Friedman: Democracy In The Arab-Muslim World Hangs In The Balance
It’s clear to me that Israel’s heavy hammer that is slamming down on Lebanon right now is an ultimatum to the moderate elements in Arab society: defeat your extremists, or suffer the consequences. Thomas Friedman sees things in a similar vein, and the stakes could not be higher:
The world needs to understand what is going on here: The little flowers of democracy that were planted in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories are being crushed by the boots of Syrian-backed Islamist militias who are desperate to keep real democracy from taking hold in this region and Iranian-backed Islamist militias desperate to keep modernism from taking hold.
It may be the skeptics are right: Maybe democracy, while it is the most powerful form of legitimate government, simply can’t be implemented everywhere. It certainly is never going to work in the Arab-Muslim world if the United States and Britain are alone in pushing it in Iraq, if Europe dithers on the fence, if the moderate Arabs cannot come together and make a fist, and if Islamist parties are allowed to sit in governments and be treated with respect — while maintaining private armies.
The whole democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world is at stake here, and right now it’s going up in smoke.
Friedman is quite right to include Iraq in that mix; if the Iraqi government doesn’t begin to stand up to the militias – and, more importantly, their backers – then the whole damn war will have been in vain. We already hear the voices of those who say the actions of Israel are killing the ‘Arab Spring’. Bull – the Arab Spring is being killed by Islamic extremists. If Lebanon had finished the job when it kicked out Syria, and disarmed and expelled Hezbollah, there would be no bombs falling on their country…
We are still living in a narrative that began in the late 1970s, when radical Islam overtook Iran. The story has yet to play out…but the momentum for a resolution is building. Whatever form the resolution takes, the narrative will come back to Iran, just as it started there…
You and Tom make some interesting points
Comrades,
Islam needs it’s own Martin Luther, or it will never leave the 7th century. Islam needs an enlightenment, a reformation, and a mailed fist across it’s face if it doesn’t grasp those concepts very very soon.
Where, now, are the “moderate muslims: the MSM so findly speaks of? Where are the “moderate muslim voices” calling for calm, for dialogue? The MSM constantly platonises those phrases. spitting them out with more regularity than a metamucil-soaked octagenarian, yet they are strangely invisible when one would want to actually see one, to actually speak to one.
You’ll have better luck seeing Jerry Fallwell give up barbecue and Pentacostal hymns that finding a moderate muslim these days.
I’ll start to give a tinker’s damn about muslims when I see them start ragging on Hammas and Hezzbollah, and telling those idiots to sit down and stfu…….
Respects,
Gwedd