The bankruptcy of America’s ideological and unrealistic educational system — especially its universities — has seldom been on better display than during this period of unrest in the Muslim world. For the most part, the well-educated folks offering analysis on television seem befuddled that anyone could think that the mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen have anything remotely to do with religion. No, say they, the unrest is the result of poverty, oppression, and a dozen other things, but it has nothing to do with Islam.
Well, no. While the immediate spark for events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen came from poverty, oppression, etc, the ultimate cause is the unIslamic nature of the dictatorial governments that long have ruled the three states in question. Each regime has used the rhetoric of Islam in public statements and the methodology of European Fascism as its instrument of government. On this point the Neoconservatives were absolutely right: The Muslim world is rife with Islamofascists. What the Necons deliberately failed to add to this truism is that the Islamofascists are not found among the mujahideen, but rather man the Arab regimes that Washington, many of its Western allies, and Israel have supported for several decades.
Thus the uprisings now occurring are anti-fascist, but they are a nowhere near pro-democracy, at least in the Western sense. The international media’s propensity — especially strong in the BBC and CNN — for finding what it lusts to find is on prominent display as they seek out protesters in Cairo and elsewhere who speak English, are middle-class professionals, and wax eloquent with admiration for the West. Having found this “evidence” the media then extrapolate from what must be regarded as a rather small sample and declare that Americans are watching “We the people” movements on the Arab streets. (We have seen this absurd species of extrapolation frequently in recent years when U.S.-led military coalitions have success in one small- or medium-sized Iraqi or Afghan village and it is portrayed by the media as a nationwide trend.)
From Chris Matthews to Katie Couric to General Wesley Clark flows the nonsense they were trained to believe at university: The triumph of secularism, democracy, and globalization are inevitable and those that stand in the way are anachronistic expendables. General Clark, on Saturday, went so far as to tell FOX viewers that after Mubarak leaves Egypt there will be “some kind of an election” — presumably with Western observers — and that an international commission must be established to investigate the Egyptian government’s corruption.
In other words, the U.S. and Western interventionism that has supported Islamofascists for 50 years should now be revved up to intervene to teach our unwashed Arab brothers how to vote, be honest, and allow power to be passed from the dictator Mubarak to an unIslamic, unrepresentative, and tiny group of secularized Muslims who shave, admire Jefferson, and have little truck with that Islam stuff.
From Matthews on the left, to Clark on the right, to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in the ever-hopeful-if-reality-defying heart of the Obama-Clinton fantasy world, the answer to a problem that has been partially wrought by U.S. and Western intervention on the side of tyranny is more and more intervention to again deny power to the majority. We should all be wondering how long the United States can survive the handiwork of the professors who “educated” this generation of U.S. leaders to be certain of the blessed inevitability of universal, pagan, and non-violent Westernization of the entire globe, a sort of a leftist, atheist, libertine Khalifate.
What seems lost in the wishing-makes-it-so fog of this “analysis” is the fact that nearly one-hundred percent of the Tunisians, Egyptians, and Yemenis we see on the street — indeed, all except the Westernized handful Matthews, Couric, and Clark want power passed to — are Muslim believers who not only want to improve their living and political conditions, but likewise want Islam to play a far larger role in governance, a role they believe will be lead to far less oppressive regimes. It is absolutely true that the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Yemeni dictators are hated by their peoples from imposing brutal repression, but they are also hated for limiting the role of Islam in government and their persecution of those Islamic scholars, preachers, and militants who have struggled to defend their faith. (Parenthetically, the government of our Republic under both parties long has used taxpayer funds to intervene in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen to encourage regime stability and so has facilitated both varieties of oppression. This may limit the pro-U.S. sentiment of any successor regime in these three states.)
At day’s end it is unclear whether Egypt’s Mubarak or Yemen’s Salih will fall, or whether the new Tunisian regime will be anything other than a more efficient dictatorship than the one it replaced. Fascist regimes, after all, have protected themselves by systematically disarming their citizenry and have little concern for anything save holding onto power. (NB: On the last point, they are like the two U.S. political parties.)
The Islamofascist regimes also know that the pro-democracy bark of Washington and its NATO allies is likely to be far worse than their bite because the existence of the regimes is necessary for the survival of Israel. It is the vigorously brutal oppression of the Mubaraks, Abdullahs (Jordan and Saudi Arabia), and Bashirs of the Arab world that controls borders contiguous with Israel and keeps a lid on hundreds of millions of Muslims who seethe with a desire to exact wide and lethal retribution for what they see as Israel’s theft, on-going occupation, and unfolding annexation of Muslim land.
