I am writing this in an airport lounge somewhere in the United States, and Fareed Zakaria is on CNN explaining it all for us at high volume on the TV overhead. I was doing my best not to pay attention, but I just heard him say, in a piece asserting that al-Qaeda’s influence is waning in the Islamic world, that the recent uprisings all over the Middle East show that Muslims there “want modernity, jobs and democracy more than they want an Islamic caliphate.”
I’m not really surprised that the mainstream media is still peddling such corrosive drivel, but Zakaria might have been kind enough to take even cursory notice of recent stories such as these:
Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links
Muslim Brotherhood rising in Libya, envisions government on “Qur’anic principles”