Comments on: Mideast Media Sampler – 06/14/2013 https://www.yourish.com/2013/06/14/18184 Cutting straight to the point Sat, 15 Jun 2013 01:29:54 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Michael Lonie https://www.yourish.com/2013/06/14/18184/comment-page-1#comment-50445 Sat, 15 Jun 2013 01:29:54 +0000 http://www.yourish.com/?p=18184#comment-50445 Muslims began to realize about 200 years ago that the West had outstripped them in power. Since then they have been casting about for some means of redressing what they see as the world turned upside down. They have tried modernizing monarchies, oligarchies of the wealthy introducing Western ways, hysterical nationalism, and socialist dictatorships, which turn into kleptocratic dictatorships. Ba’athism was an attempt at “Arab Rebirth” that sought to achive renewed power by selectively taking the worst aspects of the various totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s and mixing them together. Now they are trying radical Islam, a sort of mixture of modern left/fascist ideology and regressive Islam (like the Wahhabis or the Iranian rule of the clergy). The terrorism we were fighting, until Mr. Obama decided to unilaterally call off the war, grew out of this failure of previous solutions to solve their problems. It is the method of choice for the radical Muslims to use to restore Islam’s lost power and prestige. It has something in common with the traditional Islamic raiding of all their non-Muslim neighbors for many centuries. Their neighbors found they needed to establish elaborate border protection forces, Byzantine Akrites and Austro-Hungarian Grenzers, for example, to try to stem this predation.

The one thing they have never tried is letting their people be free. Those stupid peasants aleays would make the wrong choices, dontcherknow.

Now Muslims, especially Arabs, may not want to be free. Freedom frightens many people. They’d rather have someone else make their choices for them. It’s rarer in the US than in other countries, but it exists. A lot of Muslims seem to think that the overthrow of dictators means they can freely oppress and murder members of minority groups and that democracy means that 60 percent of the people can vote to steal the property of the other 40. If they keep it up, they will not gain what they seek, and are likely to face disaster. The Egyptians are already on the brink of a food disaster, but most of them and their government want to pay more attention to persecuting Christians and imposing Sharia on the country.

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