Early election results from Egypt’s elections indicate the Islamic Brotherhood had strong support, claiming close to 40% of the seats in the new parliament. This was widely anticipated.
The student groups, with strong participation from young Egyptian women, lit the spark and played the pivotal role in ousting Mubarak’s government only to see the first free elections allow Islamists to take power. Islamists that reject the participation of women in public life, would deny them the right to vote, and condemn the very social media which helped sustain the Arab Spring as sinful.
The whole democracy and majority rules thing can really bite ya in the ass.
And I suspect there might be a few members here ready to say, “I told ya so!”
I knew it. Some of my friends are big lefties and felt it necessary to post on their facebook accounts about how “inspiring” the student led protests were, dictator it gone, blah blah blah.
Well, the new boss is gonna be worse than the old boss. Any semblance of religions other than the new majorities will probably be gone quickly. Since the roving bands of new democratic peoples have already gone after the small number of christians, I think it will continue. The new “pro govt” protestors will probably be illiterate, disaffected Palestinian youths, ala Basij.
My sister-in-law and her family are Coptic Christians from Egypt. They are kind, generous and loving members of our extended family.
When things started going south in Egypt, her family walked, swam and flew out of the country as fast as they could. There has been a great deal of violence directed at them personally, merely due to their faith. One of her cousins and one of her uncles was murdered, burned alive in a church.
They did not love Mubarak, but said they feared him less. They called him “The smiling cow”.
When I talked to her this morning, she was not happy about the future. Her family left Lebanon during the civil war there. They fled to Cairo for safety.
She wondered aloud how she would protect her children “if things go bad here. Where do we go?”
Good question.
I told her that there is no where else to go, America is it. We make our stand here, and we do not lose. I told her it’s why her husband fought in three wars in the US Army, and all the men in her new family are a little deaf.
The violence against the Christians since the overthrow has been all but ignored by the media while they portray Obama as “freeing” numerous Arab countries with a few speeches and demands. :rolleyes:
I met her uncle, the one that was murdered. He came to my brother’s wedding. Very nice guy. He’d been a grunt in the Lebanese Army, then the Egyptian Army. The three of us chatted about being in the infantry and swapped lies, the way grunts always do.
He had applied for an immigration visa, and was patiently waiting to legally move to the US.
He was still waiting when he was burned alive. He should have just waded across the Rio Grande with everyone else. But no, the poor dumb bastard wanted to become a full US citizen and vote.
It’s difficult to express how angry this makes me, on so many levels. I was going to sponsor him for a job here.
Just remember; the NSDAP only had 43% of the vote into the Weimar Republic while Hitler was put into the position of Chancellor in order to curb rising fear of violence and revolution.
It still didn’t turn out good.
This is another phase of the Islamic Fundamentalism Urban Renewal Project of the Mid-East. Yes, the dictators are getting the boot and Democracy is coming in. And like the NSDAP, the Islamics are using it to gain power and to become oppressive.
The Iranian Revolution was a “democratic” revolution strongly supported by women and theoretically progressive students. Look at how that turned out.
Muslims are culturally incapable of anything we’d recognize as “free” self-governance. The sooner everyone in the West (especially our leaders) comes to accept that truth, the better off the West will be.
I disagree with the basic tenet, but the notion that ANY of those changes can occur in less than a generational time scale is ridiculous. The Arab intellectual circles are completely useless and overrun with theology (Sunna and Shiia alike), they lose all their competent engineers and businessmen to westernization, and most critically their education system promotes the exact same plantation philosophy that is so rightly maligned everywhere it emerges.
I don’t see a serviceable governing republic emerging, and unfortunately every idiotic bit of meddling in the name of democracy (either helping institute tyranny of the majority, or forcibly transitioning from one despot to the next) just stacks with the existing ignorance and makes the average person associate the word Democracy with war, violence, and westernized views towards women.
Again, once this goes to the ‘Arab Winter’, none of the twattering masses (here and abroad) will take any credit for what they have wrought, and it will be the usual scapegoats being blamed. I’m not envious of Israel’s position in all of this either way - an unstable regime collapse followed by a limited power vacuum doesn’t make for rosy prospects in the Sinai.
Interesting, you disagreed with the “basic tenet” and then entirety of your post supports the crux of my argument. If “generational” change was a possibility with Islam, it would have happened in Turkey already. It hasn’t, in fact the pendulum is swinging in the other direction.
Besides, education of Muslims is our enemy. It’s “educated” Muslims that become the radicals, whether they are exposed to the wonders of westernization or not. Europe’s experience is verification. As Muslims gain the education to actually read their “holy” documents and the leisure time to mull them, they become “radicalized.”
We helped the Mujaheddin defeat Russia so that they could become the Taliban.
We armed Iraq against Iran and supported Saddams mostly secular Democratic state only to abandon him over the issue of Kuwait’s lateral oil drilling into Iraq which resulted in Iraq becoming a new enemy of the west.
We then had to invade Iraq and completely destabilized it in the process and then had to set up camp for ten years so Iran wouldn’t own it.
I just don’t think people in the west comprehend that sometimes this is as good as the Middle East is going to get. Western democracy has existed for thousands of years, if it is what the people in that region truly wanted, they would have it already.
Culturally they prefer an Islamic theocracy or a strong dictator. There are of course exceptions, but they are and probably will remain a minority.
I had hoped for the Muslim Renaissance where most of the Middle East joined us in the modern, civilized world. But I can’t say this surprises me one little bit.
Not entirely true. There were many different groups in Afghanistan including the Northern Alliance which had been at war with the Taliban.
Mujaheddin, in the anti Soviet context, were not all religious crazies like the Taliban. Massoud, in his area of influence, did not require women to wear burkas and setup democratic government institutions.
And it wasn’t our help that led to the Taliban. The Pakistan government and other ME government’s directly funded them and supplied them. When the Taliban took over southern and central Afghanistan there were also Pakistani military involved along with the ISI. Saudi Arabia was also pumping money to them. Its largely a myth that we created the Taliban. After the Soviets left there were literally dozens of groups. Many of the more religious ones folded into the Taliban and the more moderate ones came under the Northern Alliance.
This is why our policy there has been so stupid. We are pumping billions of dollars to Pakistan while at the same time they are providing safe havens for our enemies, and had a large part in creating them in the first place as well as their military helping the Taliban take control of Afghanistan.
Remember Pervez Musharraf? He was Chief of Staff of the Pakistani military at the time, and was sending thousands of Pakistanis into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. After 9/11 he played both sides as we were giving them billions of dollars while at the same time he was allowing Taliban and AQ forces safe haven after escaping through the mountains. They have never really tried to curb the extremism or Taliban control of the border provinces or at best have agreements with the Taliban that they stay there and don’t act up.
But I agree with the rest of your post. There have been a few bright spots in modern ME history but they are for the most part a society that needs an iron fist and most of them want religious law as the legal system. Sharia is not compatible with western democratic values and systems. Its as absurd to them as it would be to us if the ME sent its military into Europe to reinstate the Catholic Church and monarchies of the past.
In countries like Afghanistan, which have been in perpetual war for decades if not centuries, the dude with the biggest stick gets to say how things are run. If they are not fighting a foreign invader they are fighting each other. They would rather decide who wins with bullets rather than ballots.
Certainly Bin Laden was there. It has been debated whether or not he actually was provided with US weapons, but we supported the group as a whole and it included many people just like him.
But that doesn’t mean we “created” the Taliban or that the muj became the taliban. The taliban was started in Pakistan in the religious schools, and they exploited afghan refugees living there at the time.
Not all of the muj became Talibans and we never directly supported THE Taliban as we know it. They were created after the USSR left Afghanistan.
Yes we might have supported SOME people who LATER became Taliban members but thats not the same thing as helping the Taliban or creating them.
The Saudi’s and Paki’s had much more to do with that than we ever did including direct support of the Taliban not just supporting people years earlier…a few of which became Talibans.
We didn’t intentionally create most of the problems I originally listed. But we sure laid the groundwork that permitted it to happen. And that was my point, that we often don’t really think things through when we do them.
I understand your points, but those are for the idiots who think the US does bad things on purpose because it’s a conspiracy to make enemies who attack us so that we can implement our nefarious global plans with impunity. Rest assured I am not one of those people.
All I was saying is we do a lot of shit that bites us on the ass because we either didn’t consider all the possible consequences or we dropped the ball somewhere along the way.
This, in a nutshell, describes American foreign policy for generations. There are a host of possible explanations for our seeming inability to fully contemplate or anticipate the consequences of our actions, ranging from cultural/social to economic to geographic, but history offers abundant examples of our ham-handed interventions around the globe and the blow-back we have suffered.
A common response around here is “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” I wish our leaders would grasp the simple wisdom contained in that phrase.
It only stopped working once we started skipping the first step of our patented method, which was to knock our opponents flat on their asses and accept nothing less than complete surrender before we started handing out the goodies.
