Many pixels have been spilled on the cartoons of Mohammad and the vandalisation of embassies in the Middle East. Everyone has an opinion on it of one form or another. The opinions have been predicated in freedom of speech, clash of civilisations, multi-culturalism and the civility not to offend. I haven't seen anyone raise the issue of youth yet.

The events that led to the Cronulla riots were between young kids from different parts of Sydney who should have known better than to choose violence. The riots through Cronulla, which targeted people of middle eastern appearance were dominated by images of young kids, tanned and strong. Again, people who should have known better. The riots in the Middle East were not much different. It was young kids perpetuating the violence and vandalism.

Youth bumps lead to turbulent times, sometimes for the positive, and sometimes just chaos. The Industrial Revolution led to a massive growth in the youth population in Britain. The youth; young and poor, gathered together in cities that could not handle them. Without work they took to violence and crime. Part of Britain's response to this was to send as many as they could out to Australia. The youth bump became middle aged in Britain and society settled down once again.

America faced a similar youth bump post WWII commonly known as the baby boomers. During the Vietnam war the boomers protested the violence, civil rights and other issues. Sometimes violently, sometimes passively. The boomers also changed many liberties through their activism that modern society now takes for granted, such as sexual liberation. On the down side, the boomers also popularised much of the modern drug culture.

The Middle East will be an issue for the world for a time to come. In most European nations the population under fifteen is about twenty percent. For the Middle Eastern nations it is much higher;

• Yemen: 48.7
• West Bank/Gaza: 46.1
• Iraq: 41.4
• Saudi Arabia: 39.1
• Syria: 38.3
• Jordan: 38.0
• Oman:37.2
• Egypt: 35.2
• Iran: 32.6
• Libya: 31.3
• Lebanon: 29.6
• Bahrain: 29.2
• Israel: 27.9
• Qatar: 26.6
• Kuwait: 26.1
• UAE: 25.8

The Middle East shares the highest regional unemployment figures for the globe with sub-saharan Africa. Unemployment is estimated to be as high as 50% in Gaza and 30% in Iran - not to mention Iraq where unemployment rates may be as high as 60% . The Middle East has a growth rate of approximately three percent , meaning that it will double its population every twenty years. In Yemen the growth rate is over four percent.

The confluence of youth, unemployment and fundamentalist religion in the Middle East means it will be a hotspot for a time to come. The baby boomers left their activism behind when they became fat and happy through consumerism. Oil, monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy and inequality will ensure that the Middle Eastern youth have no outlet for their fears, angers and frustrations other than demonstrations of religious backed violence.

The Middle East will change the world same as the baby-boomers did. Whether conservatives or western cultural elitists like it or not, population demographics are ensuring that the Middle East will have a massive effect on the globe. We will have to wait and see if it is for the positive.

I still have my money on Iran's youth redefining the global dialog on freedom, despite the US's clumsy parking of the US military next door. I believed Iran and Australia were the two nations best situated to achieve that in the 1990s. Australia blew it, and Iran could not get past the post.

Keating made the statement that when a government changes, the nation changes. Such is the political, media and economic power of government. The Howard government has sunk Australia into a myopic conservatism, drunken for past stereotypes of a Britonian Australia. Iran recently got a new Prime Minister who, like the Howard government, is opposed to change. Unfortunately Iran has a harder task ahead of it than Australia.

Britain, France and Germany dealt with their booming population in the 19thC largely by industrialisation. Britain supplemented this with emigration and France with a revolution that changed agrarian patterns into a martial one. South and West of Germany William H. McNeill identifies the inability of industrialisation to "keep pace with population growth." McNeill argues that this political fault line or area of 'acute political distress' manifested itself in the Hapsburg Empire and the Balkans. It was the assassination of a Hapsburg Prince by a Slavic political revolutionary that started the mechanics of what would be World War I.

McNeill writes:

Consequently, the most acute manifestations of political distress appeared within the borders of the Hapsburg and ex-Ottomoman empires (Russia's Polish provinces belong in this category too.)

Overseas emigration, though very great, was insufficient to relieve the problem. Youths who pursued secondary education in hope of qualifying for white collar employment were strategically situated to communicate revolutionary political ideas to their frustrated contemporaries in villages.

They did so with marked success, beginning as early as the 1870s in Bulgaria and Serbia, and at somewhat later dates in other parts of eastern Europe. The Balkans, accordingly, became the powder keg of Europe.

It was appropriate indeed that the spark that triggered WWI was struck by Gavrilo Princep, a youth whose efforts at pursuing a secondary school education had entirely failed to provide him with satisfactory access to adult life but had imbued him with an intense, revolutionary form of nationalism.

I argued in the past that the disturbances in the Middle East are more a function of over population than culture or religion. Population growth in the Middle East is faster than the ability of globalisation and emigration to absorb it.

It is striking how many parallels there are to the 19thC Balkans and the 21stC Middle East; over-population, a revolutionary educated class of youth, and the limits of globalisation's economic homogeneity (actually globalisation is more recognition of economic heterogeneity).

The Middle East is definitely the modern day region under-going 'acute political distress'.