Bernard Lewis: BYE BYE ARAB TYRANNIES, but the U.S. should not push for quick, Western-style elections

Note the stupidity of the reporter and the bias …WSJ

By BARI WEISS

Princeton, N.J.

‘What Went Wrong?” That was the explosive title of a December 2001 book by historian Bernard Lewis about the decline of the Muslim world. Already at the printer when 9/11 struck, the book rocketed the professor to widespread public attention, and its central question gripped Americans for a decade.

Now, all of a sudden, there’s a new question on American minds: What Might Go Right?

Bland assertion of positive only results. Bari Weiss ASSUMES ‘voting’ = good things for america and things going right. In the LONG HAUL of hundreds of years that’s probably correct. I mean it was right for Japan and Germany in 1932, WASN’T IT? I am reading along as I post as this SEEMS to negate the possibility that things could go even MORE WRONG …. FOR US.

To find out, I made a pilgrimage to the professor’s bungalow in Princeton, N.J., where he’s lived since 1974 when he joined Princeton’s faculty from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Two months shy of his 95th birthday, Mr. Lewis has been writing history books since before World War II. By 1950, he was already a leading scholar of the Arab world, and after 9/11, the vice president and the Pentagon’s top brass summoned him to Washington for his wisdom.

“I think that the tyrannies are doomed,” Mr. Lewis says as we sit by the windows in his library, teeming with thousands of books in the dozen or so languages he’s mastered. “The real question is what will come instead.”

For Americans who have watched protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Bahrain and now Syria stand up against their regimes, it has been difficult not to be intoxicated by this revolutionary moment. Mr. Lewis is “delighted” by the popular movements and believes that the U.S. should do all it can to bolster them. But he cautions strongly against insisting on Western-style elections in Muslim lands.

Intoxicated? Weiss again refuses to CONSIDER HIMSELF (OR HERSELF) the FACT, THE UTTER FACT that every poll, and every vote yet taken anywhere in the middle east reveals that what is wanted by somewhere between the largest plurality to the LARGE majority is QURAN IN GOVT.

“We have a much better chance of establishing—I hesitate to use the word democracy—but some sort of open, tolerant society, if it’s done within their systems, according to their traditions. Why should we expect them to adopt a Western system? And why should we expect it to work?” he asks.

Sorry, Berny but here I have to worry about you. Nowhere in the arab/muslim world are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Bahai, etc going to be TOLERATED as they truly exist. Just ask the Christians in the new democracy of Iraq. Nowhere will people VIOLATE the Quran by defending a Christian’s believer’s DESPISED right to proselytize because they KNOW this is defending their own rights. These people are going to vote in a ulema, which may or may not allow another election on schedule. Will that be 'better'? If it's worse for my kids do you think I really care enough to worry if it's better for the denizens belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood? You think if it's better for them they will stop hating us?

This is a good article for Dr. Lewis thoughts, especially when he rounds to Tunisia.

READ IT ALL

Where I differ after all the conversations, I have had is where it always falls. Those who vote in whatever laws they want or need right our of their head MUST violate the Quran (i.e. the BIG GUY’S AUTHORITY) to do so …SOONER OR LATER. Those who want an ‘open, tolerant society’ must defend to the death, rights they despise and people they despise and those who are condemned in the Quran.

I want to see someone reason their way around that without RELIGIOUS AND CIVIL WAR in arab/muslim societies.