Civilization?

I recently read Barbara Amiel’s column in a mid-August edition of Maclean‘s magazine. (For those outside Canada, this is a weekly news magazine along the general lines of "Time" or "Life" in the United States.) She writes to the effect that no hot country has ever had a great civilization because heat makes people lazy and stupid. (Her language is a bit more decorous, but all that this does is to deceive the reader about the offensive nature of her thesis.) The “disclaimer” sentence “It’s not the people, stupid, it’s the heat.” doesn’t in my view disguises her ethnic prejudice. (I won’t use the word “racial” which I am told is an anthropologically indefensible term.) It simply adds to her negative attributes the ability to be a gratuitous name-caller.
Examples to the contrary are numerous. Timbuktu (now spelled Tomboctou, I think) was the center of a great Islamic civilization in about (say) 1100-1200 AD: I would need to check the atlas to date this more precisely. It was presumably a hot place then, though desertification is a recent phenomenon. (I assume desertification to mean decreasing humidity but not necessarily increasing temperature.) More generally, Arab-speaking countries, and Mexico, and Peru all had thriving civilizations when Europe was still a battlefield for barbaric tribes. These (perhaps not Peru) were, as they still are, hot places. Support for her theory necessitates the definition of “civilization” held by European colonizers when they made first contact with American aboriginal cultures. Amiel reveals her hand by referring to “Burkina Faso” as “Upper Volta”. The assumption that anything European - including place names - is superior to anything indigenous - is inescapable from that simple fact. This is plainly intentional by her immediate grudging reference to the legitimate place name.
Given her involvement in Conrad Black’s “civilized” world, I’ll plonk for the version of real civilization, real culture, found among the Arabs, the Bedouins, the Islamic peoples of early medieval Saharan Africa. Black’s and Amiel’s “civilization” - western right wing “civilization” - is one in which ripping off one’s own companies is part of an acceptable definition of “honest service”; after all, Black is still guilty of crimes which leave no doubt as to his behaviour, and his exoneration on other charges therefore merely changes the legal definition of "honest service" so as to include conduct like Black's. "Civilization" a l'Amiel envisions a society in which water-boarding and sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and emotional abuse of 15-year-old Maher Arar (all documented on video) do not constitute “torture” but are acceptable interrogation techniques for use with someone who is scarcely more than a child.