Robert Fisk
So when the Arabs cry out for the very future
that Obama outlined, we show them disrespect.
Robert Fisk
Guardian (
February 10, 2011
There is nothing like an Arab revolution to show up the
hypocrisy of your friends. Especially if that
revolution is one of civility and humanism and powered
by an overwhelming demand for the kind of democracy
that we enjoy in Europe and
nonsense uttered by Obama and La Clinton these past two
weeks is only part of the problem. From "stability" to
"perfect storm" - Gone With the Wind might have
recommended itself to the State Department if they
really must pilfer
moral values in the
the presidential "now-means-yesterday", and "orderly
transition", which translates
force General Mubarak is put out to graze so that ex-
intelligence General Suleiman can take over the regime
on behalf of
Fox News has already told its viewers in
the Muslim Brotherhood - about the "softest" of
Islamist groups in the
brave men and women who have dared to resist the state
security police, while the mass of French
"intellectuals" (the quotation marks are essential for
poseurs like Bernard-Henri Lévy have turned, in Le
Monde's imperishable headline, into "the intelligentsia
of silence".
And we all know why. Alain Finkelstein talks about his
"admiration" for the democrats but also the need for
"vigilance" - and this is surely a low point for any
'philosophe' - "because today we know above all that we
don't know how everything is going to turn out." This
almost Rumsfeldian quotation is gilded by Lévy's own
preposterous line that "it is essential to take into
account the complexity of the situation". Oddly enough
that is exactly what the Israelis always say when some
misguided Westerner suggests that
stealing Arab land in the
Indeed
in
only democracy in the
implausible as it has been self-defeating.
be much safer surrounded by real democracies than by
vicious dictators and autocratic kings. To his enormous
credit, the French historian Daniel Lindenberg told the
truth this week. "We must, alas, admit the reality
many intellectuals believe, deep down, that the Arab
people are congenitally backward."
There is nothing new in this. It applies to our
subterranean feelings about the whole Muslim world.
Chancellor Merkel of
multiculturalism doesn't work, and a pretender to the
Bavarian royal family told me not so long ago that
there were too many Turks in
didn't want to be part of German society". Yet when
democracy as you can find in the
- asks to join the European Union and share our Western
civilisation, we search desperately for any remedy,
however racist, to prevent her membership.
In other words, we want them to be like us, providing
they stay away. And then, when they prove they want to
be like us but don't want to invade
best to install another American-trained general to
rule them. Just as Paul Wolfowitz reacted to the
Turkish parliament's refusal to allow US troops to
invade
generals don't have something to say about this", we
are now reduced to listening while US defence secretary
Robert Gates fawns over the Egyptian army for their
"restraint" - apparently failing to realise that it is
the people of
should be praised for their restraint and non-violence,
not a bunch of brigadiers.
So when the Arabs want dignity and self-respect, when
they cry out for the very future which Obama outlined
in his famous - now, I suppose, infamous -
of June 2009, we show them disrespect and casuistry.
Instead of welcoming democratic demands, we treat them
as a disaster. It is an infinite relief to find serious
American journalists like Roger Cohen going "behind the
lines" on
about this hypocrisy of ours. It is an unmitigated
disgrace when their leaders speak. Macmillan threw
aside colonial pretensions of African unpreparedness
for democracy by talking of the "wind of change". Now
the wind of change is blowing across the Arab world.
And we turn our backs upon it.
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