The Stranger Among Them

In freeing themselves from their traditional tyrants who kept them from each others' throats because a functioning society thrives on order, the vacuum resulting from the Arab Spring swiftly fell to the Islamists to whom freedom equates with fanatical religiosity.  Disorder has arisen in popular protest as the people viewed the failure of their original campaign. Their popular protests brought them not liberation from tyranny and oppression as they hoped, but the arrival of yet another tyranny, this one flavoured with extremism.

The existence of Israel within this social-political-religious turmoil represents the calm in the eye of the storm that is the dysfunctional Middle East. Whereas the dysfunctional elements of the Middle East are fond of pointing to the presence of the State of Israel as representing the agitating factor, the source of the disturbances in the Middle East, simply manifested by its presence, a nation of Jews among a geography of Muslims.

Israel's order, liberty and functional pluralism is decidedly not to blame for Islamic failure. It stands as a beacon of possibilities and conversely as it happens, this serves to enrage her Arab/Muslim detractors from Qatar to Iran, Syria to Turkey, Lebanon to Libya, Afghanistan to Pakistan, Algeria to Somalia, Iraq to Mali. A lot of disparate but connected-through-Islam countries arrayed in rage against one tiny nation, to be sure.

How is it even remotely possible that Muslim nations are able to evade or to overlook the viciousness of the ruling Arab Muslim class against the black African Muslims of Sudan?  Why is it that Israel's purported unwillingness to see a Palestinian state beside its own is said to be the fulcrum that leverages Muslim anger, while in Iraq the disenfranchised Sunni demographic launch suicide attacks against the governing Shia?

The liberation of Iraq from the murderous tyrant that -- like his neighbour Iran, like Saudi Arabia and like Libya, funded and encouraged terrorism, and incited violence against Israel -- turned the political tables from Saddam Hussein's Baath Party led by Sunni Muslims oppressing the majority Shia Muslims, enabling the once-oppressed to become the new oppressors. Is there no lesson to be learned from any of this?

The world is witness to the ghastly tribal and sectarian violence unleashed within Syria, and in its lethal destructiveness holding the potential to let loose a wider conflict, spreading from Syria into Lebanon where Hezbollah holds that country on bondage to terror and fights alongside the Syrian regime and Quds forces from Iran to defeat majority Syrian Sunnis who have aligned themselves with fiercely fanatical Sunni jihadists.

If ever a more bitter struggle going for the collective jugular by a people united by heritage as Bedouin tribes, sharing in the surrender to Islam could be imagined, it has not yet been heard from. As Muslims within Somalia, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan slaughter one another in the name of their faith. Countries like Bahrain, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan are managing to elude the virulent conflict for now.

If a geography comprised mostly of Arabs of various tribal extractions and clan loyalties, rent asunder by versions of pure Islam cannot gather itself into a cohesive whole with a common background, heritage and religion to unite them, when so much is at stake, and so much in human values sacrificed to the ill-will and violence that is constantly unleashed, why blame the presence of a different tribe, religion, ethos for shortcomings not of their making?

Egypt, which once aspired to lead the Arab world, the most populous of the Arab countries, with the history of a fabled early civilization that was the wonder of the world, has declined in human values, the spirit that once led it to its exalted status as an advanced society long lost to a reality of social dysfunction, symbolizes the backwardness of the region.

Non-Arab Turkey has returned to its Islamist roots. Its rediscovery of fundamental Islam has renewed its allegiance to its view of itself as the former caliphate of the geography. It chose Syria, Qatar and Iran, rejecting its long-time Western-oriented partner Israel. Its own history of atrocities against the Armenians, its cruel oppression of Kurds, and its rejection of Attaturk's separation of church and state has conceived a new Turkey, a bad-tempered, cranky one groping about for new alliances.

Aryan Iran, upon whom Nazi Germany showered praise and found much in common with, found its Western influence inimical to its Islamic traditions and wildly clasped its Islamic revolution to bring it back to its beginnings in Shia Islam, eager to take on the mantle of regional power from Saudi Arabia, wrested at one time from Egypt. They have much in common, and much deadly enmity that sets them apart from one another.

The sole country in the geography that has overcome all adversities, both from within and without, to emerge as an immense success in coming to terms with its past and asserting itself toward its abundant future, could be both an inspiration and an aspirational aid to those of its neighbours whose education, science, agriculture, manufacture, social structure and security and justice systems could use instruction.

Yet the battering ram of virulent anti-Israel sentiment as the Zionist usurper and interloper in an Islamic environment continues the threat of ultimate annihilation of the country whose success its neighbours should all be inspired by and aspire to achieve for themselves.