Days went by and the president of the United States had nothing to say about the revolution and civil war that broke out  in Libya. Eventually, having consulted with the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, he said that the Libyan government’s murderous violence against its people was “unacceptable”, but avoided condemning Gaddafi the dictator by name. Why had he waited so long to say so little? The ever-ready Office of Glib Excuses and Pretty Pretexts (OGEPP) which, being abstract, is able to hover perpetually in the air of the Oval Office and the corridors of the State Department simultaneously, came out with a sweet one: Obama had held back from saying anything in case the dictator took revenge on American citizens in Libya. The president would have it known that he was desperately keen on protecting the “safety and well-being” of individual Americans. And as usual, the ingenuously gullible – or disingenuously biased – members of Obama’s hurrah-chorus in the media reported the shiny new excuse as if it were credible.

Why do we doubt it?

Oliver North, as skeptical in this instance as we are, explains:

According to Hillary Clinton, “the safety and well-being of Americans has to be our highest priority.” Oh, really? That comment, proffered by our secretary of state Tuesday, is overshadowed by the serious jeopardy U.S. citizens now encounter thanks to the ideological blindness and national security incompetence of the Obama administration.

Since 2011 began, more than 20 Americans have been injured, killed or gone missing in the midst of violence in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Mexico and the Indian Ocean. American citizens are being held by government authorities in Iran, Yemen and Pakistan — and by pirates in Somalia. Our State Department says it is “concerned.”

Last week, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were ambushed in Mexico. Special Agent Jaime Zapata was killed, and his partner was grievously wounded. Mexican authorities now claim they have apprehended some of the perpetrators with “connections” to one or more drug cartels. The Obama administration, with its history of “slow rolling” counter-narcotics assistance to Mexico and doing next to nothing to protect our borders, is confronted now by news that a Saudi national has been apprehended in Texas with plans to attack sensitive U.S. infrastructure.

Last week, four Americans aboard the sailing vessel Quest were seized by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. A U.S. warship was ordered to the scene as the seaborne terrorists headed for safe haven in Somalia. If past is prologue, it should have ended like previous armed rescue operations conducted by U.S. Navy SEALs, U.S. Marines, South Korean navy commandos and even Russian and French special operations units — with the safe recovery of nearly all hostages.

But in this case, our ships were inexplicably ordered to simply tail the captured yacht while an FBI hostage negotiator conducted a parley with the pirates. During the negotiations, all four hostages were killed.

We think the four were stupid to go sailing in those pirate-infested waters. Or they were inexcusably uninformed, which is also to say stupid. Or if not uninformed, deliberately courting martyrdom – they were apparently sailing about on the high seas to distribute bibles hither and yon. But as stupidity, ignorance and Christianity are not capital crimes, the four should have been and could have been saved. But their lives were simply not Commander-in-chief Obama’s “highest priority”. Not harming the Islamic terrorist-pirates was higher.

In Pakistan, Raymond Allen Davis, an officially credentialed American with diplomatic immunity, is being held on murder charges at a notorious and often deadly detention facility in Lahore. Unnamed “U.S. officials” are widely quoted in international media claiming Davis is variously a “CIA officer,” a “CIA employee” or a “CIA contractor.” Any of these sobriquets are a virtual extrajudicial death sentence for an American held by anybody in Pakistan. …

The State Department has filed a “protest note” complaining that the government in Islamabad is not abiding by its international obligations and held a surreal media conference call with an unnamed government official to explain diplomatic immunity.

Meanwhile, U.S. Army Spc. Bowe Bergdahl [who is] in the hands of the Taliban, isn’t even mentioned by the administration.

But the Americans have been rescued from Libya. Obama sent a boat to fetch them out – a ferry boat unsafe on winter seas. After three days of hesitation in the Libyan port, its passengers waiting nervously on board, it finally set out for safe haven. (China, Britain, and Italy sent military ships.) Now the might of the United States may be used to strike terror into Gaddafi.

But will it be?

Instead of sending a U.S. aircraft carrier to the coast of Libya to prevent members of the Libyan air force from bombing their countrymen, our commander in chief has dispatched Secretary of State Clinton to Geneva to confer with the absurdly impotent, anti-American United Nations Human Rights Council.

Of which Libya is a member. In fact, Libya actually chairs the UNHRC at present*, seeing to it that its regular business of condemning Israel for something-0r-other is conscientiously carried out.

Oliver North concludes by saying –

Now — with rebellion sweeping Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, which is the home of our 5th Fleet, and U.S. oil spiking at more than $100 per barrel, the highest it has been since 2008 — [Obama’s] commitment to the “safety and well-being of Americans” rings more hollow by the minute. His weakness, incoherence and passivity have bred chaos that places us all at risk.

We agree that he is weak, incoherent and passive, but we tend to the view that he acts weakly, incoherently and passively because, deep in the heart of him, he has no wish to defend Americans or America.

*Correction: This is an error. Libya was elected to the chair of the UNHRC in 2003, but at present a Thailand representative presides over it. Libya was a member until it was suspended yesterday, March 1, 2011. The point we’re making about the nature of the organization remains the same.

Yesterday we quoted Bernard Lewis on the Arab rebellions and what it is that the Arab people want. (See the post below, Not ready for democracy.) We believe him that they want justice, not democracy or freedom as we understand those two concepts. But we wonder if they want justice as we understand it. He doesn’t say “social justice” – which means the actual injustice of forced redistribution of wealth – but suggests that a return to traditional tribal consultation and arbitration would satisfy them better than the rule of law. We suppose that the sheikhs would be guided by sharia, which is not remotely just, and is extremely cruel. It keeps  women subservient, and while Bernard Lewis deplores the condition of women in most Arab and Islamic countries, he  does not say how a return to the old tribal system would help their emancipation.

They – the Arab masses – want what we have. Sure, they want the products of our civilization, but are not ready for the freedom that makes the invention of those things possible, for the rule of law that makes freedom possible, for the impartial justice that applies the rule of law. Perhaps in time they’ll come to understand this. But to change their ways to our ways, they would have to renounce sharia, throw off the intellectual chains of Islam, and embrace secularism. There are no signs that they will.

As might be expected, the best informed and therefore the most valuable opinion on the present upheaval in the Arab states comes from Professor Bernard Lewis, the famous and deservedly much honored historian of Islam and the Middle East.

His view is so different from the common opinion and received wisdom recited by media pundits as to be – at least in some instances – surprising.

We’ve chosen these extracts from his recent interview with David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post.

The Arab masses certainly want change. And they want improvement. But when you say do they want democracy, that’s a more difficult question to answer. What does “democracy” mean? It’s a word that’s used with very different meanings, even in different parts of the Western world. And it’s a political concept that has no history, no record whatever in the Arab, Islamic world.

I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in [Western] terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you’ve already seen in various places. They are simply not ready for free and fair elections.

In Egypt now, for example, the assumption is that we’re proceeding toward elections in September and that seems to be what the West is inclined to encourage. I would view that with mistrust and apprehension. If there’s a genuinely free election – assuming that such a thing could happen – the religious parties have an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political tendency can hope to equal. Second, they use familiar language. The language of Western democracy is for the most part newly translated and not intelligible to the great masses. In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster. A much better course would be a gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through local self-governing institutions. For that, there is a real tradition in the region.

If you look at the history of the Middle East in the Islamic period, and if you look at their own political literature, it is totally against authoritarian or absolutist rule. The word they always insist on is consultation.

You have this traditional system of consultation with groups which are not democratic as we use that word in the Western world, but which have a source of authority other than the state – authority which derives from within the group, whether it be the landed gentry or the civil service, or the scribes or whatever. That’s very important. And that form of consultation could be a much better basis for the development of free and civilized government.

They’re all agreed that they want to get rid of the present leadership, but I don’t think they’re agreed on what they want in its place. For example, we get very, very different figures as to the probable support for the Muslim Brothers. And it’s very difficult to rely on these things. People don’t tell the truth when they’re being asked questions.

One has to understand … the differences in the political discourse. In the Western world, we talk all the time about freedom. In the Islamic world, freedom is not a political term. It’s a legal term: Freedom as opposed to slavery. This was a society in which slavery was an accepted institution existing all over the Muslim world. You were free if you were not a slave. It was entirely a legal and social term, with no political connotation whatsoever.

The major contrast is not between freedom and tyranny, between freedom and servitude, but between justice and oppression. Or if you like, between justice and injustice.

To say that [the Muslim Brotherhood] is secular [as the US intelligence chief James Clapper did] would show an astonishing ignorance of the English lexicon. I don’t think it is in any sense benign. I think it is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If they obtain power, the consequences would be disastrous for Egypt.

I don’t know how one could get the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is relatively benign unless you mean relatively as compared with the Nazi party.

I’m an historian. My business is the past, not the future. But I can imagine a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations of the same kind obtain control of much of the Arab world. It’s not impossible. I wouldn’t say it’s likely, but it’s not unlikely. And if that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor.

Remember that according to their own statistics, the total exports of the entire Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, one small European country. Sooner or later the oil age will come to an end. Oil will be either exhausted or superseded as a source of energy and then they have virtually nothing. In that case it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Africa north of the Sahara becomes not unlike Africa south of the Sahara.

There’s a common theme [in the Arab states] of anger and resentment. And the anger and resentment are universal and well-grounded. They come from a number of things. First of all, there’s the obvious one – the greater awareness that they have, thanks to modern media and modern communications, of the difference between their situation and the situation in other parts of the world. I mean, being abjectly poor is bad enough. But when everybody else around you is pretty far from abjectly poor, then it becomes pretty intolerable.

I was expecting a wave of such movements. I didn’t think it would be as quick and easy as it was in Egypt. But I expect that there will be more. We can see in so many countries, the regimes are already gravely in danger.

One method [of supporting the rebels – in Iran, for instance] is by political warfare, by having some sort of propaganda campaign against the regime. This would not be difficult. There’s a vast Iranian population now in the Western world, particularly in the United States, who I’m sure would be willing to help in this, and thanks to modern communications, it would not be too difficult to get the message across.

People talk about American imperialism as a danger. That is absolute nonsense. People who talk about American imperialism in the Middle East either know nothing about America or know nothing about imperialism. … As applied to American policy in the Middle East at the present time, it is wrong to the point of absurdity.

[Among the Arabs] two things have happened. One is that their position on the whole has been getting worse. The second, which is much more important, is that their awareness of that is getting much greater. As I said before, thanks to modern communications, they can now compare their own position with that in other countries. And they don’t have to look very far to do that. I have sat with friends in Arab countries, watching Israeli television, and their responses to that are mindboggling. [That is to say – the context indicates -they found freedom of speech “mindboggling” – JB.]

There are increasing numbers of people in the Arab world who look with wonderment at what they see in Israel, at the functioning of a free and open society. I read an article quite recently by a Palestinian Arab whom I will not endanger by naming, in which he said that “as things stand in the world at the present time, the best hope that an Arab has for his future is as a second class citizen of a Jewish state.” A rather extraordinary statement coming from an Arab spokesman. But if you think about it, he’s not far wrong. The alternative, being in an Arab state, is very much worse. They certainly do better as second class citizens of the Jewish state. There’s a growing realization of that. People would speak much more openly about that if it were safe to do so, which it obviously isn’t.

There are two things which I think are helpful towards a better understanding between the Arabs and Israel. One of them is .. the perception of a greater danger. … Sadat turned to Israel because he saw that Egypt was becoming a Russian colony. The same thing has happened again on a number of occasions. Now they see Israel as a barrier against the Iranian threat.

One sees similar calculations later than that. Consider for example, the battle between the Israeli forces and Hezbollah in 2006. It was quite clear that the Arab governments were quietly cheering the Israelis and hoping that they would finish the job and were very disappointed when they failed to finish the job. The best way of attaining friendship is by confronting a yet more dangerous enemy. There have been several such [enemies] in the Middle East and there are several at the present time. That seems to me the best hope of understanding between the Arabs on the one hand and either the West or the Israelis on the other hand.

The other one, which is less easy to define but in the long run is probably more important, is [regarding Israel] as a model of democratic government. A model of a free and open society with rights for women – an increasingly important point, especially in the perception of women.

The case has been made, and I think there is some force in it, that the main reason for the relative backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West is the treatment of women. As far as I know, it was first made by a Turkish writer called Namik Kemal in about 1880. At that time an agonizing debate had been going on for more than a century: What went wrong? Why did we fall behind the West? He said, “The answer is very clear. We fell behind the West because of the way we treat our women. By the way we treat our women we deprive ourselves of the talents and services of half the population. And we submit the early education of the other half to ignorant and downtrodden mothers.”

It goes further than that. A child who grows up in a traditional Muslim household is accustomed to authoritarian, autocratic rule from the start. I think the position of women is of crucial importance. That is why I am looking with great interest at Tunisia. Tunisia is the one Arab country that has really done something about women. In Tunisia there is compulsory education for girls, from primary school, right through. In Tunisia, women are to be found in the professions. There are doctors, lawyers, journalists, politicians and so on. Women play a significant part in public life in Tunisia. I think that is going to have an enormous impact. It’s already having this in Tunisia and you can see that in various ways. But this will certainly spread to other parts of the [Islamic] world.

A fuller record of the interview may be found here.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi

Our Yukkie Award for the Most Personally Repulsive Tyrant in modern times goes, in a line-up of stiff competition, to Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.

Maybe only just in time. His tyrant status is slipping. He’s no longer supremo over the whole of his bleak desert country. About a third to a half of the six-or-so million miserable people whose faces he’s been grinding in the dust for decades are in full rebellion, and the blood of hundreds of them is soaking the sand as his still-obedient goons mow them down on land, from the air, and from the sea.

Here is one of DebkaFile’s reports, which, though not necessarily accurate in all details, contains more concrete information than most US news sources:

Cyrenaican protesters … who control half of the country and part of its oil resources, embarked Sunday, Feb. 20, on a full-scale revolt against Muammar Qaddafi and his affluent ruling Tripolitanian-dominated regime.

Cyrenaica is in the east of the country. There the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk are in the hands of the rebels.

Unlike the rights protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, in Libya, one half of the country is rising up against the other half, as well as fighting to overthrow a dictatorial ruler …

Since last week, heavy battles have been fought in Benghazi, Al Bayda, Al Marj, Tobruk and at least two other two cities. In some places … protesters stormed army bases and seized large quantities of missiles, mortars, heavy machine guns and armored vehicles – and used them. The important Fadil Ben Omar Brigade command base in Benghazi was burnt to the ground.

Qaddafi’s 42-year rule of Libya appeared to have begun disintegrating Monday, Feb. 21, as civil war swept the country with no signs of him quitting. Instead, he ordered the army to redouble its brutal assaults on the opposition. The Air Force began bombing crowds at random while army tanks and armored vehicles blasted them with live ammunition – not just in the insurgent eastern provinces of Cyrenaica, but the capital of Tripoli and its environs too. There, helicopter gunships aimed heavy machine fire into the main market, the Souk al Jumma, while the first tribal militias loyal to Qaddafi to arrive in the capital from the Sahara fought alongside the army. Casualties soared to an estimated 600, with 250 in Tripoli alone …

High officials of his regime and businessmen began fleeing Tripoli aboard Libyan Air Force fighter jets and helicopters which landed Monday at Malta’s MIA international airport. Government officials in Valetta said the pilots had defected rather than bomb demonstrators, while all the Libyan arrivals asked for political asylum and more flights were on the way.

The United States and European Union have concentrated airplanes and ferries on the island ready to evacuate the thousands of their citizens employed in Libya, most in the oil and gas fields …

And here is a later report from the same source:

In a long, fiery speech broadcast by Libyan state TV Tuesday, Libya’s ruler Col. Muammar Qaddafi … made it clear he had no intention of devolving his powers or “stepping down and giving up like other leaders.” …

The 22,000-man strong Libyan Air Force with its 13 bases is Muammar Qaddafi’s mainstay for survival against massive popular and international dissent… 44 air transports and a like number of helicopters swiftly lifted loyal tribal militiamen fully armed from the Sahara and dropped them in the streets of Tripoli Monday, Feb. 21.

Qaddafi had mustered them to fill the gaps left by defecting army units and the large tribal militia which went over to the people.

One of the ruler’s sons, Mutassim Qaddafi, is in command of the Tripoli crackdown. Air Force planes, mostly from the Libyan Air Force’s inventory of 226 trainers, and helicopter gunships, bombed and fired heavy machine guns to scatter every attempt to stage a rally in the city’s districts. In their wake, Mutassim’s “Libyan Popular Army” cleared the streets of protesters.

The tactics employed by Qaddafi and his sons was, first, to give the protesters free rein to rampage through the city, torch state TV and government buildings and so generate an impression among them and in the West that the Qaddafis were about to fall. But when the demonstrators fanned out to seize the rest of the capital, they were bombed from the air and targeted by the tribal militias, who had no qualms about shooting directly at civilian crowds.

By the small hours of Tuesday, Feb. 22, when Qaddafi went on air to demonstrate he was still in Tripoli, he was again in control of the capital. …

His strategy for staying in power rests first on consolidating his grip on Tripoli and then using it as a base for military operations to regain control of the rest of the country, including Cyrenaica . … Libyan Navy missile ships began pounding Benghazi from the sea.

We’ll all soon be feeling the effects of the Libyan revolution and civil war:

Straight after [Gaddafi’s] speech, Tripoli announced that Libyan oil and gas exports were blocked to Europe, causing pandemonium in a world market that saw a 12 percent price hike of crude oil this week and seriously threatens the fragile economies of many nations.

Why do journalists believe they are or ought to be exempt from the violence they report?

Last Saturday (February 5, 2011), the reporter Greg Palkot and cameraman Olaf Wiig appeared on Fox News , for which they work, describing how they were attacked by the revolutionary mob in Cairo as they were doing their job. They were obviously badly beaten. Their wounds looked painful. They claimed plausibly that they had feared for their lives.

They deserve sympathy, and they did not suggest that they should have special treatment as newsmen.

But the media in general have taken the wrong side of the conflict between Western civilization and Arab barbarism for at least the last 44 years since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. If sometimes the nature of barbarism is brought home to newsmen in the field with a body-blow, they have no moral standing to justify complaint. There are exceptions, no doubt, and Polkot and Wiig may well be among them. But none should imagine that they have a right to some special immunity that all the world should respect. Barbarians, they should understand, are by nature and definition no respecters of persons.

If journalists from strong societies insert themselves into places where weaker order prevails, they should not expect to be safe. Non-combatant though they are, objective though they may claim to be, their presence has an effect on the events they describe. They’re part of what happens whether they like it or not. They dance with the throng.

If they want to be treated in a civilized fashion, they should promote civilized values. Being anti-American, as so many Western newsmen are, does not wrap them in a sort of moral armor. It approves and encourages belligerence, sometimes extremely savage, of which anyone can be the victim.

The production of bio-fuels promotes hunger. Ethanol is the sacrifice of food to ideology.

Driven by its obsession with “green energy”, the left – whose heart, remember, is constantly aching for the wretched of the earth – has food turned into fuel (rather than drill for more oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska). The result – the wretched of the earth go hungrier.

This is from Breitbart:

World food prices reached their highest level ever recorded in January and are set to keep rising for months, the UN food agency [Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO] said on Thursday, warning that the hardest-hit countries could face turmoil.

Some of them already have – Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria …

And in its latest survey, the Food and Agriculture Organisation said its index which monitors monthly price changes for a variety of staples averaged 231 points in January — the highest level since records began in 1990. …

The Index rose by 3.4 percent from December — with big increases in particular for dairy [cattle feed becomes more expensive because of the ethanol program], cereal and oil prices. …

The data from the Rome-based FAO showed that prices for dairy products rose by 6.2 percent from December, oils and fats gained 5.6 percent, while cereals went up by 3.0 percent because of lower global supply of wheat and maize. …

The Food Price Index hit 200 points over the whole of 2008 at the height of the 2007/2008 food crisis. It breached that level for the first time in October 2010 with 205 points. …

And this is from FrontPage Magazine:

One of the most common causes of societal discontent, the very factor that led to the ongoing Egyptian protests, is hunger. Unfortunately, worldwide global warming fanaticism has only contributed to this plight. By consuming ever-expansive portions of the world food supply for the production of green bio-fuels, the left has increased the cost of food for those who can least afford it. This has caused much undue suffering for the world’s poor and significantly exacerbated Third World instability — and Egypt is no exception. …

Today, we’re seeing that effect in Egypt and we’re going to see more of it throughout the world unless we can fix the growing worldwide food crisis. We’ve been skating on thin ice, in terms of food supply, for more than a decade now. Between 2000 and 2010, the World Food Price Index, the inflation-adjusted measure of how expensive food is across the globe, almost doubled. In 2000 the index sat at a value of 90. By 2010, the index had risen to a value of 172. That’s a 91% increase in the cost of food over the course of a decade. …

Between 1999 and 2009, the amount of cropland used to grow wheat in America dropped by over 3 million acres, or almost 5 per cent. … The amount of land used to grow rice dropped over 15 per cent; for oats, over 30 per cent; for rye, over 20 per cent; for peanuts and edible beets, over 25 per cent; and for sugarbeets, a shade under 25 per cent. These are some of the commodities that are used, directly and indirectly, to produce the food that once fed the world. And, those statistics are just a few highlights, or lowlights if you will, of the overall trend.

In the US, farmers use ever more land to grow “energy-crops” – chiefly corn and soybeans – because they are subsidized by the government, and ever less for crops that can only be eaten.

Overall, the amount of United States cropland used to grow basic food commodities — crops other than corn and soybeans — has decreased by over 22 million acres since 1999. …

The American taxpayer … ultimately pays the bill for the bio-fuel incentive programs that make growing energy crops more profitable than providing nutrition to the globe.

It’s ironic that the United Nations should be warning about the disastrous results of the food-into-fuel policy, since it is the central church, the Vatican one might say, of the “green” religion.

But don’t take my word for it, consider instead the viewpoint of the organization that has been pushing global warming hysteria harder than anyone this side of Al Gore: the United Nations. According to the UN, almost 10 per cent of world grain production – that’s about 100 million metric tons per year – goes for bi-fuel production. They expect that number to double by 2018. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says that “competition between the three Fs (food, feed and fuel) is expected to intensify,” which is probably about as close in tone to criticism that one branch of the UN is going to use about another branch: the International Panel on Climate Change.

So it seems that the left has now become more sentimental about the planet than about the poor.

Michelle Obama and her fans might try fussing less about Americans being too fat and think more (if think they can) about why other nations are too thin.

President Bush tried to democratize the Arab Middle East. It was an effort worth making. But did he understand what he was up against?

In his World Economic Forum Address, delivered at Sharm el Sheikh International Congress Center, Egypt, on May 18, 2008, he said:

“Democracies do not take the same shape; they develop at different speeds and in different ways, and they reflect the unique cultures and traditions of their people.”

This is typical waffle of Western statesmen trying to accommodate multicultural “values” when speaking of dysfunctional polities.

There is some variety among national democracies, differences in types of representation and electoral process – administrative differences – which may reflect local mores and preferences, but these are superficial. True democracies, the ones which allow for change of government and limits upon government, do not reflect the “unique cultures and traditions” of their people: they reflect a core Western (British) cultural development, a tradition of limiting absolute power constitutionally. This political principle – like the zero in mathematics – may have originated within one culture, but it is of benefit to all mankind in the establishment of national political institutions. It is through these institutions that we know freedom (civil rights, the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, the individual protected from the predations of power). Democracy is a superior idea, and the West should continue to offer it – insist on it – to nations which have inferior arrangements. Diluting the idea by allowing for local versions of power-sharing to substitute for it is foolish. For example, I do not count the loya jirga, the traditional tribal forum for dispute arbitration, as a cultural equivalent of democratic government, nor can I see how it could form the institutional basis for a national democracy as it enshrines tribal power. Societies which borrow the trappings of democracy – elections – without the civil institutions that sustain the core principle are parodies of democracy (one-party communist states, kleptocracies, oligarchies, autocracies, theocracies). There is a distinct element of parody in setting up national arrangements which submit to local traditions by enshrining sectarian power, by having individuals of different sects take up different political offices (as in Lebanon).

When the West allows parodies of democracy to be installed because this shape of democracy “reflects the unique culture and tradition of [a] people”, it is relegating the people to more of the (not so unique) culture and tradition of absolute power: dynastic, tribal, sectarian, ideological powers asserting themselves and oppressing their rivals for as long as they have strength of arms and/or superior numbers (not to be confused with a democratic majority).

Allowing the Muslim Brotherhood power, or Shia equivalents, or communists for that matter, in Egypt would not be an expression of freedom, nor an example of democracy in action. These are not political parties, they are absolute powers waiting to seize office. The West has long established that one may not sell oneself into slavery. That idea is incorporated into the idea of democracy: an electorate may not vote itself out of sovereignty.

Obama is making a very grave error – as have administrations before him – in allowing totalitarians opportunities to take power at all, but to do so under the pretense that their elected accession to power reflects “democratic self-determination” or some collective expression of “freedom” is an appalling betrayal of democratic principles. The Nobel peace prizewinner is guaranteeing that there will be blood …

C.Gee   February 2, 2011

Any hope that revolution in Egypt might lead to democratization must be abandoned now that Obama has taken steps to assist the Muslim Brotherhood into power. President Mubarak banned it with good reason.

It should come as no surprise that Obama is doing this. He’s been helping to empower Islam from the moment he became president. His heart is with Islam. He has no objection to the Muslim Brotherhood. About a year ago Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder Hassan al-Banna and proselytizer-in-chief for the organization, who had been kept out of the United States in the Bush years, was given a visa by the Obama administration (see our post, Enter the general of soft jihad, January 23, 2010).

The Muslim Brotherhood openly works for world domination by Islam. From its inception in Egypt in 1928 it called for the re-establishment of the Islamic Empire. Although in recent years its tactic has been to work at conquering the world by non-violent means, infiltration and proselytizing, it’s motto, “Jihad is our path; martyrdom is our aspiration“, makes plain that it has not and will not renounce traditional, sacred, violent jihad. Hamas and al-Qaeda are two of its off-shoots. (Ayman al-Zawahiri,  co-leader of al-Qaeda, joined the Muslim Brotherhood in his early adolescence.)

The prospect darkens.

Our view of the upheaval in Egypt, how the new technologies of personal communication have played a vital part in its causes as well as its spontaneous organization, is endorsed by Victor Davis Hanson, who writes in a must-read article at PajamasMedia:

So what’s the matter with Egypt? The same thing that is the matter with most of the modern Middle East: in the post-industrial world, its hundreds of millions now are vicariously exposed to the affluence and freedom of the West via satellite television, cell phones, the Internet, DVDs, and social networks.

And they become angry that, in contrast to what they see and hear from abroad, their own lives are unusually miserable in the most elemental sense. Of course … their corrupt government is in some part a reification of themselves, who in their daily lives see the world in terms of gender apartheid, tribalism, religious intolerance, conspiracies, fundamentalism, and statism that are incompatible with a modern, successful, capitalist democracy. …

Instant global communications have brought the reality home to the miserable of the Middle East in a way state-run newspapers and state-censored television never could even had they wished.

In reaction, amid this volatile new communications revolution, the Saddams, the Mubaraks, the Saudi royals, the North African strongmen, and all the other “kings” and “fathers” and “leaders” found an effective enough antidote: The Jews were behind all sorts of plots to emasculate Arab Muslims. And the United States and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain were stealing precious resources that robbed proud Middle Easterners of their heritage and future. Better yet, there was always a Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, or, for the more high-brow, a Jimmy Carter to offer a useful exegesis of American conspiracy, oil-mongery, or Zionist infiltration into the West Wing that “proved” Middle East misery was most certainly not self-induced. … The more we promised to pressure Israel, the more we could ignore the misery of Cairo, and the more a thieving Mubarak could perpetuate it. …

He concludes for the moment as we do, though with slightly less optimism:

Watch it play out with encouragement for those who oppose both Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood — hoping for the best, expecting the worst.

Even if the Egyptian revolution is aborted now, how long will the despots be able to resist the transformative power of the new technologies?

It’s in the lap-top of the gods, so to speak.

Hanson does not believe, any more than we do, that if America “lets” Mubarak go, an Islamic fanatic will take his place as happened in Iran when Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah and welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini – with what appalling results to this day we know all too well.  True, the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood strains to take power in Egypt, but has no Khomeini-like figure ready to implement instant oppression. Besides which, the causes in Egypt are different. The world has moved on since the Iranian revolution.

It is this new world which is making the prison-walls of the Arab states crack and crumble.

It may burst the Islamic theocracies too.

It may render all religion obsolete.