"The Freest Arabs Still Are Those Who Are Citizens Of Israel"
Sohrab Ahmari writes in the WSJ about what anyone with knowledge of Islam understands -- it is not a system that supports democracy or freedom:
Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia's venal autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn't withstand it.Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region's avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.
Each Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, "We've remained on the bridge of democratic transition while others have fallen off." True, but the birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world's top exporter of fighters for Islamic State, or ISIS.
...How did dreams turn into nightmares? The standard account has it that by crushing or co-opting opponents, secular autocrats like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak empowered Islamist outfits that were the only remaining channel for dissent. Once the dictators fell, the liberals were quickly sidelined as Islamists and remnants of the old order battled for dominance.
It's a theory riddled with contradictions. For one thing, it underestimates political Islam. As early as the 19th century, Islamist intellectuals had called for restoring Islam's lost glory and expelling Western pollutants. To say that the movement's grip on the region is a reaction against secular dictatorship is to deny Islamists' agency and inherent ideological drive.
...As for ordered liberty, five years after Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated, the freest Arabs still are those who are citizens of Israel. Millions fleeing other parts of the region are rendering their own judgment about the state of Arab civilization. The intellectuals and activists don't dare imagine another uprising because they know that, given an opening, large numbers of Arabs will demand Shariah law, repression of women, and ethnic and sectarian revenge.
Perhaps that's an unfair judgment, but it follows from a political culture that prizes honor, tribe and piety above reason and compromise. Viewed in that light, it isn't just the years since the Arab Spring that the region has wasted, but the whole century since it was freed from the Ottoman yoke.
Here's a man facing death in Iran for "waging war on God" while a teenager, still in school.
Meanwhile, 600 million Muslims (in places besides America) support death for converts. That's 86 percent.
Barbaric.
> The Freest Arabs Still Are Those Who Are
> Citizens Of Israel
Seriously? Freer than here? What freedoms do they have there that they don't have here?
Snoopy at December 18, 2015 9:43 AM
Free from NSA snooping?
I R A Darth Aggie at December 18, 2015 5:56 PM
Meanwhile, 600 million Muslims (in places besides America) support death for converts. That's 86 percent.
Barbaric.
It's so incredible that anyone feels a person should be killed for converting to another religion, or for leaving a religion. What a sad, sad consequence of the capability of human beings for being so easily brainwashed by bullshit.
JD at December 18, 2015 7:26 PM
"Seriously? Freer than here? What freedoms do they have there that they don't have here?"
What freedoms do you have here that you wouldn't there?
We have a tremendous number of obligations to the State over here.
Radwaste at December 20, 2015 8:27 PM
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