BURY IT WITH THE EAST EUROPEAN STREET:

The Arab Street: A vanquished cliché (Christopher Hitchens, Feb. 28, 2005, Slate)

In retrospect, it's difficult to decide precisely when this annoying expression began to expire, if only from diminishing returns. There was, first, the complete failure of the said "street" to detonate with rage when coalition forces first crossed the border of Iraq, as had been predicted (and one suspects privately hoped) by so many "experts." But one still continued to hear from commentators who conferred street-level potency on passing "insurgents." (I remember being aggressively assured by an interviewer on Al Franken's quasi-comedic Air America that Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army" in Najaf was just the beginning of a new "Tet Offensive.") Mr. Sadr duly got a couple of seats in the recent Iraqi elections. And it was most obviously those elections that discredited the idea of ventriloquizing the Arab or Muslim populace or of conferring axiomatic authenticity on the loudest or hoarsest voice.

The London-based newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi, which has for some time been a surrogate voice for "insurgent" talk in the Arab diaspora, polled its readers after the Iraqi elections and had the grace to print the result. About 90 percent had been favorably impressed by the sight of Iraqi and Kurdish voters waiting their turn to have a say in their own future. This is a somewhat more accurate use of the demotic thermometer than the promiscuous one to which we have let ourselves become accustomed. Meanwhile, the streets of, say, Beirut have been filled with demonstrators who are entirely fed up with having their lives and opinions taken for granted by parasitic oligarchies. [...]

In the Palestinian elections, boycotted by the Islamists, a fairly solid turnout split the votes between Mahmoud Abbas and Mustapha Barghouti, the latter of whom scored an impressive 20 percent or so for a secular program. Where Hamas has done well in local elections in Gaza, it has been due to grass-roots welfare and social policy as much as to intransigent anti-Zionism, and it's possible to imagine the organization evolving, as has Hezbollah in Lebanon, into a quasi-political party with seats in the assembly. The logic of this, all rhetoric to one side, points largely in one direction.

Other Muslim streets are even more problematic for those who lazily assume that the jihadists are the voice of the unheard. The populations of Bosnia and Kosovo—populations that actually did have to confront anti-Muslim violence on a large scale—are generally hostile to Bin-Ladenism. Nobody has ever used the term "Iranian street," at least in print or on broadcast news, if only because everyone knows that Iranian opinion, as registered during the mock elections or voiced to visiting hacks, is strongly against the reigning theocracy.

Those of us of a certain age can recall how the Eastern Bloc nations would turn out anti-American crowds at the drop of a hat. Then the Wall fell and all of a sudden the man in the street interviews were with folks apologizing for all the silly things they'd had to say for years at their regimes' demands. If a people isn't free its crowds aren't expressing popular will, just what they have to in order to survive.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 1, 2005 12:00 AM