When liberals dubbed the 2011 Middle Eastern uprisings an “Arab Spring,” they were doing what they always do, seeing what they wanted to see: aggrieved underclasses overthrowing tyrannical dictators in order to achieve democracy. And on the surface, that remains an accurate description of what occurred. The problem is that liberals assume democracy is a step toward their utopian vision of a people’s state — complete with women’s suffrage, freedom of speech, gay adoption and government-sponsored health care for all. But, given a democracy, most Muslim societies choose to live under Sharia law.
The truth is that democracy is not inherently good. It never was. According to Aristotle, democracy was the oppressive and self-serving rule of the people. Its opposite, the selfless rule of the people for the common good, was called a polity. Majority rule is only moral if the majority is comprised of moral individuals. And if the will of the people is to mutilate the genitals of little girls and kill Jews, then the will of the people should be stifled, ignored or altered.
By the by, if you wanted to know the newspaper headlines for the autumn of 2012, all you needed to do was listen to talk radio in the spring of 2011. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Savage, Mark Levin and others predicted exactly what has occurred in Egypt and Libya on President Obama’s watch: widespread instability, the adoption of Islamic law, the endangerment of Israel, the emboldening of enemies and the loss of two allies. Mubarak and Gadhafi may have been monsters, but they were our monsters. They protected our diplomats and kept relative peace with our allies. By not supporting them, the Obama administration transformed compliant, stable, horrendous dictatorships into non-compliant, unstable, horrendous democracies.
Under Sharia, certain speech is punishable by death. So is homosexuality. Unbelievers are formally oppressed as dhimmis by state mandate, and they must pay the jizya, a tax for their heresy. Women are bartered into marriages arranged by the men in their families. And if women are permitted to vote, they do so in a veil. Curiously, by allowing Mubarak and Gadhafi to be overthrown, a real war on women has been facilitated by American leftists. It grows more bizarre when you consider that Muslims are pro-life, pro-death penalty and, by all appearances, gun aficionados.
All of this begs a question. Why? Why would we abandon and undermine stable allies? Why would we arm the Muslim Brotherhood? Their motto reads, “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” President Obama and his special assistant Samantha Power may be committed leftists, but were they really so naïve?
Bestselling author and Jihadwatch.com director Robert Spencer doesn’t think so. In a recent email to me, he asserted, “The Left is revealing that its hatred for America is paramount on its agenda as it allies with Islamic supremacist groups that stand against everything else that the Left stands for — the only thing they have in common is their desire to destroy the U.S. and the principles for which it stands.”
Spencer is correct about the far left. Many leftist groups believe and openly state that America is the cause of much of the planet’s strife. But most American liberals aren’t committed to that ideology. Most of them believed that President Obama was doing a great thing by promoting democracy in Egypt and Libya. Most of them are shocked and disappointed with the results.
For those American liberals, the experiment is over. Multiculturalism was always a myth. Now they have proof. They’re left with a choice: either embrace freedom of expression, freedom of religion, individual liberty and women’s rights, or embrace the Islamists. You can’t do both.
Yates Walker is a conservative activist and writer. Before becoming involved in politics, he served honorably as a paratrooper and a medic in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. He can be reached at yateswalker@gmail.com.