Livin' In America

The Arab Spring might have started out as a man self-immolating to protest Government brutality, but it's turned into something much different, and certainly not what's being peddled on American news channels.

Here in the US, we're told it's freedom fighters versus oppressive regimes.  Actually, it isn't.  Let's take Syria as an example.

Boy Assad is an Alawite Muslim - a sort of Shia Muslim.  Alawites are a minority in Sunni Muslim Syria (90% Sunni, 10% Shia), and they've stayed in power through terror.

Nasty, you might think, but what's the alternative?

Well, give the Sunni majority power, and the first thing it will do is exterminate all the Alawites.  Muslims are triumphalist savages, so that's the sort of thing they do.  If you doubt me, look to the Christian minorities all across the Middle East.  How are they faring, right now?

So, really, right now in the Arab world, it's minorities fighting like hell to stay alive.  Well, retain the balance of terror, and stay alive.  I'm sure you catch my drift.

Right now, the Arab world, from Mali to Syria, is turning into a battleground between Shia and Sunni Islam.  Backing the Shi'ite side is Iran.  Backing the Sunni side is, well, mostly Iraq, but I'm sure the Saudis have their fingers in that pie.

Why am I thinking this?  Well, a secular politician was recently murdered in Tunisia.  As part of the coverage of the murder, the BBC broadcast the opinion of a prominent female blogger/journalist who indicated that the revolution in Libya had been taken over by jihadis.  Tunisia erupted, the jihadis saw an opportunity, and they moved in.  Result?  Fight for sharia law in the new Tunisian constitution, secular politician murdered.  Next up?  Jihadis in the streets enforcing sharia at the point of a gun.

Bottom line here is that this is no longer an Arab Spring.  It's open war between Shias and Sunnis.

Another wrinkle:  ever since Khomeini got his start in Iran (flown into Tehran by Air France, by the way) the Muslim womb has snapped shut.  Islam is dying, demographically.

You look at pictures from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, etc., in the 1950s and you see men and women dressed in Western-style shirts, pants, dresses.  Today, you see shirts, pants, burqas.  I believe Muslim women are objecting to their objectification and oppression by refusing to have children.  Hence, the pure Salafist Islam of the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mullahs, is dying because women remember a past with better conditions for women, and have no interest in inflicting the new Islam on their daughters.

Erdogan in Turkey has been railing about this, declaring that Turkey will soon be Kurdistan because Turkish women won't have children.  Doctor, heal thyself!

But, there's a larger issue to consider.  Imagine you can see your civilization dying all around you, even though you have implemented the purest of pure interpretations of God's law, applying it to politics, civil society, and economics.  Well, first you blame the Big Satan, then you blame the Little Satan, then you go looking for Empire and nuclear weapons.  If you can't rule, then take the world down with you.  This is why Iran is sponsoring Shi'ite fighters across the world, and building nukes.

Israel, meanwhile, is surrounded by existential enemies, and unsupported by an American administration whose vision of Israel's future is a Muslim boot stomping on a Jewish face, forever.

Here in the US, what we are told on the news is not what's happening in reality.  Hence, what eventually happens will be a total surprise to us.  (Well, not me.  But I read a lot.)

I don't know how all this will shake out.  After all, we get to vote on the Iranian plan.  Still, it's going to be an exciting decade or five.