March 5, 2005
WHAT DOES NAZARETH KNOW:
The prophet of democracy brought in from the wilderness: Natan Sharansky tells Martin Ivens his time has come as America adopts his strategy for Middle East reform (Sunday Times of London, 3/06/05)
Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy, became bedside reading for President George W Bush. It inspired the clarion call for democracy in the Middle East that Bush made in his second inaugural address. “That thinking, that’s part of my presidential DNA,” said Bush.The admiration is mutual. “I was sorry (Andrei) Sakharov was not alive to hear it”, Sharansky rasps in his accented English, while speaking of his revered mentor in the Soviet dissident movement. “But the dissidents will hear it. I heard President Reagan’s appeals when I was in prison.” The dissidents today are Arab and he singles out some of them in his book.
Soviet hostility to him was predictable, Israeli indifference scarcely less so. Most shades of Israeli opinion ironically share the analysis of Arabists in the West: you get oil and sand in the Middle East, but not freedom. The neighbourhood is stuffed full of dictators and it’s going to stay that way. Don’t expect better.
When Sharansky said that Israel must foster democratic change among Arab neighbours his critics shrugged that Islam was incompatible with democracy.
Considering the Sovietologists of yore and the Arabists still, it seems fair to ask if anyone ever knows less about a people than the academic experts on them. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2005 11:41 PM
There are two classes of academic experts: the people the MSM calls on for comment and the real ones. How many people know more about the Middle East than Bernard Lewis? My dog knows more about it than Robin Wright, yet Robin Wright is on TV about 100 times as often as Lewis. Consider the Soviet Union. The MSM has even brought back Stephen Cohen out of mothballs to regale us on the glories of Putin. There are people like Anne Applebaum out there who understand the reality of the situation today and there are people like Robert Conquest who have a half century of intelligent perspective on the matter. Yet, Cohen, obviously a patron of the same barber as Arafat, is the one we see on TV.
The MSM wants experts only if they confirm its biases.
Posted by: Bart at March 6, 2005 7:10 AMThe best example is how often Juan Cole is interviewed and/or quoted about the middle east and Bush administration policy, when five minutes work on Google would demonstrate that (a) he is always wrong on those subjects because (b) he is personally, politically and professionally invested in the failure of our democratic crusade against his friends the tyrants and fanatics.
Posted by: David Cohen at March 6, 2005 10:36 AM