Category Archives: Middle East

UPDATED: The Tyrant’s Intellectual (& Non-Egghead) Enablers

Celebrity, Critique, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Intellectualism, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist, Uncategorized

Much has been made of the American singers who sang for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Nothing has been said of the intelligentsia that has sung his praise. There is a big difference between singing for your supper and singing songs of praise for this, and other, odious characters. Paul A. Rahe at The Chronicle of Higher Education dissects “The Intellectual as Courtier.” (Here, with thanks to my Canadian friend, Dr. Grant Havers.)

“If, in The Washington Post, one were to describe the elder Qaddafi as ‘a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat,’ if one were to call him ‘flexible and pragmatic,’ if one were to go on to suggest that ‘Libya under Qaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally,’ one would be apt—and with good reason—to be compared with Leni Riefenstahl, as Benjamin Barber was by Ken Silverstein at Harper’s Magazine.

Worse criticism would justifiably be in store for the intellectual sycophant who chose to write on the eve of the Libyan uprising, as Barber did at The Huffington Post, that Qaddafi ‘is not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested and rules by means other than fear,’ especially if he were to add, ‘His son Seif, with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and two forthcoming books focused on liberalism in the developing world, has pioneered a gradualist approach to civil society in Libya, insisting along the way that he would accept no office that wasn’t subject to popular elections. No dynasty likely there.'”

READ ON.

[SNIP]

Because of their wide reach, Peggy Noonan (and her ilk)—while no intellectual— serves as a greater court courtesan than does the academic sycophant. As I chronicled in “LETHAL WEAPONS: NEOCON GROUPIES,” Noonan has gone as far as to conflate President Bush “with a Higher Power – Peggy believes God speaks through George W. Bush. From his furrows to his genitals, her high-flown linguistic banalities have lovingly depicted her man’s every inch. (See “He’s Got Two of ‘Em.”)

There are other culprits, of course.

UPDATE: Myron: You’re the funniest ever here on “nuance.” Why not cross-post this and other posts to the Facebook page, where the blog posts appear automatically? You’ll spice up the place in no time.

The Brotherhood’s Steel Magnolia

Democracy, Islam, Israel, Law, Middle East, Religion

“Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood,” I wrote here. For the sake of accuracy, let’s remember that Mubarak was not an equal opportunity oppressor; he went after members of the Muslim Brotherhood, mainly.

The BBC concedes as much in an upbeat expose on the Brotherhood’s Egyptian acolytes. “For decades, keeping the Brotherhood and other Islamists from power was the main justification for the authoritarian rule of President Hosni Mubarak.” (Here.)

Here are some of the musings of gentle Doha, a Muslim Brotherhood steel magnolia:

“The first thing to do is to sever all ties with Israel because it is the cause of our ruin. And Mubarak was their agent.” …

“Egypt follows French law, and we do not want that, because when someone steals for example, he spends a month in jail and then he’s released to do the same again. But under Sharia law he gets his hand cut off and that’s better.” …

And the least unreasonable of Doha’s beliefs:

“Sharia doesn’t allow women to participate in government because women are emotional. Women should be responsible for their houses and their jobs, but not government,” she said.

The BBC correspondent says that “some of [Doha’s] views reflect the official Muslim Brotherhood line.”

The BBC would never entertain the notion that where the radicalism of dear Doha doesn’t jibe with that of her “moderate” Brothers—it’s because the latter practice Takiya: lying to advance and protect the faith.

UPDATE II: ‘Un-American Revolutions’ (Un-American America)

America, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History, Islam, Liberty, Middle East, Nationhood, Political Philosophy

Having grown up in the Middle East, and lived through a war or two, I’m not optimistic about the outcomes of a democratic revolution in the region. I said as much in “Media’s Sickening Sentimentality On Egypt” (HERE). That’s why I mocked (in 2005) the continual comparisons Bush and his gang used to make between “the carnage in Iraq and the constitutional cramps of early America; between the feuding Mohammedans and the followers of John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu.”

Niall Ferguson, writing in Newsweek, also thinks that the slobbering will soon give way to an uneasy silence:

“Time and again, Americans have hailed revolutions, only to fall strangely silent as those same revolutions proceeded to devour not only their own children but many other people’s too. In each case the body count was in the millions.

So as you watch revolution sweeping through the Arab world (and potentially beyond), remember these three things about non-American revolutions:

* They take years to unfold. It may have seemed like glad confident morning in 1789, 1917, and 1949. Four years later it was darkness at noon.

* They begin by challenging an existing political order, but the more violence is needed to achieve that end, the more the initiative passes to men of violence—Robespierre, Stalin, and the supremely callous Mao himself.

* Because neighboring countries feel challenged by the revolution, internal violence is soon followed by external violence, either because the revolution is genuinely threatened by foreigners (as in the French and Russian cases) or because it suits the revolutionaries to blame an external threat for domestic problems (as when China intervened in the Korean War).

To which an American might reply: yes, but was all this not true of our revolution too? …”

Read “Un-American Revolutions.”

UPDATE I (Mar. 6): Regular readers should know better than to attribute my quoting of Ferguson to an ideological affinity for his neoconservatism. Hell, Myron, as a man with a particularly critical and curious mind, don’t you get sick of tinny ideologues who mouth-off opinion without reference to the facts of history? I like deductions that cleave to facts. Ferguson is a good source of information. The article is cited for its juxtaposition of the American and The Other Revolutions. These contrasts demand Derb-worthy pessimism, not silly, happy faces. A lot of people refuse to ever cast aspersions on Thomas Jefferson’s blind spot: France. As much as I revere him, Jefferson was somewhat enamored of the “Revolution in France,” Edmund Burke’s precise, and derisive, characterization.

UPDATE II (Mar. 7): UN-AMERICAN AMERICA. Right you are Nebojsa. Vox writes: “Americans themselves do not even enjoy the democratic freedoms which their leaders are claiming to support elsewhere.” Which is exactly the point I belabored in “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn,” over a month ago:

“The ‘planners’ society’ I inhabit is ‘dominated by a bureaucratic elite.’ This unnatural elite, ‘manages its people’s principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances. … Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent.'”

“What remains of the rights to property and self-ownership in the soft tyranny that is the USA is regulated and taxed to the hilt. When they travel, Americans are routinely patted down, and irradiated with photons like meat in a packaging plant. In contravention of their naturally licit rights, many thousands of my compatriots languish in prisons for ingesting unapproved substances, or for violating information socialism laws (so-called insider trading infractions). Others are hounded by democratically elected despots for daring to form militia (as many Egyptians have recently done) in order to repel the trespassers who traipse across their homesteads on our country’s Southern border, killing their cattle and imperiling their kin.”

BESIDES:

“More often than not, Americans who yearn for the freedoms their forbears bequeathed to them are labeled demented and dangerous. I’ve yet to hear liberty deprived peoples the world over stand-up for the tea-party patriots. When they do — I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf.”

BASICALLY, when Egyptians and Libyans stand up for my tea-party rights, I’ll love them and their freedoms back.

The Dawn of Democracy

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Middle East

Diana West notes the under-reported “triumphal return to Egypt of the poisonous Yusef al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s favorite cleric who just drew 2 million Egyptians back to Tahrir Square where he prayed for the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem.” She ponders the “delusional belief that American principles — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equality before the law — have a natural place as ‘universal principles’ in a culture grounded in Shariah principles. This is the pure fantasy that has driven our foreign policy through a decade of ‘nation-building’ wars. …”

One quibble: The revolution in Egypt had its own momentum. The US and its incoherent foreign policy had little to do with the Changing of the kleptokratic Guard in Egypt.

More at “Big Peace.”