You know, you and I have disagreed explicitly on a few subjects already and there are a few other issues you’ve expressed that I don’t agree with (and I’m sure there are others…) But goddamn it’s good to see someone arguing the issues who actually knows what they’re talking about.
Most people here wouldn’t know Qutb from Quadaffi, and that wouldn’t stop them or even slow down their arguments.
Thanks for deciding to post here.
The Turkish government is Islamist and they’re one of Israel’s allies though relations have been strained after Israel killed several Turkish citizens during the Gaza Flotilla debacle.
Islamism is a big concept that can encompass many different things.
That said, if the Muslim Brotherhood does gain power it’s more likely to be a part of a coalition government.
I also suspect the new Egyptian government won’t sever ties with Israel but will probably put a lot of pressure on Israel to make more concessions.
You’re welcome.
Jordan’s a monarchy and both Iraq and Afganistan have … somewhat limited autonomy these days.
These are not the best examples of what an Islamist state, free to its own devices, would look like. Even so, neither the Afgan nor Iraqi gov’t are shining examples one would hope to see emulated - though to be fair, their troubles have little to do with Islamism on their parts, specifically.
Turkey is an odd case, because there the army is avowadly the guardian of a tradition of Attaturk-style secularism, which is also built-in to the legal structure. An Islamicist gov’t has to tread warily in Turkey - so far, there is still an ongoing controversy over the banning of headscarf-wearing, for example.
That’s not the point I’m making, tarring Islamist parties as not having the same interests as the US is fallicious.
And as pointed out, I doubt highly even if Islamists were elected in Egypt they would be free to their own devices anyway.
Well, my concern is not so much that Islamicists will oppose US interests, but rather that they would generally be horrible in multiple ways.
But if it was - I’d certainly not choose two countries which happen to be occupied by US troops as examples. Whatever the feelings of the gov’ts of Iraq and Afganistan, they have no real choice but to go along with ‘US interests’, at least to an extent.
That isn’t a good guide to how a country not similarly constrained would act.
Do tell. 
Well, Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood so they’re bound to give some support to Hamas.
What about Indonesia? It toppled its dictator and ‘suffers’ the Islamists just as much as we do.
In Indonesia, the Islamist parties are a minority. The issue here is not toleration of Islamist political parties within a mnore-or-less democratic system with plenty of counterbalances - like in Turkey or Indonesia - but the potential for a take-over of a state by an Islamist group, who has professed its loyalty to democratic principles in a made-for-Western-consumption section of a website, but whose actual interest in sharing power may, when put to the test, be dubious.
If faced with a choice - create an Islamic state, or lose power to secular parties - it is not utterly irrational or out-of-line with historical precident to see them taking power for the “greater good”, particularly if they are the only organized faction among the protestors. It is often forgotten that, in Iran, the revolution was as much secular-socialist as it was Islamic - as here, the protestors initially simply wanted the hated Shah gone. After the revolution succeeded in that, the Islamists - much more organized and rutheless than their secular “co-revolutionaries” - quickly cracked down and imposed their will, murdering or jailing their now-opponents, leading to the Iranian state we all know and love today.
Now, Egypt isn’t Iran, and there are plenty of differences between the two. Not least of which is the attitude of the Egyptian army, which may well prove decisive. Also, the Muslim Brotherhood is supposed by many to be much more moderate in its operations. But how moderate it will stay with the dictator-du-jour no longer cracking the whip over them it is hard to say.
I’d say it’s fairly unlikely a new Egyptian government will maintain the current Gaza policy intact (probably regardless of if it’s an actual democratic government, secular or Islamist, or a thinly-veiled military regime).
Gaah. So many arguably correct ways to spell his name, but that isn’t one.
Just to keep all this in its proper perspective:
. . . Vimes put on his helmet. “And what’re the dwarfs like?”
“The future Low King is considered pretty clever, Your Grace. Mhm.”
“How does he stand on Ankh-Morpork?”
“He can take Ankh-Morpork or leave it alone, Your Grace. On balance, I believe he doesn’t much like us.”
“I thought it was Albrecht that didn’t like us?”
“No, Your Grace. Albrecht is the one who would be happy to see Ankh-Morpork burned to the ground. Rhys merely wishes we didn’t exist.”
“I thought he was one of the good guys!”
“Your Grace, I did hear you express some negative sentiments about Ankh-Morpork on the way here, mhm, mhm.”
“Yes, but I live there! I’m allowed to! That’s patriotic!”
“Across the whole of the world, Your Grace, there inexplicably appear to be definitions of, mmm, mhm, ‘good guy’ which do not automatically mean ‘likes Ankh-Morpork.’ . . .”
– The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett
Heh, it seems that the rioters in Egypt are set on re-inventing medieval warfare.
I heard (Drudgereport) that the Muslim Brotherhood are demading that Egypt abrogate its peace treaty with Israel.
This could be serious.
Emnity with Israel has always been a major plank of the Muslim Brotherhood’s platform. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It’s highly unlikely that they will, at least under any interim government headed by ElBaradei. He opposes blockading Hamas to keep weapons from them and he opposed Israel’s strike on Syria’s nuclear reactor (the one that Syria quietly let slip below the waves of the global news circuit).
At the very least, Hamas re-arming during a cessation of a blockade seems likely, and coupled with strong MB support in Egypt…
Now is a very precarious time for the stability of the Middle East. Of course Egypt should be free and prosperous. But a renewed Hamas-Israel war, especially if Egypt gets dragged in, would be devastating.
Five years of civil war would have made it clear to anybody in the new Iranian regime that one group taking control in Lebanon was a non-starter. And it’s not like Iran had any capability to do it. They did all they could do which was give support to Shiite groups in Lebanon, but they could only provide a fraction of the funding America put in there.
And yes you can debate whether the Shah was worse than the mullahs. To Iranian people who did OK under the Shah’s regime and whose families are now living in Los Angeles or New York then for those people obviously the mullahs were worse. For a lot of people in Iran who still support the revolution, and the counter demonstrations to the attempted youth revolution in Iran show a sizeable minority still do, the mullahs are obviously better than the Shah.
Kermit Roosevelt did indeed write a book called Countercoup which I’ve mentioned here before. While he says that the coup was to prevent any possibility of Iran becoming allied with Moscow he also makes clear that the only reason anybody was worried about this was because of Iran’s oil. If two-thirds of the world’s oil was located in five countries around the Sahara desert instead of five countries around the Arabian desert then the Saharan desert region would have been the subject of endless machinations of the great powers over the last century instead of the Middle East, and the Middle East would have recieved as much attention as America has actually given to sub-Saharan Africa over the same period. Mauritania could have threatened to go communist in 1953 and nobody would have given a shit. But Iran, the world’s third-largest oil reserve…
The demands of the Zionist entity on US regional policy coincide a lot with America’s number one aim, controlling the oil. They both like friendly clients in Arab capitals. In 1948 the five oil countries were bought and paid for by US/British interests, basically wholly-ownwd subsidiaries. America was in a position to do exactly what she wanted to.
I don’t care how many times more you’ve been to Lebanon than me, I’m happy to let the results of the poll stand for themselves despite how much anecdotal evidence I’m sure you have about how much everybody hates the mighty Hezbollah. Both of us could make all sorts of anecdotal claims here but the one thing people can check for sure is the poll. I wonder if 80% of Lebanese agree on any other single subject, or even 50. I’m not really interested in anything that Hezbollah, peace be upon them, do outside of the thing they do best. And their logo. I really like it on my nice yelloe T-shirt.
Have a nice weekend wherever you are.
Well, if you want to continue digging a hole for yourself by saying that the Iranian regimes support for Hezbollah had nothing to do with Khomeini’s beliefs and was simply a desire to strike back at Israel and the US you can but no serious expert on Iran or Lebanon will agree with you.
To anyone who thinks he’s right, I’d recommend reading up on Khomeini and read both his writings and speeches.
I’m sorry, but that is an asinine argument. You think the “counter demonstrations” which were organized by the government are “proof” of how popular the Mullahs are.
By that standard than the Shah was even more popular since his regime had much larger “demonstrations” supporting him.
Now, just so we’re clear, you think that the Mullahs are better than the Shah despite the fact that the Mullah:
A. During the 80s put ten to fifteen times as many political prisoners in jail as the Shah ever did.
B. Stoned women to death for adultery. Something the Shah never did.
**C. **Set up and gave law enforcement powers to the Committee for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue and gave them the authority to set up sting operations to catch, torture, and execute Iranians for being gay. By contrast, Iran of the 60s and 70s under the Shah was far more gay-friendly than the US of that time period.
**D. **Caused virtually all of Iran’s Jewish population flee and then forbade the remainder from leaving and took dramatic steps to prevent them from doing so. Occasionally locks up various Jewish leaders on trumped up charges of being spies. Also dramatically cracked down on Iran’s Christian minority. This is a dramatic reversal of the Shah, where Jews and Christians were treated much better.
**E. **Aggressively has tried to hunt down and persecute every member of the Bahai faith, causing them to have to go into hiding lest they be murdered. While the Shah hardly treated them equally, he was never remotely this horrible.
F. Has imposed a number of morality laws on the Iranian people dramatically restricting their personal freedom. The most famous of which has been laws requiring women to wear the Chador. The Shah never did anything remotely like this.
Now, with all of that, you have the gall to claim that the Mullahs are “better” than the Shah and you’re only evidence for this is the “counter demonstrations” that occurred during the Green Revolution. This despite the fact that those “counter demonstrations” were smaller than similar ones the Shah had.
Frankly, I’m confused that you feel this way.
I thought you were a leftist.
Leftists generally don’t like governments that stone women for adultery, hunt down and execute gays, persecute religious minorities, require women to cover their hair and throw hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in jail.
Why are you giving Iran such a pass and saying it was better than the previous regime which did nothing of that(except for the political prisoners, except in that case it was far, far fewer).
Please list me what horrors the Shah inflicted on the Iranian people that weren’t inflicted on them by the Islamic regime.
If you think most Iranian-Americans support the Shah you know even less about them then you do about Iran. For starters, the Iranian Jews of Beverly Hills and other parts of LA are lots of things, but they’re not going to be enthusiastic supporters of the Shah. The same is true for Iran’s Armenian expatriates.
Moreover, most Iranian-American Muslims aren’t fans of the Shah. My father hated the Shah and left Iran with myself and my mother before he fell.
I’m sorry, but you’ve made the extremely foolish decision that because for a brief period in 2006 there was a large amount of good will for the Hezbollah amongst Lebanese Sunni and Christians. That’s comparable to assuming that because the IDF was popular among the Lebanese Shia during the initial Israeli invasion in the 80s they’re popular now.
Now, since you’re a big believer in polls, you might want to check out polling done by the Pew Research organization just a few months ago.
It found that 84% of all Lebanese Sunnis and 79% of all Lebanese Christians had unfavorable views of Hezbollah.
Sorry, but your information about “the mighty Hezbollah” is grossly outdated.
I would recommend talking to actual Lebanese Christians and Sunnis before foolishly assuming you know how they feel and assume they view the Hezbollah the same way you do.
By “the thing they do best” do you mean kill Jews or intimidate anyone who disagrees with them?
Anyway, fair enough, you freely admit that you don’t care about them being a violently bigoted organization.
I’m sorry that I assumed you were an opponent of bigotry. You seem to be indicating that you have no objection to bigotry. My mistake.