After two years
the Arab Spring revolution has developed a bitter aftertaste.
Unemployment is up and corruption is still around in countries where the
rebels succeeded. The incompetent and abusive police forces are still
on the job in those nations. While the government has changed, the
families that control most of the economy are still around. This
concentration of economic power in a few families is common in many
countries, particularly in the Arab world. The problem with the Arab
Spring is that the focus was the anger was too narrow, concentrating on
the current dictators and not the fundamental problems that allowed all
those dictators to flourish in the first place.
Islamic radicalism has been a part of Islam since the
beginning but has never been able to sustain control over governments.
That’s in large part because Moslems are divided over whether it is
better to be ruled by a religious dictatorship and according to Islamic
law (interpreted by religious scholars who act as a final appeals court)
or by some other system. Islamic radicals consider the alternatives
(secular dictatorship, monarchy and democracy) un-Islamic. Many Arab
countries had tried secular dictatorship (usually accompanied by
socialism) after World War II. This turned out to be a major failure and
most of the Arab Spring governments overthrown were secular
dictatorships. Monarchies have been more successful as they have been
the oldest and most successful form of government in the region.
Democracy has had a hard time in the Middle East because it requires a
civil society (people willing to work honestly for the common good) and
the pervasive corruption in the region made that very difficult. The
religious dictatorship has never worked, also done in by the corruption
and tribalism but it has survived as an impossible idea.
The big change has been the tolerant attitude towards Islamic
radicalism by the new Arab Spring governments. A major reason for the
renewed vigor of Islamic terror organizations in the last year is
because the Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian, and Tunisian jails were emptied of
political prisoners after the rebels replaced the dictators. The freed
prisoners included thousands of Islamic radicals, many of them Islamic
terrorists who have gone back to the business of being very bad.
Even the Islamic conservatives, who tended to stay out of jail
by toning down their religious and social prejudices, have become a
problem. Mobs of Islamic conservative men have been attacking women’s
schools and any establishment that serves alcohol (even if mainly to
tourists). Women who don’t dress very conservatively are confronted and
sometimes beaten. These Islamic conservative groups want Islamic law
imposed on everyone and are not waiting for laws to be passed. Anyone
who opposes this vigilantism is accused of being hostile to Islam and
attacked even more vigorously.
Most of the Islamic terrorists let out of prison were those
who had experience, especially management skills. In the last decade the
U.S. and Israel have put thousands of skilled Islamic terrorists out of
action (dead or imprisoned). Arab dictatorships were particularly
effective at finding and killing to imprisoning Islamic radicals and
have been doing this vigorously since the 1990s. All this led to a
steady decline in the number of Islamic terrorist attacks over the last
decade. But with so many jailed Islamic terrorists freed, the mayhem is
on the increase again.
Already, police in Arab countries are seeking to arrest some
of those freed radicals for crimes committed since they got out, or for
general bad behavior over a long period of time. Despite that
experience, countries still undergoing Arab Spring rebellions (like
Syria) are under pressure to let Islamic radicals out of prison once the
dictatorship is overthrown. In part this is because many Islamic
radical groups are taking part in the fighting and expect to get
something more than a “thank you” for their efforts. Indeed, Syrian
rebels are concerned about the Islamic radicals attempting to install a
religious dictatorship after the current secular Assad dictatorship is
overthrown. Whatever the case, Islamic radicals expect a new government
to let imprisoned Islamic terrorists to go free.
Even if the new
government wants to keep Islamic terrorists and criminals imprisoned,
the chaos that accompanies a revolution often leads to many jail breaks.
Moreover, many of the non-terrorist criminals and political prisoners
are recruited into Islamic radical groups while in prison. Western and
Arab intelligence agencies are identifying more and more of these former
prisoners in terrorist hot sports like Pakistan, Yemen, Mali, and
Libya, including those who were not originally jailed for Islamic
terrorism.
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