When I started warning last winter that Islamic supremacists were in the best position to take advantage of the uprisings in Tunisia (and Egypt), I was enunciating a minority view. One commenter here at Jihad Watch asserted that “these revolts are spontaneous outbursts against the ruling elite. There is not one shred of evidence of any Islamist involvement.” Another’s scorn was intense: “You are taking advantage of the ignorance of your readers to spoon feed them this nonsense about jihad in tunisia [sic] while the Tunisian people are clamoring for democracy and freedom.”
These comments are indicative of a tendency: Islamic supremacists generally charge their opponents with “ignorance” and treat them with arrogance and contempt, even when those upon whom they are heaping contempt are correct, and even when the Islamic supremacists know that they are correct.
And so on this yet again: I tried to tell you. “Tunisian secularists nervous over slow change, concerned about Islamists,” from Reuters, July 13:
Secularists hope Tunisia’s gradual approach for moving to an open political system from a police state will help box in Islamists but it has created a political and security vacuum that could end up helping them. Tunisians forced out president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali via street protests in December and January, and over 90 political parties have sprung up in the newly freed public space.
Secular parties, policy-makers and Western powers are preparing for a future where the leading Islamist party Ennahda, driven abroad and underground by Ben Ali, is a key force in the North African country but working out how to limit its impact.
“There are colossal suspicions about Ennahda. No one believes their commitment to democracy and pluralism. Their discourse in Arabic is very different to their discourse in French, particularly in rural areas,” said George Joffe, a politics professor at Cambridge University. He said the fear was not just of its Islamist platform but of a gradual slip into the one-party authoritarianism of the previous era if one better-organized group dominates….
“There is a reasonable chance Ennahda will emerge the strongest party but not having a majority. The best guess is there will be a secular-center left majority in parliament,” a Western diplomat said….