PARADOX? (Via ESR: Musings):

Where is the Middle East’s Sakharov (ASLA AYDINTASBAS, Jerusalem Post: Upfront)

Historian Bernard Lewis explains this as the great paradox of the modern Middle East: the so-called moderate regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have populations irate with anti-American and anti-Western sentiments, while among the people in rogue regimes like Iran, Iraq and Syria, there is sympathy for the West and support for the new American mantra for regime change.

Skeptical? Go take a cab in Teheran — where the drivers feel free to curse at the government in front of a total stranger and move on to discuss ways Iranians could achieve freedoms.

In fact President George W. Bush’s speech earlier this month about promoting democracy in the Middle East could not have arrived at a better time for the Middle East. Predictably, the Arab (and European) media dismissed Bush’s idealism; scoffed at his mea culpa; banished the call for freedoms as a smoke screen to cover up the US occupation of Iraq. No surprises here.

Instead of self-criticism, the official Middle East and its intelligentsia would rather revel in discussions of America’s past support for Saddam, the looting at the Baghdad archeological museum, the failures to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, how the US companies are milking Iraqi oil, and so forth.

BUT WHAT cannot be ignored by anyone is the quiet beginnings of an uprising against autocratic, repressive, and corrupt governments in the various corners of the Middle East and the Muslim world. The fact that practically all Muslim nations — with the exception of Turkey and perhaps Bangladesh — are run by regimes that are characterized as anti-democratic is an abomination first and foremost to Muslims. And we know it.

"Any regime that represses is bad. But a dictatorship that combines state and religion is especially unacceptable. There is nothing Islamic about this," Hussein Khomeini, a Shiite cleric and the grandson terrible of Iran’s revolutionary radical Ayatollah Khomeini, told me a few months ago in New York. He looked exactly like his grandfather, but could he possibly be any further from the man who gave us the Islamic revolution?

Mr. Khomeini is certainly right where Shi'a Islam is concerned, but it seems an open question whether Sunni Islam, as currently understood in most of the Middle East is inherently totalitarian.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 23, 2003 1:25 PM