Blaming Democracy!!

When someone tries to analyze a situation from one angle, you can get to very disturbing conclusions. When you ignore 60 years of conflicts, wars and political maneuvers, and focus on the last few years, you will be misleader. The Middle East conflict is a tool used for leverage by many countries, by the communist block, the imperialists, the pacifiers, the extremists from both side and the dictators of the region. All took benefit from it, but the population of the region. And today someone is trying to blame the current situation on Democracy. In my opinion that's short sighted, but I can't blame the person who wrote the following article. In fact, did the Arab leaders succeed in proofing that Democracy is not the solution?? I think they did :(

FROM GAZA TO LEBANON to Iraq, the Middle East is aflame, and the vaunted free elections that have been held in each country have hardly produced peace, stability or good governance. Some Arabs are now claiming that democracy itself is discredited. That's neither fair nor true.

Democracy is the only path to a government for and by the people. And without the competition of free elections, politicians have no real incentive to enact reform, and citizens have no meaningful way to hold them accountable. But it is simplistic to equate elections with democracy. Nor should Americans expect elections to produce outcomes we approve.

Early this decade, Washington was fiercely opposed to Palestinian elections that would surely have legitimized the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's leadership against his weak rival, Hamas. After Arafat's death, Hamas won elections that were unquestionably free and fair, and this week, Gaza has descended into a fierce civil war. The U.S. applauded the Iraqi and Lebanese elections. Yet sectarian strife, malevolent neighbors and crippling historical legacies have conspired to nullify the resulting democratic gains.

It is often said that were free elections to be held tomorrow, Islamists would sweep into power across the Middle East. That's because Islamists are seen as an antidote to corruption and despotism, and they are organized. So governments such as Egypt's have virtually crushed secular democratic opposition, while the Islamists continue to spread their messages in mosques and underground. Cairo banned Muslim Brotherhood candidates from parliamentary elections last week, beating up poll watchers and turning away voters in heavily Islamist neighborhoods. Such repression is intolerable, of course. Still, the central challenge to the Bush administration's democracy promotion strategy is the inconvenient but pressing question: What does the U.S. do when elections produce leaders who despise the United States, or whom the United States despises?

First, we must practice patience, which has not been a traditional American virtue. It is worth remembering that in U.S. foreign policy, as in medicine, bad outcomes are sometimes inevitable. Elections should not have been expected to cure the poisoning of the Palestinian body politic after 40 years of war, occupation and strife. Elections could not prevent Syria from assassinating Lebanese politicians. And medievalist Al Qaeda has no respect for the ballot. That does not mean balloting should not take place.

Second, the U.S. should reiterate that merely getting elected does not make a government legitimate. Civilized nations also judge each other on the basis of their adherence to the rule of law, political pluralism, minority rights, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech and press and respect for international borders. U.S. support for democratic ideals does not obligate it to recognize a freely elected government of Nazis, genocidal thugs or terrorists.

The Bush administration would be wise to recalibrate its rhetoric and promote more realistic expectations. But it should not retreat from our democratic principles.

source

This reminds me of a joke.
A scientist was studying flies. One part of his experiments is trying to teach a fly to obey his orders. So he uses some lab flies and he noticed that every time he put one of them on a table and said “fly”, it flied :))). Then to make his point, he took one and cut its wings, put it on the table and said “fly”. Obviously it did not, so he went and wrote his conclusion “When you cut the wing of a fly, it becomes deaf” :)))

Al Gore : The dream candidate!

Even in the US, democracy sometimes fails short of reflecting the will of the people through an elected government. Al Gore knows that very well.

Let's say you were dreaming up the perfect stealth candidate for 2008, a Democrat who could step into the presidential race when the party confronts its inevitable doubts about the front runners. You would want a candidate with the grass-roots appeal of Barack Obama—someone with a message that transcends politics, someone who spoke out loud and clear and early against the war in Iraq. But you would also want a candidate with the operational toughness of Hillary Clinton—someone with experience and credibility on the world stage.

In other words, you would want someone like Al Gore—the improbably charismatic, Academy Award–winning, Nobel Prize–nominated environmental prophet with an army of followers and huge reserves of political and cultural capital at his command. There's only one problem. The former Vice President just doesn't seem interested. He says he has "fallen out of love with politics," which is shorthand for both his general disgust with the process and the pain he still feels over the hard blow of the 2000 election, when he became only the fourth man in U.S. history to win the popular vote but lose a presidential election. In the face of wrenching disappointment, he showed enormous discipline—waking up every day knowing he came so close, believing the Supreme Court was dead wrong to shut down the Florida recount but never talking about it publicly because he didn't want Americans to lose faith in their system. That changes a man forever.
Source



His new book "Assault On Reason", is a proof that this country needs someone like him to put it on the right path. Too bad, he is not interested!! Here is an excerpt.
A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.
More

نزار قباني :حوار مع ملك المغول

أهدي هذه القصيدة إلي عبد الكريم نبيل سليمان و إلي كلّ مساجين الراي العامّ في كلّ مكان و إلي كلّ من تحدّوا الطّغيان و لم يخيّروا الكتمان و وقفوا في وسط الميدان ليعبّروا علي آرائهم

يا ملك المغول ..

يا وارث الجزمه والكرباج عن جدّك أرطغولْ

يا من ترانا كلنّا خيولْ..

لا فرق- من نوافذ القصور-

بين الناس والخيولْ..

يا ملك المغولْ ..

يا أيها الغاضب من صهيلنا..

يا أيهل الخائف من تفتّح الحقولْ..

أريد أن أـقول:

من قبل أن يقتلني سيّافكم مسرورْ..

وقبل أن يأتي شهود الزورْ..

أريد أن أقول كلمتينْ

لزوجت يالحامل من شهورْ..

وأصدقائي كلّهم..

وشعبي المقهورْ..

أريد أن أقول انّي شاعر

أحمل في حنجرتي عصفور

أرفض أن أبيعه..

وأنت من حنجرتي

تريد أن تصادر العصفورْ..

يا ملك المغولْ..

يا قاهر الجيوش يا مدحرج الرؤوس..

يا مدوّخ البحورْ..

يا عاجن الحديد يا مفتت الصخور

يا آكل الأطفال

يا مغتصب الأبكار

يا مفترس العطور

واعجبي ... واعجبي

أأنت , والشرطة , والجيش

على عصفور

Free Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman!

Nabil, wearing a gray T-shirt and sitting in the defendants pen, gave no reaction and his face remained still as the verdict was read. He made no comment to reporters as he was immediate led outside to a prison truck.

Seconds after he was loaded into the truck and the door closed, an Associated Press reporter heard the sound of a slap from inside the vehicle and a shriek of pain from Nabil.

It is really a shame that blogging could get you to jail in our times. The official causes are “defaming the President of Egypt” and “insulting Islam.”. So what??? is it better for the Egyptian government or any other arabic government to deal with this international PR crisis than to let this guy say what he wants?

This mean, that you can get executed in these countries because it could be treason next time, not defamation. Obviously the intent is to scare and threaten, but we all know that others will step up and speak, so will they put them all in jail??

Nizar Kabani was so right on in his poems, may he rest in peace.

Globalisation aspects.

While surfing on OpenDemocracy.net, I came across this interview of Zygmunt Bauman a Polish born sociologist and emeritus professor of Leeds and Warsaw University. For those who are already jumping to conclusions, this is a non-practicing jewish, but I don't think that is relevant to what he's saying. I invite whoever is interested in the globalisation to read this full interview of which I'm reproducing just this 2 questions. I'm very interested in your reaction on this.



Lukasz Galecki: How do you define the borders of globalisation?
Zygmunt Bauman: Globalisation is not a process taking place somewhere far away in some exotic place. Globalisation is taking place in Leeds as well as in Warsaw, in New York and in any small town in Poland. It is just outside your window, but inside as well. It is enough to walk down the street to see it. Global and local spaces can be separated only as an abstraction, in reality they are intertwined.
The main trouble is that the globalisation we are dealing with today is strictly negative. It is based on the breaking down of barriers, allowing for the globalisation of capital, the movement of goods, information, crime, and terrorism, but not of the political and judicial institutions whose basis is national sovereignty. This negative aspect of globalisation has not been followed by the positive aspect, and the instruments of regulation over economic and social processes are not established enough to deal with the reach and consequences of globalisation.
[...]

Lukasz Galecki: The war against the west has been waged in the name of the Russian soul, the Germanic race, communism, and now Islam. But Occidentalism, as an ideology of hate against the west – and when based on religious grounds – turns into a holy war against an absolute evil. In this holy war, true believers must destroy the false god of western materialism with all the powers and means they have at their disposal. Can such a war be won?
Zygmunt Bauman : Which came first, the chicken or the egg? We are facing much more than a politicising of religion, whether Muslim or any other. The issue is the “religionising” of politics, where the normal conflict of group interests is regarded as an eschatological matter, and the confrontation of these interests as having an apocalyptic character.
This is a longing for certainty in an unstable world. It is an escape from extremely complicated problems we cannot even name. It is a longing for the “great simplification”. It is nostalgia for a lost, simple world and the elementary array of tasks within this world.
In this general cacophony – where serious debate about the state of affairs almost never takes place, in which television shows have actors in front of the footlights shouting slogans at one another and using “word-bites” as weapons – one needs some kind of certainty. It can take the form of a simple division between good and evil, in which our hearts are immaculate, and the evildoers are condemned for they have no hope of redemption.
Islam has no monopoly on this vision. Both Palestinian and Israeli radicals, amazingly, use the same sort of vocabulary. Each side presents their conflict as an ultimate clash, not between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, but between Jehovah and Mohammed. A similar kind of vocabulary is present in news coverage of the 2004 American election, although the gods being worshipped had different names. But one must admit that in this vast current of today’s Manicheism, Islam – for geopolitical reasons – has occupied a very important position.