Arab liberals - endangered species

[drdon326]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1071541096042

I don't want to list here all the Arab world's political, economic, and social disasters of the last half-century. One should not have to be a genius to see how the existing systems and dominant ideologies - both radical Arab nationalism and revolutionary Islamism - have failed. Equally, the region's poor performances in almost every index for measuring progress have been amply documented.

WHAT is there to counter the status quo? A few hundred, at most, Arab intellectuals writing columns and op-ed pieces with devastating critiques of these problems, and a much larger amount of private muttering about how rotten the situation is for Arabs today. This stands in opposition to powerful regimes with giant armies and massive Islamist movements with many tens of thousands of followers.

Why the disparity? Some of the reasons are apparent:

The strength of repression.

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But foremost reason why this situation persists is due to the real WMD - Weapon of Mass Deception - xenophobic demagoguery: teaching people that everything is the foreigners' fault. It is the systematically exploited hatred of the West in general and of Israel and the US in particular that is the most effective tool of the Arab regimes and their Islamist opponents.

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intelligent article