10/06/11
Arab Spring, My Foot: How the Autocrats Are Winning Marty Peretz
Or, better yet, “my ass.” The Arab Spring
has been with us for nearly three quarters of a year. This is not a long time as
history goes. But the annual flowers of the spare land have long ago vanished
into the crude, mostly gritty sand that is the Middle East. It’s not, though, as
if it is at all back to “normal” in the Arab world. And, frankly, we haven’t the
slightest about what normal in the Arab world is or will be. The Muslims and the
Jews and the increasingly scarce but differentiated Christians who constituted
the region lived (and live) recreant lives. For centuries it was the People of
the Book who were put on edge or to death, mostly for what they believed and
also for what crimes the authorities fantasized they had committed. (In this way
the Jews of the Near East—near where, exactly?—lived lives on the edge much as
they did in Christendom. Of course, if there are maybe 2,000 Jews now in all the
Arab lands, it would stun me. The near-million there were are now mostly in
Israel, God bless them, and in Western countries which, God bless them, welcomed
them, even France, like brothers and sisters, a new enunciation of fraternité.)
The Peoples of the Cross were likewise persecuted—but sometimes the powerful
states of Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, were able to extend a cloak of
protection around Christian communities of the Levant. Though not, of course,
around the Armenians. Or, for that matter, not around the Kurds either, who,
mostly Sunni, some Shia, were in the Islamic orbit but distanced from that
orbit’s—let’s face it—zealotry.Continue Reading "Arab Spring, My Foot"
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