For many years,
every time a regime has changed in that part of the world, it was for the
worst. The local autocrats didn’t respect human rights or advance democracy,
but at least tried to some extent to emulate the western social evolution in
relation to secularization of the state, respect for all religions and
advancement of women’s rights.
After the recent
changes, countries like Iraq and Libya went back to the dark ages of fanatic
religious sects and tribal fighting, Tunisia and now Egypt are fighting for
survival against extremism, Syria descended into the hell of civil war and may
bring Lebanon with it, Algeria, Jordan and Morocco are struggling for reform.
The Gulf States are on the razor’s edge, on one side they are police states
that bribe their citizens into quietness and on the other they suffer the
blackmail of extremists, religious and other, who bleed their treasury in
return for sparing them the mass demonstrations that led to revolt elsewhere.
The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and their
brethren in other Arab countries is unsurprisingly taking over from the former
despots and creating new ones, none the better than before. Morsi and his
fellow Islamists are bent on creating a regime without any checks and balances,
betting on the ignorant religious fervour of the masses to swallow it all. No
courts, no participation of Christians (mostly Copts, who are the original
Egyptians, those from before the Arab/Islamic invasion), non-participation of seculars
or liberals in the writing of a new constitution. Another kind of caliphate in
the making and the West is considering financing it.
Financing these regimes, there like elsewhere, is for
no use and to no avail. In Afghanistan,
the theft of almost one billion dollars led to the collapse of its largest bank.
A brother of the President and a brother of his vice president were
shareholders in the bank and it is obvious whose pockets were lined with the
bounty, but they have not been charged with any wrongdoing. Instead, a few straw
men are being tried, just for the sake of throwing sand into the eyes of the
naive westerners who are propping up one more utterly corrupt regime.
There are many other
examples of stupidity meeting extremism.
Some pea-brained
bigots, of whatever persuasion, in one of the boondoggles frequent in the
wastelands of America, made a worthless film about Muhammad, considered a prophet by the followers of
Islam. Other pea-brained bigots, Islamists this time, used the film as an
excuse to go on rampage against everything American or western, killing in the
process several diplomats and other innocents, considered expendable by the
organizers of the demonstrations.
In America’s
hinterland, moronic televangelists and assorted preachers can sometimes compete
in religious fanaticism, racist and bigot intolerance, with the Islamic sects.
The major difference is in scale. Although some of those fanatics can actually
kill, as they have already assassinated doctors who performed abortions, they
have not reached the scale of massacre, the use of suicide bombers and attacks
against women just for attending school, as seen in other parts of the world.
Fanaticism, the
product of ignorance, poverty or cultural isolation, is a deadly threat to global
human development. Unfortunately, it reaches even the developed countries where
some of these communities live, or to where they emigrated or where they took
refuge. Fanaticism does not accept or even understand the basic rules of
civilized social life: that all people deserve respect, independently of race
or sex, religion or lack of it, as well as their right to freedom in their life
choices and opinions. Immigrant communities must respect the laws of the
countries where they chose freely and sometimes illegally, to live in.
JSR
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