hypocritexposer
Well-known member
"Our eventual goal is to create an equal society, not a society of privileges and class distinctions. Social justice is the first rule for peace and stability in society.".
Mike said:Was it a Muslim that said it. If so, it could have been any one of those Mid Eastern liars.
Nobody said it better than Hosni Mubarak: "Our eventual goal is to create an equal society, not a society of privileges and class distinctions. Social justice is the first rule for peace and stability in society." But that was in November 1981, a few weeks after he had become president of Egypt.
Over the next 30 years, Mubarak became a symbol not of equality but of a deep corruption — financial, political and cultural — that enveloped Egypt and other countries in the Middle East.
He grew arrogant like a king, fancying that he could pass on his dynasty to his son; he ignored advice for reform, doing just enough to keep critics at bay; he shamelessly played up Western fears of Islamic radicalism.
The most hopeful sign for the future is that the Egyptian military now holds the balance of power.
It is the one institution that Mubarak has not been able to corrupt. Indeed, across the turbulent Arab world, it's a paradox that strong armies are now platforms for change.
"The army is the middle class in camouflage," says Jamil Mroueh, a Lebanese journalist. Soldiers are embraced on the streets of Cairo because they symbolize the independence and integrity of the nation.
It's a throwback to the paradigm Samuel Huntington described in his 1957 study "The Soldier and the State": A strong army can allow a transition to democracy and economic reform.
At the heart of the current Arab crisis is the inability of leaders to deliver on reforms they knew were necessary.
Missing Reforms
They chickened out for various reasons — fear of offending domestic power brokers; fear of Muslim radicals; and yes, sadly, fear that the reform agenda was seen as part of an elitist, "pro-American" conspiracy to weaken the Arabs.
I've watched these reform efforts rise and fall over the past decade, often traveling to interview leaders about their ideas for change.
King Abdullah II of Jordan commissioned an ambitious set of reforms called the "National Agenda"; he abandoned it in 2005 under pressure from an "old guard" that was profiting from the status quo. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria made an effort to shake up the corrupt Baath Party, but he balked at larger political reforms.
Abdullah, who dismissed his Cabinet on Tuesday, and Assad, who made upbeat comments to the Wall Street Journal recently, are now scrambling to buff the old reformist message.
Democracy of Cannibals
Those for whom the distribution of power is a means not an end, will exploit democratic elections as a means, while still imposing authoritarian rule. Islamist movements have exploited populism to get to power, but their philosophy of power is not populist, it is still top-down rule. That is the problem with democracy, you do not need to believe it in order to make use of it. It is not a covenant or a philosophy, only a means to an end.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/02/democracy-of-cannibals.html