entire planet's surface, something entirely possible we could see that in large swathes of the earth's crust does not move a handful of soil or building a small wall of stone. Just would detect any movement in the United States, Ireland and Spain.

Something, but without exaggeration, in emerging countries: Russia, China, India or Brazil. Everything is stopped, however, in large mammoth projects of oil-rich Persian Gulf emirates, full of empty skyscrapers and vast sea for millionaires now ruined. Only two foreign territories and peculiar, about two cities in the same geographical region, still roaring cement, new feathers are lifted and removed the land.

In Mecca the Muslims and Jerusalem from the Jews grow beyond the crisis paths result of a speculative bubble very special and different from that which has led to the ruin of Western economies. Can not be said that the money moves. For explanations are sophisticated, the end always serves the miserable track Marxist material interests.

But in both cities is displayed precisely the spirituality, the sacred history and even directly the divine to explain the eagerness constructor that is busy human anthill of their worshipers. In the capital of Islam is growing about eight years ago a kind of Manhattan Arabic, in which stands a skyscraper over 600 feet high that reproduces the Big Ben in London.

As has the German weekly Der Spiegel, one of the few Western media has reported in detail on this colossal urban transformation, an architectural consortium is Stuttgart who signed the draft of a shopping mall, luxury residential buildings and hotel complex near the Grand Mosque which is the Black Stone.

Whoever is financed and operated real estate company of Bin Laden, led by a brother of the world's most wanted terrorist. A brother destroyed the tallest towers in New York, in the center of the capitalist world, and the other challenging other towers built in the center of the Islamic world.

According to Wikileaks cables, the pilgrimage to Mecca, hosted by the close U.S. ally is Saudi Arabia, is one of the means used by Al Qaeda to collect and launder money for terrorism, by pilgrims who come from Worldwide confused among the three million people who have met the ritual this year or the 13 million which together have visited the holy city off-season over the last twelve months.

Little is known in the west of the urban growth of Mecca, a city forbidden to non-Muslims. We know more of the strange growth of Jerusalem, another city sacred to Muslims, but still far more sacred to Christians and Jews, especially the latter, who have pursued and longed for since all exiles and consider their eternal and inalienable capital.

Jerusalem is growing, especially in its eastern part, captured by Israel from Jordan in 1967, and at the expense of Arab citizens and their property and even homes for Israeli settlers, as happens in the West Bank. The whole of the occupied territories, including Jerusalem, has experienced these past three months, a real estate boom, according to The New York Times says, after ten months when the construction was slowed in response to a complete freeze required by the Palestinian Authority and supported by Washington to sit down to negotiate peace and Palestinian statehood.

As the moratorium ended, on 26 September, the building frenzy resumed more violently than before. According to the Israeli movement Peace Now, are 2,000 new homes under construction and 13,000 projects already underway, while in the past three years had only been built a thousand houses per year.

There is little in common between the two housing bubbles. One is the expression of the strength of Islam in the era of technological globalization, while the other will blast the radical Zionist settlers on behalf of the divine rights of the biblical land. Both vectors are united in the same growth rate, silent and untouched for centuries, now suddenly grow as a city twice and incurable tumor that had arisen on the planet in its eastern side.