Where's that booming call for freedom?
Take a look at some of the great advocates of democratic expansion that are speaking out this week against actual demonstrations of liberty, freedom, and self-governance in the Middle East. Among them, the likes of Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Vice President Biden, and the Likud Party in Israel. Ah, what tangled webs...The citizen uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt should reveal for all to see the hypocrisies the Arab world has been forced to deal with for decades in regards to its relations with the United States and Israel. It's never been about "freedom" or "democracy" on the part of the West. That was only occasionally incidental. It's been about protecting the Israeli settlements and aggressive expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It's about having rulers in place that allow the two countries to outsource their torture and violate international human rights laws in the advance of their economic initiatives. The U.S. and Israel demanded Palestinian parliamentary elections, then it got them in 2006, but then refused to recognize Hamas, the elected majority party of the government.
If a new leadership coalition in Egypt adopts an anti-American stance, and this is not to be feared according to all reasonable reports (even Bill O'Reilly, in the Beck link above, acknowledges a very secular military in Egypt), but if it did, let me suggest that the anti-Americanism may not have been caused by the people's sectarian tendencies in that part of the world, as we've already been told again and again. Their religious fundamentalists ("The Society of Muslim Brotherhood," et al) are not all terrorists in the same way that our religious fundamentalists in the U.S. are not all terrorists. It might be, instead, because the weapons and tanks being aimed at peaceful demonstrators this week have "Made in the U.S.A." engraved on them in small print. The Egyptian dictator Mubarak has been the recipient of more than $50 billion in U.S. aid over three decades. Whatever the new government will be though, we know it won't be a puppet state of the U.S. and Israel, such as it has been, and that's what's truly feared.
Just who exactly is responsible for the revolutions on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, and Alexandria during this historic month? Well, aside from the millions of individual men and women of courage standing unarmed against their own repressive governments and against the stern glances of an American government seated high atop the proverbial fence that has, up until now, valued the "stability" of intimidation and authoritarianism in the region above all else, how about a shout-out to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks?
Indeed, we may be witnessing just the beginning of "the WikiLeaks revolution." Released diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks revealed corruption by Tunisian President Ben Ali, forcing his ouster. Much to the particular benefit of the United States, WikiLeaks cables released Friday show that pro-democracy leaders in Egypt have been meeting secretly with members of Congress and the State Department in recent years even as President Mubarak was being publicly supported by U.S. leadership. Thanks to this technological revolution that is also benefiting from the use of social networking websites, repressive regimes may just fall like dominoes now-- in Sudan? in Yemen? in Iran?
Just yesterday, the LA Times published an editorial suggesting that WikiLeaks was dead, even as it simultaneously and bizarrely explained how newspapers are taking steps to ape it. This example, along with Bill Keller's self-serving and defensive comments from the other side of the continent last week, should illustrate just how behind-the-curve the people are that run newspapers these days.
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In Christopher Hitchens' memoir from last year, "Hitch 22," the author quotes Mario Soares, the first Socialist president of Portugal, as once saying to him in Lisbon: "If the army officers are so much on the side of the people, why do they not put on civilian clothes?" I'm reading that book currently and I thought of that line after watching this marvelous, marvelous video, which might just make you well up with tears.
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The cutest member of the Bush family has come out for marriage equality. Tolerance is sexy.
posted by CM @ 4:46 PM
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