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Fitzgerald: Making sense of the Middle East (Syria in particular)

Dec 21, 2005 12:23 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald assesses democracy on the march and makes a few suggestions for how to deal with Syria’s Alawite regime:

“Democracy on the march”? Infidels should be largely indifferent to “democracy on the march” unless it means less Sharia, or a weaker Islamic superstructure. Ataturk was no democrat, certainly not in the 1920s when he began clamping down on the practice of Islam and diminishing its political and social influence. Others, including the late Shah of Iran, Mohammed V of Morocco, and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, quasi-enlightened despots who were variously despotic or enlightened, helped to keep Islam in check.

The Middle East requires us to make sense of a seemingly inexplicable crazy quilt. It is really not that crazy. In Lebanon there are the Christians, the allegiance-shifting Druse and the chastened Sunnis, now chagrined at their demographic defeat by the Shi”a — just as once the Christians, in what had always been the main Christian redoubt in the Islamized East, had been previously disturbed to realize that the Muslims, both Sunni and Shi”a, had overtaken the Christians in population.

In Iraq the American government has tended to see the Shi’a as Good and Sunnis Bad; in Lebanon, on the other hand, the Shi’a are Badder and Sunnis apparently Good; in Egypt Mubarak the Crook is Bad but the Muslim Brotherhood is Even Badder — and of course the Freedom and Tomorrow Parties Are Okay But Perhaps Too Ineffectual to Hold the Muslim Brotherhood at Bay. In Syria the Alawite Dictatorship is Bad but Since the Chief Enemy of the Alawites are the Real Muslims and the Alawites Have a Vested Self-Interest in Protecting the Christians within Syria Because The Alawites May Call Themselves Muslims But Non-Alawites Do Not Agree, and Then Perhaps”¦well, at this point we need to take a break. How about a 2-minute time out, and then come back and we will resume?

Okay, everyone here? We”ll wait just a minute, for the last straggler to take his seat.

Just keep in mind, to keep that same mind from reeling, that whatever helps constrain or weaken the hold of Islamic law, with its oppression of women and non-Muslims, is greatly to be desired. That’s it. That should be your anchor, your point of repair, your guiding light. Depending on the place, the means toward that end may vary. In Lebanon, among the various Muslim or quasi-Muslim (Druse) communities, the most fervent in their faith and in their malevolent intentions and acts are now the Shi’a. It is they who, while pretending to be Lebanese patriots, have turned themselves into the handmaidens of Syria and of Iran, treating Lebanon as a large army base and department store where being Syrian means you never have to pay for anything. Ergo, whatever the Shi”a want, they should not get, and that means embargoing weapons, and keeping them from getting money.

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Filed Under: Hugh Fitzgerald


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