Tag Archives: Arab Spring

The Egyptian People Are Ready for Democracy: Too Bad About the Politicians

Egyptian Protest

IN A MAY 2013 Ahram Online interview, the US ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, fielded a question about her government’s delicate relationship with the Morsi regime:

The fact is [the Freedom and Justice party] ran in a legitimate election and won. … Of course it is challenging to be dealing with any new government. However, at the state institutional level, we are for instance still liaising with the same military and civil service personnel, and thus have retained the same long-established relations.

One month later, footage of Tahrir Square brought to the world an outpouring of hostility, aimed at Ms. Patterson and President Obama. Why, ask the Egyptian critics of Morsi, did Obama keep up the flow of money and other material supports, as the Freedom and Justice Party undertook to replicate the authoritarianism of earlier regimes? Or to put it another way — the way Patterson did — why did the American government “retain the same long-established relations”?

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Small minds are behind The Innocence of Muslims

The Innocence of Muslims

IN THE YEARS since the Danish broadsheet Jyllands-Posten, or Jutland Post, incited retribution for its publication of satirical Mohammed cartoons, we’ve had a negative case study of Bertrand’s Russell’s 1940 observation that “in a democracy, it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged.”

This Russell controversy concerned a New York State school board decision to hire the atheist philosopher, a decision reversed as the result of a pious defamation campaign. The recent killings in Libya of American diplomatic staff (a revisiting of the 2006 cartoon “controversy”) remind us that neither democracy nor the endurance of having one’s sentiments outraged are principles universally accepted, which is why I designate the outrage of some Muslims a negative manifestation of Russell’s principle. Nonetheless it’s into these camps — the democrat and the outraged revenge-murderer — rather than into race or tribal or national categories, which we may in the present instance be most usefully divided.

As did many of you this week I wasted thirteen minutes of my time on the amateurish Innocence of Muslims video, my amusement over its barrel-bottom production values and the shoddy acting of its chubby twenty-first century midwestern American cast (am I alone in seeing the resemblance to a young Michael Gross, from the sit-com Family Ties, in the actor chosen for the lead role?) tempered by the knowledge that revenge had been exacted on dedicated and by all accounts decent public servants.

As I write this, speculation concerning the identity of Sam Bacile, the film’s supposed creator, is abundant. The complete film itself, like Bacile, may not even exist. But does it even matter who made this obvious and clumsy piece of calculated slander, and why? Bertrand Russell’s challenge cuts through the fat and gets to the bone of the current contention: human sentiments will from time to time be outraged, and it is the distinction of civilized persons to endure and to find peaceful means by which to mediate their differences.

We ought to be mindful that the Jutland Post cartoons were the culmination of a debate, at the centre of which were, for example, a September 2005 article “Dyb angst for kritik af islam” (“Deep anxiety over the criticism of Islam,” which registered a cresting Scandinavian fear that candid talk of the world’s youngest monotheism was dangerous and ill-advised), as well as the death of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and the precarious existence of the Islam critic Ali Hirsi Ali. That debate is as vital and important as ever and, I would add, while it is more active in the West, it will have universal application.

If Innocence of Muslims’ ramshackle depictions of Mohammed invoke Edward Said’s Orientalism (and they do), the intemperate and insecure response of a fringe rabble invokes the indictments, as well as commitments, of Hirsi Ali. Writing of the conflict between religious extremism and “the values of personal freedom,” in her book Infidel, she asserts that “I was a one-issue politician, I decided. I am still. I am also convicted that this is the largest, most important issue that our society and our planet will face in the coming century.” Such is the big picture for these acts of the small minded.

 

Belhassen Trabelsi — a criminal, not a refugee

Belhassen Trabelsi

THE RIVALRY BETWEEN Alberta’s Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties at several points alluded to another contest, of Canada and Saudi Arabia in the designation of the world’s premier crude-yielding nation. There’s however another contest underway, crude in a differing sense, and concerning the harbouring of Tunisia’s former oppressors and exploiters.

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