Home Burying the Arab Spring
Home Burying the Arab Spring

Burying the Arab Spring

It was only three months ago that you could hardly open a newspaper without encountering columns full of growing predictions about the revolution sweeping the Middle East. Now the Arab Spring is swiftly becoming the embarrassing relative in the journalism family. The predictions as silly as crystal healing and alien visitations.


In Egypt, the revolution has been more like a realignment, with the army and Muslim Brotherhood sharing power. Tahrir Square is over. The Western backed leftists who were meant to benefit from the coup are hanging around foreign capitals giving speeches about the importance of a movement that has already made them irrelevant. El Baradei is a punchline in an Egyptian joke, and the only one who doesn't get it is Thomas Friedman.

In Tunisia and Yemen, the Islamists have a clear path to power. And if Libya and Syria do fall, it won't be to the enlightened forces of secular democracy, but to a populist Islamic state that will make the Taliban look like secular humanists.

Bahrain has been allowed to go on repressing the Shiites. Turkey's suppression of Kurdish parties is one of those obscure things unmentioned by newspapers too busy running tourism ads urging Americans to travel to Istanbul.

More importantly, the most repressive regimes in the region have emerged untouched. Iran bludgeoned and butchered its protesters. Saudi Arabia sent tanks to massacre protesters in Bahrain. The UAE is still running its slave empire, and Western companies are still eager to set up shop in Dubai.

The odds are good that Gaddafi and Assad will survive their own civil wars. The message that will send is that it's good to be a violently repressive regime. That Western alliances and human rights concessions create a dangerous weakness. And that no matter what deals you make with the United States and Europe, they will sell you out for the sake of some illusory democratic movement.

The winners of the Arab Spring will take that lesson to heart, especially the final beneficiaries of the coups in Egypt and Yemen. Mubarak and Saleh both made the mistake of forgetting what happened to the Shah. And not realizing that Carter's successor was poised for a grander repeat of the Ayatollahs. Their successors will profit by their example.

There will be more repression and Western NGO's will be stepped on. The State Department's favorite local human rights activists will meet with unfortunate accidents similar to those so commonly encountered by Russian human rights activists. If they aren't shot down in the street outright.

The Arab Spring will become an Arab Winter. And the Western media columnists who drove the narrative will go on associating themselves with a grand revolution that failed. The difference between them and A Gay Girl in Damascus will be slight at best. They all worked to manufacture and distribute a narrative that had as much in common with regional realities as Harry Potter does with the British public school system. And they will go on feeding off it, writing books and articles about it, and giving speeches about it at 20k a pop.

Western leaders who thought that Gaddafi's insanity would make him easy to dislodge were guilty of misreading regional realities as badly as those who thought that popular protests in Egypt were happening out of an enthusiasm for free elections and human rights-- rather than fixed low bread prices and more jobs. And quite often they were guilty of listening to what they were told.

Washington D.C. and Brussels are full of Arab revolutionaries who are eager to explain how with only a little support, their country of choice can become a beacon of freedom and democracy for the region. America has played host to a large number of these folks, some of whom were also collecting checks from Tehran.

But if conservatives allowed themselves to be convinced that removing Saddam would usher in a free Iraq-- then liberals were far more foolish for believing that removing every moderately repressive ruler would lead to free nations, rather than the rise of a new breed of thugs and dictators. After spending five years tearing apart the very idea of regime change-- they fell head over heels for the idea that what couldn't be accomplished with a 150,000 soldiers could be accomplished with mob protests and bouts of self-immolation.

It was the same infatuation with democracy that had turned the wars against the Taliban and Saddam into grand nation building projects writ large. Unsatisfied with experiments in democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan-- the Arab Spring was an experiment across the length of the Arab world. And again as the ballot box was torn open, inside was chaos, violence and Islam.

It is a more cheerful thought that the Arab world can be reformed, than that it cannot. That the problem is not a Saddam or Mubarak or Assad-- but that there is something in the water. And if that is then importing large numbers of Muslim immigrants will not turn out newly minted Americans, but will repeat the same experiment with the same disastrous results. An experiment already approaching its hazardous point in Europe.

Western world leaders want stability around the world and at home. And they've tried everything from colonialism to appeasement. But regime change is clearly not the answer, unless the question is, "How can we make the Muslim world even angrier and more violent than it already is." That leaves just the humiliation of appeasement, or a new iron curtain put up by the free world to shut out the unfree world that desperately wants to cross its borders and introduce its citizens to the joys of child murder, polygamy and terrorism.

Those aren't good options, but the slow collapse of the Arab Spring leaves less room for dishonesty. What the Bush Administration couldn't establish at the cost of thousands dead and a global war-- the Obama Administration has managed to prove at a far lower cost. That may be its great unintentional foreign policy accomplishment. A thesis that lays out on a grand scale the futility of trying to bring human rights and democracy to the Muslim world, with obvious implications for Muslim migration.

The majority of the Muslim world is not interested in Whiskey, Sexy and Democracy. Rather they want Whippings, Sharia and Dhimmis. They want security and stability, and that can only come from either a dictatorship or an Islamic state. They want state subsidized prices and jobs, which makes for a stagnant economy. And they want Islamic morals policing and second class status for non-Muslims and women, which means there is no room left for human rights.

Both the Bush and Obama models wrongly assumed that greater democracy, through forcible regime change or by encouraging popular protests, would allow the populations of the Muslim world to show their true peaceable natures underneath. And that's exactly the opposite of what happened. What they actually showed was that the grim brutality and oppression of the Muslim world was not imposed from without, as the leftist model had it, but emerged from within.

That is why the Arab Spring is becoming a dangerous embarrassment to the foreign policy experts. If dictators and our foreign policy can no longer be blamed for conditions in the Muslim world-- then all that's left is to admit the truth. It is the Muslim world that is to blame for the state that it's in. And what is the Muslim world but the green brush of Islam splattered in dribs and drabs across the globe.

Poverty is their last stand. The claim that global warming and Western industry creates the poverty and resource shortages that make the Muslim world such a miserable and violent place. Pity that argument doesn't hold up too well. If it did there would be Christian Africans ramming planes into our buildings and Tibetan Buddhists detonating car bombs in Times Square. Turkey's wealth increase has gone hand in hand with its Islamism. The Gulf states are the richest parts of the world and the most viciously bigoted Islamic hellholes.

But after the decline and fall of the Arab Spring into tyranny and brutality, there are no other arguments to make. None that can avoid the central issue of Islam. And none that can shift the blame to us.

While the New York Times buries the Arab Spring on page A8, it also buries Muslim democracy as a solution to its ills. And that brings it one step closer to a confrontation with the inescapable problem of Islam.

Comments

  1. You see it clearly, I am sure some others do too but why do so many in power not see it? Behind the screens of-course there are always the financial interests that play large parts but even that does not explain the overly present dose of desire for self-destruction on the part of most political leaders in the western world.

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  2. Anonymous21/8/11

    The truth told exceptionally. And the truth is so very very disturbing (to say the least).

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  3. They don't see it because it doesn't fit into their mindset.

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  4. What we have there in the Arab world as a chronic malaise is what can be expected in Europe and America.

    1) Inflation causing lowered standard of living, but not supporting innovation as in the past
    2) More clearly delineated upper and lower class distinctions
    3) Fewer middle-class jobs - except in a government context
    4) Emergence of violent left-wing and blatant anarchist groups (Yes, Caliphate-seeking Islamists are similar to Marxists and Anarcho-Sydicalists)
    5) Media as water-boy lackeys for government policies
    6) Failure of families as a unit to support children (Arabs still consider their children as chattel; the West will see children as an increasing burden or as a sign of having beaten the system - a matter of class.)

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  5. Can we really expect the 'journalists' to bury their lie, rather than keep repeating it, and build more false theories upon its non-existent foundation?

    The only important question, though, is whether the common westerner would become aware of the truth in time, as it is ultimately he who pays the price for the follies of the left.

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  6. Daniel

    Your otherwise excellent analysis misses one very important point. For all the evidence proving that their predictions were wrong, the Western media and liberals can (and do) still rely on the existence of Israel as their 'get our of jail' card. So, for example. they can claim that the Islamists taking over Egypt is an inevitable reaction of the population to Israel's 'continued humiliation of the Palestinians'. While Israel continues to exist in any shape or form, the western media and liberals will allow the Arab world a completely free pass to continue their savagery internally and externally. And it is not just the 'liberal' media. Take a look at today's Telegraph the only supposedly serious 'conservative' newspaper in the UK. despite the unprecedented terrorist attacks against Israel on Thursday and the 100 rockets fired from Gaza since, the ONLY mention of Israel is a brief paragraph stating that Israel's 'killing of Egyptian security guards' has led to the Egyptian ambassador from Israel being recalled.

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  7. Oldfart21/8/11

    I'm an oldfaret and not a great thinker but I believe our "leaders" keep us sliding down this slippery slope for one reason only: Money! They believe if they can hoard enough money they will be insulated from the eventual firestorm they are lighting.

    One has to wonder what might be the outcome if half-a-dozen men like George Soros were to die suddenly and violently. If vast fortunes were no longer sufficient to ensure personal physical safety -- would there be change and what would it be like?

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  8. @oldfart.....

    As one old fart to another, I was thinking that exact thing a few days ago. Except it would be a shame to limit the fun to only a half dozen.

    Remember, behind most vast fortunes lies a felony or three waiting to be uncovered.

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  9. Anonymous21/8/11

    "Muslim democracy"-

    This is by no means a swipe at Muslims, but have we not learned by now that some political systems don't work well in some cultures?

    How's that (puppet) democracy in Iraq turned out? The (puppet) democracy in Afghanistan?

    You said-
    "None that can shift the blame to us"...

    I call BS. America was elbow deep in Arab spring, and we are partially responsible for what our meddling has wrought.

    AP

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  10. TY for writing this. Sadly, I was clueless and never heard of Arab Spring.

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  11. A Syrian Jewish woman once told my ACT for America group that her mother always said the only "Arabs" you could trust were the ones 6' underground -- considering what's happened to the Jewish populations of Yemen, Morocco, Iraq and Egypt I'm inclined to believe her.

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  12. Halycon23/8/11

    A very succinct article on the perpetual status of the Muslim world, Mr Knish.

    I feel only to mention how this reminds me of what Friedrich Hayek had to say about the worst getting to the top. In the case of the Muslim world, it is the most aggressive and militant forces that see themselves with the chance to gain power. It will only ever be the choice between and islamist regime and a kleptocratic dictatorship; perhaps even a little of both.

    There can only be order at the end of a muzzle because of the intolerant and chaotic nature of the Mohammetans, who have outright rejected reason and cling firmly onto their Qurans and tribalistic dogmas.

    It is a foolish endeavour to think you can even bring democracy to the supremacist Muslims who follow a religious-backed materialism.

    The Muslims consider themselves martyrs for blowing themselves up and in return they get virgins in the afterlife. But how can one be a martyr if they are motivated by such self-interest?

    This questionable moral code is what holds them back so much. Compare this to the efforts of Anne Hazare who is fasting against corruption and it isn't to achieve a harem in heaven and to full-fill his baser instincts.

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  13. Anonymous23/8/11

    I saw your article by accident and know also by accident that you are a big foolish donkey like many western
    writers.

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  14. @the Anonymous idjit criticising
    Daniel

    Yeah, but in any Islamic state Daniel would be dead or imprisoned
    for writing his scathing and accurate criticisms of Islam -- and that fact kinda exposes who the real donkey is doesn't it?

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