My opinion on the Egyptian Crisis

As everyone should know by now, Egypt is burning. Without any useless rhetoric, I'd like to just cut to the chase of what's going on. There are some dynamics here that need underlining. The Egyptian people are attempting to oust President Hosni Mubarak, because he is guilty of not promoting democracy, holding fixed elections, subjugating political opposition, backing police brutality, being responsible for various economic grievances, and corruption. On the face of it, this seems bad. Our moral outrage triggers right away, and we listen with impatience to any reasons (excuses, we'd say would be a better word) someone might have to not be on the protester's/rioter's side.



But as usual, it's probably more complicated than that. We all love democracy. The idea spawned from within a Western context, rife with Western sentiments of equality, fraternity, justice for all, liberty. It was an idea that spawned from a Western cultural context. We are sure that if the process is ran in this context, that - given the right checks and balances - we'd get a leader who would compliment Western sentiments, and who would try to the best of his ability to represent our worries and desires. When things get complicated is when we try to dislocate this idea from its cultural context and relocate it within a cultural context in which it probably won't find a home. By analogy, when monarchy was imposed from without by the English, as yet American sentiments ousted it in the Revolutionary War. American culture differed from English culture and we resisted and gained independence.

If we failed, and the English won, then, because of the cultural divide, there would be political and demographic unrest until the English sentiments prevailed, or until American sentiment won out in the form of a change in English sentiment or another war where America won instead. When I look at Egypt, I see a country whose government shares Western sentiments; but they also see that the governed primarily do not. Seeing this, they reason that if they let the democratic process go, leaders would be elected that would end democracy in the long run. A huge majority of the population are members of The Muslim Brotherhood. Their main goal is to re-institute the caliphate and have that Caliph rule in accordance with Shari'ah law, a form of theocracy, not democracy, a rule that they want to extend from Spain to Indonesia. Usually, the members of The Brotherhood aren't nice Muslims who keep to themselves; they are the aggressive ones, the intolerant ones, the ones who wouldn't be accepting of many religions, free speech, and basically all of the Western privileges we enjoy over here.

A pattern I see is that dictators are tolerated if they are Western allies and because the West sees that if they were to topple, an aggressive anti-Western, pro-Muslim government would certainly arise, extremely intolerant of all the Western sentiments we hold dear, such as free speech, women's rights, etc. So, these governments are tolerated to keep a constant hose on this smoldering danger. But then these subjugated Muslims can USE democratic rhetoric to denounce the behavior of their governments. For example, free speech. Yes, Egyptian government doesn't really have much free speech; but they have more than if Egypt was ruled by a Caliph. That's the best they're going to have because all the Egyptian government has to work with are these anti-Western sentiments of the ruled.

My opinion is that the stability of the middle east depends on tolerating these governments that might not be completely democratic; but they are our allies in combating the sentiments of intolerant and aggressive Islam, who, if given free reign to the democratic process, would elect someone sympathetic to the Caliphate, and would therefore be ruinous to any of the little freedoms they enjoyed lately. This effort to foist uninhibited democracy on the middle east is a sham, a futile operation not sensitive to the reality that, culturally speaking, people are just plain different from the West.

A final note: I've noticed something that might be an inconsistency with the way Obama is handling this. Remember when the Iranian people had a similar uprising, when there was rioting and protesting because of allegations of electoral fraud regarding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Why would Obama back Ahmadinejad (someone not pro-West by any means) against Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh (someone who IS pro-West), and against the protesters (all of whom were pro-West); but in the Egyptian case, Obama is backing the protesters, the majority of whom are The Muslim Brotherhood, even though Hosni Mubarak is pro-West, and pro-Israel?