Same planet, different worlds
I was arguing with some colleagues yesterday about democracy in the Middle East. They were put out with me for taking the position that if given a choice between a democratically elected Islamist government, or a non-Islamist authoritarian regime, the US should side with the authoritarians -- for the sake of stability. It's the less bad choice, as I believe the past few years have shown.
We came to no satisfying conclusion, because I don't think there is a satisfying conclusion to be found. Later, I was thinking about how hard it is for us Westerners to conceive of the mindset of that region. I was reminded of a man I met walking the road to Bethlehem in 2000. He was an American, a Catholic priest who lived in one of the monasteries in or around Jerusalem. He'd served in the area for at least a decade, he told me, and was no closer to understanding the way the people there think.
He told a story about having dinner one night around the table in the monastery, with the monks and brothers. The topic of conversation that evening was the 1982 massacre Syrian president Hafez al-Assad carried out on Islamist rebels in the city of Hama. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been waging a terrorist campaign against Assad, including an assassination attempt. He finally had enough, surrounded the Islamist stronghold, and slaughtered possibly up to 25,000 people there. That was the end of Islamist rebel activity against his government.
Anyway, the priest told me that the clerics gathered around the dinner table -- all Americans or Europeans -- were marveling with disgust over Assad's savagery. Finally, two Syrian-born Catholic novices at the far end of the table spoke up. "You don't understand," one of them said. "If Assad hadn't done that, the Muslim Brotherhood would have taken over the country, and they would have killed us all" -- "us" meaning the Christian population. The novices defended the massacre as the only rational thing left to Assad to do -- and as an act of deliverance for the Christian community there from Islamofascists who would have put them to the sword.
"We all kind of sat there just staring at them," the priest told me. "We didn't know what to say. They saw how shocked we were, and then they pretty much put their masks back on. We didn't speak of it again."
No easy answers, eh?
We came to no satisfying conclusion, because I don't think there is a satisfying conclusion to be found. Later, I was thinking about how hard it is for us Westerners to conceive of the mindset of that region. I was reminded of a man I met walking the road to Bethlehem in 2000. He was an American, a Catholic priest who lived in one of the monasteries in or around Jerusalem. He'd served in the area for at least a decade, he told me, and was no closer to understanding the way the people there think.
He told a story about having dinner one night around the table in the monastery, with the monks and brothers. The topic of conversation that evening was the 1982 massacre Syrian president Hafez al-Assad carried out on Islamist rebels in the city of Hama. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been waging a terrorist campaign against Assad, including an assassination attempt. He finally had enough, surrounded the Islamist stronghold, and slaughtered possibly up to 25,000 people there. That was the end of Islamist rebel activity against his government.
Anyway, the priest told me that the clerics gathered around the dinner table -- all Americans or Europeans -- were marveling with disgust over Assad's savagery. Finally, two Syrian-born Catholic novices at the far end of the table spoke up. "You don't understand," one of them said. "If Assad hadn't done that, the Muslim Brotherhood would have taken over the country, and they would have killed us all" -- "us" meaning the Christian population. The novices defended the massacre as the only rational thing left to Assad to do -- and as an act of deliverance for the Christian community there from Islamofascists who would have put them to the sword.
"We all kind of sat there just staring at them," the priest told me. "We didn't know what to say. They saw how shocked we were, and then they pretty much put their masks back on. We didn't speak of it again."
No easy answers, eh?
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