Posted on 02/11/2013 10:29:06 AM PST by JerseyanExile
As dozens of riot police fired volleys of tear gas towards crowds of angry youths on Bourghiba Avenue this week, the scene was disturbingly reminiscent of what happened on this very avenue two years ago.
Even the chanting was the same: "We want the downfall of the regime!"
The target of the crowd's anger may be a different government, but many here feel their efforts in 2011, when they succeeded in removing Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, may have been for nought.
Many outsiders, myself included, always believed the Tunisian "Jasmine" uprising had the best chance of succeeding, of building a vibrant new democracy, above all the other subsequent Arab revolutions.
Tunisia has a large civic society and almost everyone goes to school until the age of 16. French is widely spoken, in the big cities at least.
After elections to a constituent assembly, the winning Ennahda party - though allied to the Muslim Brotherhood - promised to be inclusive, and brought in several liberal elements into its interim administration.
But, as in Egypt, liberal and secular Tunisians are discovering that democracy is not so easily won.
The murder of leftist secular politician Chokri Belaid may have come as a shock to most Tunisians, but there have been underlying tensions here for months.
Belaid, in many ways an old-fashioned socialist, was also a vocal opponent of Ennahda's governing coalition.
Although Ennahda portrays itself as a moderate and tolerant body, the government's critics say that in recent months it has allowed ultraconservative Muslim groups, or Salafists, to impose their will and opinions on what was always regarded as a bastion of Arab secularism.
Salafists have stopped music concerts, disrupted art shows, ransacked the US embassy (ostensibly in anger at a film which portrayed the Prophet Muhammad in a negative light) and have...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Perhaps we’ll get a real Arab Spring this spring. Obama will not support freedom so don’t count on America supporting them.
The building of the Obama Caliphate continues.
Obama was quick to support Islamist tyrant wannabes. Will he be as quick to support true democracy in the unlikely event that the good guys can organize against Obama’s friends in Egypt?
Half of America wishes that too
Some people in the Middle East are slowly learning that a great deal of the “Arab Spring” is really about “Arab betrayal” - which i have said is what is happening from the start.
Just as everyone (including secular moderates, “democrats”, “progressives” and even Marxists) who joined the “revolution” in Iran, cheered the Sha’s downfall, among the leaders of all the allied groups, all but those closest to the core around the radical fundamentalist Shia Muslim clerics were eventually sidelined, or shoved aside, or arrested and imprisoned, or assasinated or hung.
And who is really behind the “Arab Spring”? The Sunni Muslim version of the Shia Muslim Iranian Mullahs - the radical fundamentalist Saudi-Wahbi clerics and their philosohpical kith and kin, the Muslim Brotherhood. They pretend to stand apart from the Al Queda types but outside of Saudi Arabia they help fund them and have used them in Syria, and the Muslim Brotherhood is doing no more than playing “good cop” to Al Queda’s “bad cop”, while they have identical final hopes in their agendas.
He is supporting his proxies and his brethren for the whacking of Israel.
It is not about democracy , elsewise , he would be pushing a one state of Israel solution, Andrew Klavan style.
It is easy to look at each thing singularily, however, the sum looks pretty ugly. Obama is not a leader for America. Nothing more than a subversive, treasonous, seditious foreigner, a intermeddling cultural alien bent on the final destruction of America.
Leftwing simpletons never learn.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.