robinshepherdonline.com
02 February '11
Here are two sets of statistics that you have never been informed about by the BBC, and have never heard from the mouth of a senior official in the British Foreign Office: According to a major opinion poll survey conducted by Pew in 2006, 97 percent of Egyptians admitted to holding “somewhat unfavourable” or “very unfavourable” opinions about Jews while none (zero percent) said they had favourable opinions about Jews; in Jordan 98 percent said they had unfavourable opinions with one percent holding favourable opinions.
Those figures tell you much about why genuine, liberal democracy is going to be so difficult to achieve in Egypt (ditto Jordan), while also telling you just how harmful to the prospects of genuine MidEast peace have been the appeasement/stability-at-all-costs oriented policies of Western governments and the assumptions which have underpinned them.
This is a complex issue, and the key points are rarely spelled out. So let me think aloud in front of you. My thoughts, as you will see, are not yet fully formed on this. So, I welcome your contributions in the comment section. Here goes for starters, in question and answer form:
Q) Why is mass anti-Semitism incompatible with genuine liberal democracy?
A) Because anti-Semitism represents an emphatic rejection of the universalist principles which underpin liberal-democracy. This is why anti-Semitism can emerge as a mortal danger to non-Jews as well as Jews. The social, cultural and political forces unleashed by anti-Semitism are inherently antithetical to the classical liberal values of the Enlightenment. They are also antithetical to reason itself. All polities dominated by virulent anti-Semitism will therefore struggle to produce liberal-democratic outcomes. Some will produce extreme tyrannies. Christopher Hitchens was hinting at precisely these thoughts in the following remarks made in an article for Slate in February 2006: “…only a moral cretin thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The memory of the Third Reich is very vivid in Europe precisely because a racist German regime also succeeded in slaughtering millions of non-Jews, including countless Germans, under the demented pretext of extirpating a non-existent Jewish conspiracy.”
Q) So, given the presence of both mass anti-Semitism in Egypt and, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, a major political movement ready to hone down and exploit this anti-Semitism, is liberal-democracy impossible in Egypt?
A) It depends on whether and to what extent anti-Semitism becomes a dominant theme in the political discourse in the manner that it has long been a dominant theme in the cultural and religious discourse. But given the near ubiquity of anti-Semitism in mainstream society, the great danger is that anti-Semitism will become an ideological mainstay of whatever new regime emerges. Here’s how it might unfold: The Muslim Brotherhood becomes part of a government dominated (initially) by Egyptian nationalists. Anti-Semitism emerges as the common denominator holding these two forces together. In political terms this leads to a much more hostile approach to Israel. During a flashpoint, like Operation Cast Lead for example, the Islamists demand direct support for Hamas. The nationalist constituency opposes such a move thus handing the initiative to the Brotherhood which discredits its opponents by portraying them as agents of the US-Zionist conspiracy. At this point we get an Islamist takeover.
Clearly, all of this is scenario building. I do not have a crystal ball. But I challenge anyone to say that this is not one possible outcome of the process of change now underway in Egypt.
Q) If it’s really that dangerous, wouldn’t it be better to have Mubarak?
A) No. And no again! The western policy of supporting dictatorships such as Mubarak’s over the decades has been disastrous and has made the problem far worse than it might have been if a more enlightened approach had been adopted. The price of supporting these dictatorships has been to ignore or play down mass bigotry inside Middle Eastern societies thus precluding any chance whatsoever of addressing it. Worse, Mubarak and his fellow dictators in the Middle East have used hatred of Jews as a safety valve to be turned on and off whenever social and political discontent needed a way to let off steam. It is crucial to understand the point: by backing Mubarak and company, Western governments have contributed to the very situation we are now faced with. They helped incubate anti-Semitism by backing a regime which has used anti-Semitism to sustain itself. In addition to all this, the fact that Western democracies have supported dictatorship for so long in the region has inevitably discredited the democratic ideal in the eyes of many ordinary people. This has given the initiative to the Islamists.
Q) This is all very well. Yes, we should have adopted different strategies in the past. But we can’t turn the clock back. We have to deal with the issue of the day. Shouldn’t we have given Mubarak more support in order to forestall the possibility of an Islamist takeover?
A) Think it through. The fall of Mubarak was inevitable. The Mubarak dictatorship has fallen because of mass domestic discontent which came together after the revolution in Tunisia. By the time matters came to a head there was nothing the West could have done to save him anyway. Oh wait. I hear a counter argument: We could have stopped the fall of Mubarak if we had invaded Tunisia to prop up the dictatorship in that country. That would have stopped the first domino falling. And even if we were too late to save the dictatorship in Tunisia we could have invaded Egypt itself. We could then have positioned the British Army and the US Marines at key points in Cairo and machine gunned Egyptian pro-democracy protestors by the thousand. Hell, if that didn’t work, we could have nuked them!
Come on. If you’re saying that we should have stuck by Mubarak, please explain how precisely we could have kept him in power. And I’m not interested in vague answers here. Think it through and tell me what practical measures you would have liked us to have taken.
Q) So what do we do?
A) We have no choice but to support the democratic process wholeheartedly and publicly. We should use every opportunity to give the democratically oriented sections of Egyptian society the best possible chance of success. We can offer strengthened trade relations with Europe and the United States. We can give funding to civil society organisations. We can offer legitimacy to the most western oriented candidates when the elections finally come. We can stress that we will have nothing whatever to do with the Muslim Brotherhood, and that anti-Semitism must be combatted and destroyed. We should simultaneously give an absolute security guarantee through NATO to the State of Israel. This would make it very clear to Egyptian society that the extreme anti-Zionism of the Muslim Brotherhood can never bring anything other than disaster on their country, while simultaneously doing our duty to the one true liberal democracy in the Middle East.
So, that’s where I am on the events in Egypt. Thoughts?
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