In his Cairo speech, Obama painted a graphic picture of the sufferings of slaves, and went so far as to liken the plight of slaves in America in the past to the (self-inflicted) condition of the Palestinians in the present, implying that the Israelis are guilty of holding them in subjugation and inflicting extreme cruelty on them. A bigger lie, a more extreme libel is hardly possible. At the same time he does not choose to notice  that Arab Muslims are the world’s most persistent and unashamed slave owners. They keep, buy, sell and cruelly use slaves, most of them captured or bought in Africa.  

With fully justified righteous indignation, David Podvin writes in Canada Free Press:

Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo exemplified the craven liberal compulsion to appease evil. While progressives accuse conservatives who oppose affirmative action of being racist, Obama lavished praise upon his Muslim audience that enslaves millions of Africans. America’s first black president uttered nary a word on behalf of Islam’s many black captives. Liberals once opposed slavery rather aggressively [depends wh0 you mean by liberals – JB], but now ingratiate themselves to the slave masters.

Obama also abandoned gays to the predations of Muslim zealots. Although liberals have vilified Miss California USA for opposing gay marriage, Obama did not issue even the mildest rebuke to the Muslim world for perpetrating gay murder. When Mormons support traditional matrimony, progressives publicly explode in anger. When Palestinians commit homophobic homicide, the Left is unable to generate any discernible outrage.

The Obama speech failed to confront the barbarism of Islamic misogyny. Across the Koranic world, women are relentlessly abused. Islamic females are routinely flogged, sexually mutilated, and subjected to honor killings by their Muslim brethren. Yet Obama so yearned to avoid offending Muslim misogynists that his fleeting reference to Islamic women drew moral equivalence between their plight and the situation facing their American counterparts. Muslim females must deal with having their genitals disfigured while Western women must deal with the corporate glass ceiling. Obama equated these asymmetrical forms of bigotry, fecklessly declaring that all humanity must improve its treatment of women. His unwillingness to confront specifically the sadistic misogyny of Islam leaves imperiled Muslim women without the advocacy they so desperately need.

Obama forfeited a precious opportunity to champion the cause of the blacks and gays and women who are persecuted by Muslims. Theoretically, the welfare of these groups is of paramount importance to liberals. In reality, progressives concern themselves with the oppression of blacks and the slaughter of gays and the torment of women only when such injustices can be used to gain political advantage against Republicans…

Liberals not only refuse to condemn the racism and homophobia and misogyny being perpetrated by Muslims, they also smear as “Islamophobic” anyone who does object… Jihadists constantly commit atrocities while their liberal sycophants insist that Islam cannot be held responsible for the evil committed in its name… 

The liberal devotion to Islam constitutes history’s greatest unrequited love. Every social principle that progressives claim to cherish is rejected by the Muslim world:

Freedom of speech… Freedom of the press… Separation of Church and State… Civil rights…Women’s equality…

Liberals insist that these tenets are incomparably precious. Islamists could not disagree more. As Obama has proven again, progressives eagerly capitulate whenever protecting their cherished beliefs conflicts with the higher liberal principle of appeasing Islam.

Barack Obama’s speech was an amoral profile in cowardice. It therefore faithfully represented the modern liberal movement, which is extremely long on rhetoric, painfully short on backbone, and totally devoid of integrity.

Charles Krauthammer writes:

Obama the Humble declares there will be no more “dictating” to other countries. We should “forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions,” he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”  

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”

What’s the issue? No “natural growth” means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within  the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.

To what end? Over the last decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements — and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself.

That was envisioned in the Clinton plan in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001. After all, why turn towns to rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians?

This idea is not only logical, not only accepted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the last decade, but was agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding exchanged between Israel and the United States in 2004 — and subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all parties to the conflict honor previous obligations.

The entire “natural growth” issue is a concoction. It’s farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren — when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert’s peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode — waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave — before he’ll do anything to advance peace.

In his much-heralded “Muslim world” address in Cairo Thursday, Obama declared that the Palestinian people’s “situation” is “intolerable.” Indeed it is, the result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization; leadership that for three generations — Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1947, Yasser Arafat in 2000, Abbas in December 2008 — rejected every offer of independence and dignity, choosing destitution and despair rather than accept any settlement not accompanied by the extinction of Israel.

In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the West Bank and Gaza over to the Palestinians, their leaders — Fatah and Hamas alike — built no schools, no roads, no courthouses, no hospitals, no institutions that would relieve their people’s suffering. Instead they poured everything into an infrastructure of war and terror, all the while depositing billions (from gullible Western donors) into their Swiss bank accounts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one [two actually, see our post immediately below – JB] concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

Self-defeating? While we agree with almost everything in this column, we question whether what Obama is doing is ‘self-defeating’.  For America, certainly. But for Obama himself? No. He has shown every sign of intending to augment Muslim power and prestige, and a willingness – no, an eagerness – to sacrifice Israel to that end.  

From Investor’s Business Daily:

In the torrent of analysis of the president’s Muslim speech, a major policy shift went largely unnoticed. We now endorse equal opportunity regarding what countries can have atomic weapons.

President Obama’s Cairo University address to the world’s Muslims on Thursday squandered a historic opportunity that perhaps only a president with a Muslim father and a Muslim name could have utilized: effectively rallying the Islamic world against Iran as it pursues nuclear weapons.

Instead, he did pretty much the opposite, declaring that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.”

This is multilateralism taken to its reductio ad absurdum. Since the dawn of atomic weapons, it has been mostly the United States’ job — what Harry Truman called “an awful responsibility which has come to us” — to act as a kind of global nuclear custodian.

Truman made no bones about defending our building of the bomb, noting that the Nazis “were on the search for it” and that “we know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.”

That Democratic president made it clear to the world that “Great Britain, Canada and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.”

If we are honest with ourselves today, we must admit that even now, nearly six-and-a-half decades into the nuclear age, there remains no foolproof means of controlling the bomb. It continues to be, in Give ’em Hell Harry’s words, “too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world.”

So it is chilling to hear a U.S. president go to Egypt and, after issuing an unprecedented apology for the 1953 CIA coup that kept Iran and its oil from the clutches of Iran’s direct neighbor to the north, the Soviet Union, declare that Iran has “the right” to nuclear power — which it can easily use to build bombs.

There is nothing new in a president calling for “a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons,” as Obama did in Cairo. Ronald Reagan expressed such hopes. But isn’t contending that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons” the opposite of zero nuclear tolerance?

How is it a step toward a nuclear-free world when we announce that the West should stop practicing what might be called “nuclear discrimination?” Tehran will interpret Obama’s words as carte blanche to pursue its goal of building a nuclear weapons arsenal.

According to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has now amassed 1,359 kilograms of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride. It has nearly 5,000 centrifuges up and running — and is making it more difficult for international inspectors to scrutinize its nuclear program.

Yet at the G-8 foreign ministers conference at the end of this month in Italy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will rub shoulders with Tehran’s diplomatic mission, invited to attend by the Italians, just as if Iran were Finland or New Zealand or any other civilized nation, not the Islamofascist threat to the world that it is.

Neither Europe nor the U.N. has the willingness or the fortitude to “pick and choose” multilaterally which nations can be accepted into the nuclear club. Only the U.S. can lead in such an “awful responsibility.”

But last week in Cairo we apparently relinquished that grave duty.

To our consternation,  many conservative commenters have failed to see the evil in Obama’s Cairo speech.

Fortunately, some are more discerning than others. Caroline Glick has written a very perceptive piece , worth reading in full. Here’s a part of it:  

Obama’s “straight talk” to the Arab world, which began with his disingenuous claim that like America, Islam is committed to “justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” was consciously and fundamentally fraudulent. And this fraud was advanced to facilitate his goal of placing the Islamic world on equal moral footing with the free world.

In a like manner, Obama’s tough “truths” about Israel were marked by factual and moral dishonesty in the service of political ends.

On the surface, Obama seemed to scold the Muslim world for its all-pervasive Holocaust denial and craven Jew hatred. By asserting that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are wrong, he seemed to be upholding his earlier claim that America’s ties to Israel are “unbreakable.”

Unfortunately, a careful study of his statements shows that Obama was actually accepting the Arab view that Israel is a foreign – and therefore unjustifiable – intruder in the Arab world. Indeed, far from attacking their rejection of Israel, Obama legitimized it.

The basic Arab argument against Israel is that the only reason Israel was established was to sooth the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.

This argument is completely false. The international community recognized the legal, historic and moral rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated the “reconstitution” – not the creation – of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel in its historic borders on both sides of the Jordan River.

But in his self-described exercise in truth telling, Obama ignored this basic truth in favor of the Arab lie. He gave credence to this lie by stating wrongly that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history.”

He then explicitly tied Israel’s establishment to the Holocaust by moving to a self-serving history lesson about the genocide of European Jewry.

Even worse than his willful blindness to the historic, legal and moral justifications for Israel’s rebirth, was Obama’s characterization of Israel itself. Obama blithely, falsely and obnoxiously compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to white American slave owners’ treatment of their black slaves. He similarly cast Palestinian terrorists in the same morally pure category as slaves. Perhaps most repulsively, Obama elevated Palestinian terrorism to the moral heights of slave rebellions and the US civil rights movement by referring to it by its Arab euphemism, “resistance.”

But as disappointing and frankly obscene as Obama’s rhetoric was, the policies he outlined were much worse. While prattling about how Islam and America are two sides of the same coin, Obama managed to spell out two clear policies. First, he announced that he will compel Israel to completely end all building for Jews in Judea, Samaria, and eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem. Second, he said that he will strive to convince Iran to substitute its nuclear weapons program with a nuclear energy program.

Obama argued that the first policy will facilitate peace and the second policy will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Upon reflection, however, it is clear that neither of his policies can possibly achieve his stated aims. Indeed, their inability to accomplish the ends he claims he has adopted them to advance is so obvious, that it is worth considering what his actual rationale for adopting them may be.

The administration’s policy toward Jewish building in Israel’s heartland and capital city expose a massive level of hostility toward Israel. Not only does it fly in the face of explicit US commitments to Israel undertaken by the Bush administration, it contradicts a longstanding agreement between successive Israeli and American governments not to embarrass each other.

Moreover, the fact that the administration cannot stop attacking Israel about Jewish construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, but has nothing to say about Hizbullah’s projected democratic takeover of Lebanon next week, Hamas’s genocidal political platform, Fatah’s involvement in terrorism, or North Korean ties to Iran and Syria, has egregious consequences for the prospects for peace in the region.

As Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas made clear in his interview last week with The Washington Post, in light of the administration’s hostility toward Israel, the Palestinian Authority no longer feels it is necessary to make any concessions whatsoever to Israel. It needn’t accept Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. It needn’t minimize in any way its demand that Israel commit demographic suicide by accepting millions of foreign, hostile Arabs as full citizens. And it needn’t curtail its territorial demand that Israel contract to within indefensible borders.

In short, by attacking Israel and claiming that Israel is responsible for the absence of peace, the administration is encouraging the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole to continue to reject Israel and to refuse to make peace with the Jewish state…

The only reasonable explanation is that the administration is baiting Israel because it wishes to abandon the Jewish state as an ally in favor of warmer ties with the Arabs. It has chosen to attack Israel on the issue of Jewish construction because it believes that by concentrating on this issue, it will minimize the political price it will be forced to pay at home for jettisoning America’s alliance with Israel. By claiming that he is only pressuring Israel to enable a peaceful “two-state solution,” Obama assumes that he will be able to maintain his support base among American Jews who will overlook the underlying hostility his “pro-peace” stance papers over…

By his words as well as by his deeds, not only has Obama shown that he is not a friend of Israel. He has shown that there is nothing that Israel can do to make him change his mind.

Mark Steyn writes:

I see the beleaguered Gordon Brown has now followed the Obama path and introduced to British government the concept of “czars” — or, as he spells it (presumably to avoid confusion at the first G7 czar summit) “tsars.” Mr. Brown has made Alan Sugar Britain’s “Enterprise Tsar” — or … the head of the Tsar Ship Enterprise.

Sir Alan hosts the British version of the TV show The Apprentice, so this is a bit like Obama making Donald Trump Beauty Czar.

On the matter of tsar or czar, maybe we need a U.N. Spelling Cztsar. What variations will be left for the Canucks and Aussies when they embrace the czarist model? My old friend Emma Freud used to sing with a magician called the Great Xar,  seen here swallowing razor blades, which seems to be the fate the Labour party’s lining up for Gordon Brown before the weekend’s out…

Wouldn’t it be more politically correct – and more actually suitable – to call these appointees ‘commissars‘?

Michelle Malkin writes:

Two weeks ago, in a highly unusual move, [Attorney General] Holder dismissed default judgments his department had won against two of three defendants charged with violating the Voting Rights Act. On Nov. 4, 2008, a billy club-wielding militant in military-style boots and beret stood outside a Philly polling location with a similarly dressed partner. Citizen journalists from the Pennsylvania-based blog Election Journal captured the menacing duo on video. One of the watchdogs observed: “I think it might be a little intimidating that you have a stick in your hand.”

That was an understatement. Witness Bartle Bull, a Democratic lawyer who organized for Bobby Kennedy and worked for the civil rights movement in Mississippi, signed a sworn affidavit decrying the Election Day brutishness. Serving as a poll watcher that day, he called the behavior of Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson “the most blatant form of voter discrimination I have encountered in my life.”

One of them, Bull reported, taunted poll observers: “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”

If the pair had been dressed in white sheets, pandemonium would have broken loose. But the ebony-clad thugs were members of the New Black Panther Party who had been dispatched by Malcolm X wannabe Malik Shabazz to “guard” the polls. Translation: Protect them from scrutiny. Shield them from sunlight. Keep independent voters and observers out.

Who is Malik Shabazz? The bespectacled race hustler grabbed the spotlight in the weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks by defending Osama bin Laden, blaming President Bush for 9/11, bashing Israel and blasting our Founding Fathers as “snakes.” His group also infamously rallied behind the Duke University lacrosse rape hoaxer. And on the day before the presidential election last fall, one of Shabazz’s “field marshals,” Minister Najee Muhammad, held a “black power” rally promising to send his forces to polls across the country “to ensure that the enemy does not sabotage the black vote.”

The Bush DOJ filed suit against Malik Shabazz, Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson in early January 2009. None of the defendants filed an answer to the lawsuit, putting them all into default. Instead of taking the default judgment that DOJ is entitled to against all of the defendants, the Obama team fully dismissed the lawsuits against Malik Shabazz and Jackson. Jackson, you should know, is an elected member of the Philadelphia Democratic Committee and was a credentialed poll watcher. Witness Greg Lugones told me, “Obama campaign operatives were on site throughout the entire episode.”

Former Justice Department official and voting rights scholar Hans Van Spakovsky added: “I have never heard of the Department dismissing a case it has already won by default. They have … sent the message that hurling racial epithets and slurs at voters and intimidating and threatening voters at the polls is fine with the Holder Justice Department — at least if you are African-American. I seriously doubt that would have happened if the races had been reversed in this case.”

Exactly. And the harassment was aimed not just at voters, but at white poll workers trying to ensure a fair and lawful process in a city infamous for machine politics and street money pollution.

Who are the racial cowards, Holder?

On the heels of this voter intimidation protection plan, the Obama Justice Department issued another decision that undermines electoral integrity — but bolsters Democratic voter drives. The department this week denied the state of Georgia the ability to enact strict citizenship voter verification rules previously approved by two federal courts. As Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel explained: “DOJ has thrown open the door for activist organizations such as ACORN to register non-citizens to vote in Georgia’s elections, and the state has no ability to verify an applicant’s citizenship status or whether the individual even exists.”

On top of all that, Holder recently politicized the legal review process involving the contentious issue of D.C. voting rights. After careful study, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued an opinion that a House bill on the matter was unconstitutional. Holder … overrode his staff lawyers’ ruling — and simply ordered up an alternative opinion that fits the White House agenda.

The founding myth of the monotheistic faith that evolved into Judaism, is the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which Abraham sacrifices to his god not his son but an animal. The story is often interpreted as an hortatory tale about having to obey God. But that is not its significance.

Its essential message is that the God of Abraham, the one and only God, does not require human sacrifice.

The idea of a god who did not want human beings sacrificed to him was a great leap forward for mankind. The other gods of ancient times were all given human flesh to eat and human blood to drink. The huge statue of the god Moloch was a hollow bronze image, a human body with a bull’s head, in which his worshippers, the Canaanites, made a fire and heated the metal until it glowed red-hot, and then they fed their first-born babies into the furnace through the gaping mouth.

Such gods, it was believed, needed propitiation with human flesh and blood, suffering and death, so that they’d allow the tribe to survive and prosper.

The Chaldees, whose god Ba’al was the counterpart of Moloch, similarly sacrificed living people. It was from them that Abraham and his tribe broke away, both in a physical-geographical sense, and in a moral-religious sense.

One of the four main reasons why Jews faithful to their religion could not possibly accept Christianity was because Christ was held by Christians to be a human sacrifice. No idea could be further from Judaism (and would certainly have been absent from the mind of an orthodox Jew like Jesus of Nazareth). The other reasons were: God cannot be incarnate; God is One, and cannot be Three as Christianity holds its triune divinity to be; and Judaism requires obedience to the Law. The Jews were set free physically when they left Egypt where they had been slaves, and became a free civilization when they were granted and accepted the law – traditionally fifty days after the accomplishment of the exodus. Law protects and guarantees freedom. Freedom is only possible in practice under the rule of law.

St Paul, the author of the Christian religion, was willing and eager to abandon the Law. The Catholic Church did not after all do this, and accepted Judaism’s moral law though not its rituals.

As a people, the Jews’ first great gift to humanity was the idea that God, an abstract being, was a moral authority who required people to treat each other justly, and did not himself require them to suffer or die for him.

When the center of their religion, the Temple, was destroyed by the Romans in the first century CE, and they were exiled from Jerusalem and dispersed from their land, the Jews clung to their religion, adapting such rituals as it was possible for them to observe in the absence of a Temple and a priesthood; and their faith held them together for two millennia as a people though they were physically scattered through the world.

With the coming of the Enlightenment in Europe, and then the Age of Science, belief in the supernatural began to die in the Western world generally. But the Jews still needed to adhere to their religious tradition. Only since the land of Israel has been restored to them, has the Jews’ need for religion as a kind of abstract glue to hold them together become less compelling.

It is true that orthodox Jews still observe the religion as it has long been observed. But orthodoxy has spawned a crowd of rivals, some of which have become such broad churches that traditional Judaism is hardly discernible in them. Rabbis (male and female) in Reform synagogues now call God ‘he or she’, and even speak of a plurality of gods. What is left of Judaism there? And if the answer is nothing, does it matter? For ever-increasing numbers (even in America), all religions have passed their use-by date.

If the State of Israel were again to be destroyed – a tragedy that looks all too possible now – would the religion revive to bind the Jews together again?

Just possibly, but much more probably not. The only thing that could and should bind the Jews together in this age is loyalty to their peoplehood in the light of their history. But that is a nationalist kind of idea, and nationalism is despised by the loudest intellectuals of our time. Many of those loud voices are Jewish voices. Treasonously they decry Zionism – the nationalism of the Jews – and raise moral objections to the existence of the Jewish state. If the State of Israel is destroyed, brought to political extinction, can the Jews continue to exist, either as a religion or as a people?

Jillian Becker  June 3, 2009

Joshua Muravchik writes in the Wall Street Journal: 

The results of Kuwait’s elections last month — in which Islamists were rebuffed and four women were elected to parliament — will likely reinvigorate the movement for greater democracy in the region that has stalled since the hopeful “Arab spring” of 2005. It also puts pressure on the Obama administration to end its deafening silence on democracy promotion.

Although ruled by a hereditary monarch, Kuwait is the most democratic of the Arab countries. The press is relatively free, parliament has real power, and politicians are chosen in legitimate elections. However, Kuwait is a part of the Persian Gulf, where the subordination of women is traditionally most severe. Historically, Kuwait’s political process was for males only. But in 2005 parliament yielded to female activists and approved a bill giving women the right to vote and hold office.

In 2006 and 2008, several women ran for parliament, though none won. The women that captured four of the 50 seats last month weren’t aided by quotas; they won on their own merits. Their success will undoubtedly inspire a new wave of women’s activism in nearby countries.

Almost as significant as the women’s gains were the Islamist losses. The archconservative Salafist Movement’s campaign for a boycott of female candidates obviously fell flat, and the number of seats held by Sunni Islamists fell sharply.

Thus continues a string of defeats for Islamists over the last year and a half from west to east. In September 2007, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist group, was widely forecast to be the winner. Its support proved chimerical: It came away with 14% of the seats, trailing secularists. Iraq’s provincial elections this January signaled a turn away from the sectarian religious parties that had dominated earlier pollings. This trend, capped by Kuwait’s elections, has important implications.

What sapped the vitality of the “Arab spring” was the triumph of Islamists — the Muslim Brotherhood’s strong showing in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary election, Hamas’s victory in Gaza, and Hezbollah’s ascendance in Lebanon. In response to these election results, the Bush administration muffled its advocacy of democracy in the Middle East. Some democrats in the region even took a go-slow stance.

To put it bluntly, these outcomes renewed questions about whether the Arabs were ready for democracy. If elections produce victory for parties that are not themselves democratic in practice or philosophy, then democracy is at a dead end. But the Kuwait election, following those in Iraq and Morocco, suggests that such fears may have been overblown.

If this election is a harbinger of larger developments, its symbol is Rola Dashti, an American-educated economist who led the fight for women’s political rights in Kuwait and who lost narrowly in 2006 and 2008 before triumphing this year.

Her victory was remarkable for several reasons. Half-Lebanese by birth, Ms. Dashti speaks Arabic with a distinct Lebanese accent that stamps her as an outsider in a relatively insular country. She is also proudly secular. She wears no head covering and makes no effort to conceal the fact that she remains unmarried although she is in her forties.

This flies in the face of the custom that is the essence of women’s subordination in the culture of the Gulf. The system of “guardianship” requires that women be under the supervision of some male — father, uncle, husband, brother or even son — at all times. Ms. Dashti lives with her divorced mother in a household devoid of males. She has brothers, but they serve as campaign aides rather than as guardians.

The fact that Kuwaiti voters sent Ms. Dashti and three other women to parliament suggests that the Arab world may be ready for democracy after all. The Obama administration should take heed.

The most surprising thing to us in all this – that Muravchik thinks Obama gives a damn.    

Mark Steyn writes in The New Criterion:

Paul A. Rahe’s new book … is called Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, which nicely captures how soothing and beguiling the process is. Today, the animating principles of the American idea are entirely absent from public discourse. To the new Administration, American exceptionalism means an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending…

The professor opens his study with a famous passage from M. de Tocqueville. Or, rather, it would be famous were he still widely read. For he knows us far better than we know him: “I would like to imagine with what new traits despotism could be produced in the world,” he wrote the best part of two centuries ago. He and his family had been on the sharp end of France’s violent convulsions, but he considered that, to a democratic republic, there were slyer seductions:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

He didn’t foresee “Dancing with the Stars” or “American Idol” but, details aside, that’s pretty much on the money. He continues:

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

“It does not tyrannize, it gets in the way.” The all-pervasive micro-regulatory state “enervates,” but nicely, gradually, so after a while you don’t even notice. And in exchange for liberty it offers security: the “right” to health care; the “right” to housing; the “right” to a job—although who needs that once you’ve got all the others? The proposed European Constitution extends the laundry list: the constitutional right to clean water and environmental protection. Every right you could ever want, except the right to be free from undue intrusions by the state. M. Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president and chairman of the European constitutional convention, told me at the time that he had bought a copy of the U.S. Constitution at a bookstore in Washington and carried it around with him in his pocket. Try doing that with his Euro-constitution, and you’ll be walking with a limp after ten minutes and calling for a sedan chair after twenty: As Professor Rahe notes, it’s 450 pages long. And, when your “constitution” is that big, imagine how swollen the attendant bureaucracy and regulation is. The author points out that, in France, “80 per cent of the legislation passed by the National Assembly in Paris originates in Brussels”—that is, at the European Union’s civil service. Who drafts it? Who approves it? Who do you call to complain? Who do you run against and in what election? And where do you go to escape it? Not to the next town, not to the next county, not to the next country.

Now not even to the United States of America. He goes on:

Tocqueville’s great insight—that what prevents the “state popular” from declining into a “state despotic” is the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. The French revolution abolished everything and subordinated all institutions to the rule of central authority. The New World was more fortunate: “The principle and lifeblood of American liberty” was, according to Tocqueville, municipal independence. “With the state government, they had limited contact; with the national government, they had almost none,” writes Professor Rahe:

In New England, their world was the township; in the South, it was the county; and elsewhere it was one or the other or both… . Self-government was the liberty that they had fought the War of Independence to retain, and this was a liberty that in considerable measure Americans in the age of Andrew Jackson still enjoyed.

For Tocqueville, this is a critical distinction between America and the faux republics of his own continent. “It is in the township that the strengths of free peoples resides,” he wrote. “Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people.” In America, democracy is supposed to be a participatory sport not a spectator one: In Europe, every five years you put an X on a piece of paper and subsequently discover which of the party candidates on the list at central office has been delegated to represent you in fast-tracking all those E.U.micro-regulations through the rubber-stamp legislature. By contrast, American democracy is a game to be played, not watched: You go to Town Meeting, you denounce the School Board budget, you vote to close a road, you run for cemetery commissioner.

Does that distinction still hold? As Professor Rahe argues, in the twentieth century the intermediary institutions were belatedly hacked away—not just self-government at town, county, and state level, but other independent outposts: church, family, civic associations. Today, very little stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why schoolgirls in Dillon, South Carolina think it entirely normal to beseech Good King Barack the Hopeychanger to do something about classroom maintenance.

I say “Good King Barack,” but truly that does an injustice to ye medieval tyrants of yore. As Tocqueville wrote: “There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.” His Majesty was an absolute tyrant—in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. “The details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control,” wrote Tocqueville. But what would happen if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible “to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations”?

That moment has now arrived. And administrative despotism turns out to be very popular: Why, we need more standardized rules, from coast to coast—and on to the next coast. After all, if Europe can harmonize every trivial imposition on the citizen, why can’t the world?

Would it even be possible to hold the American revolution today? The Boston Tea Party? Imagine if George III had been able to sit in his palace across the ocean, look at the security-camera footage, press a button, and freeze the bank accounts of everyone there. Oh, well, we won’t be needing another revolt, will we? But the consequence of funding the metastasization of government through the confiscation of the fruits of the citizen’s labor is the remorseless shriveling of liberty…

But it seems like the way to bet. When President Bush used to promote the notion of democracy in the Muslim world, there was a line he liked to fall back on: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Are you quite sure? It’s doubtful whether that’s actually the case in Gaza and Waziristan, but we know for absolute certain that it’s not in Paris and Stockholm, London and Toronto, Buffalo and New Orleans. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, American campuses, and the disgusting U.N. Human Rights Council) what you’re permitted to say and think…

When something goes wrong, a European demands to know what the government’s going to do about it. An American does it himself. Or he used to—in the Jacksonian America a farsighted Frenchman understood so well. “Human dignity,” writes Professor Rahe, “is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.” When the state annexes that responsibility, the citizenry are indeed mere sheep to the government shepherd. Paul Rahe concludes his brisk and trenchant examination of republican “staying power” with specific proposals to reclaim state and local power from Washington, and with a choice: “We can be what once we were, or we can settle for a gradual, gentle descent into servitude.” I wish I were more sanguine about how that vote would go.