[Irenicus]

Originally Posted by Darkbeat

Syria - Continues to slaughter it's own people daily.

The dictator is [the son of] one of those who took power during the last great era of Arab nationalism, most famously symbolized in the rule of Nasser in Egypt -- Mubarak was, by the way, a successor of Nasser after the assassinated Anwar Sadat; Gaddafi and Saddam too were part of that general trend. (Almost?) all outlived Nasser; most abandoned any figment of pan-Arab idealism a long time ago, and continued their oppressive reigns only on the basis of raw force, sometimes backed by the West.

The Arab Spring threatens to overthrow them all. That motherfucker in Syria is "just" trying to hold power after seeing what happened to his colleagues. May he die horribly very, very soon. I'd laugh.

Lebanon - Controlled by an internationally recognized terrorist group who smuggle arms to other internationally recognized terrorist groups.

You can actually place a large part of the blame on Israel. It went in more than once smashing the infrastructure and the government apparatus in the name of fighting Hezbollah. Hezbollah fought back...using human shields as part of their tactics, not to mention they were kind of provoking Israel in the first place. But they fought back. The Lebanese government had no real resources to conduct a similar guerilla campaign.

What kind of government holds legitimacy if it cannot defend its own people from such predations? Whatever Israel's justifications were, it attacked and bombed the hell out of Lebanon. You don't go to a bombed out city and say, oh we were just doing it against the terrorists and don't have stones thrown back at you, even if that's really the case. Israel fucked up, let its military dominate its diplomatic thinking and Hezbollah's provocation to get to them and made an enemy -- heck, a broken state -- out of their least antagonistic neighbor.

They should have instead done everything in their power to back up a pro-Western Lebanese political movement, because there, more than any other place in the Middle East, such a thing could have existed. Lebanon actually had a history of pro-Western elements, a strong Catholic (+ Orthodox) minority, and was something of a cultural melting pot. But you can't exactly bomb out a country two or three times and hope it stays "nice."

Iran - Now officially building nukes, controlled by a holocaust denying madman, lack of human rights (homosexuals executed, women get hands chopped off for wearing trousers or driving etc).

The Theocracy arose out of the popular revolution that overthrew a Western-backed Shah. Iranians don't like the West politically, not even the liberals, because of history. Let's just say the British (and the Russians) were the bad guys there. They sabotaged its earliest democratic movements, they deprived it of its independence, then they reinstated a Shah nobody wanted back.

However, tensions between Iran's powerful Shiite clerics and its more reformist thinkers predated the revolution by many, many decades. There were entire generations of embittered Iranian reformers who denounced in no uncertain terms the backwardness and self-interest of the clerical class (and who usually then had bad things happening to them). The revolution was partly theirs, before the clerics won out the struggle. They still exist. As recently as 2009 they were part of the greater "Green Revolution" mass movement, anticipating and predating the Arab Spring. Iran isn't monolithic and doomed to theocracy, oh not at all. Iranians are hungry, hungry for Democracy, for pop music, for twitter.

But the clerics are strong. And they are jealous of their power. And they will do anything to defend it. Demonizing Israel is part of their tactics ("external enemy").

Saudi Arabia - Lack of human rights.

It was built as a personal kingdom by a charismatic Bedouin chief following a puritanical sect of Islam. Before the age of oil it was just a desert nobody really cared about (and, well, the holy cities in the Hedjaz).

But then somebody dug up the black gold and a peripheral kingdom half-stuck in the Middle Ages became a key element in global oil politics. Oops.

Palestinian Territories - Glorification of terrorism, lack of human rights.

Terrorism was the only way they could fight Israel. In those places they are considered freedom fighters.

Fair? Good? Nice people? Hell no. But it's a war there. You are a people trapped, starved, despised, deprived of what you see as your rightful homes. You don't sit down, think it through, and draw an unbiased history of how you got there and who was really at fault. You see the guys with the tanks holding the checkpoints blocking you from going to the well the other side of the fence so you blame them.

Israel had its reasons of course. Stray rockets, suicide bombs in Tel Aviv...

Egypt - Extremism on the rise.

The Muslim Brotherhood was the most successful mass movement in Egypt for a long time, representing the underground opposition to Mubarak's rule (its suppression dated back to Nasser, who saw clearly that his own mass popularity had a rival in the organization, and who in any case despised Islamists). As for the popularity of Islam in Egypt, it became entangled with Egyptian nationalism very early on, representing opposition against Westernization and -- at the time -- Western occupiers.

The problem is for the liberal forces to de-entangle the Islamist position from the broader nationalist appeal, and if they would have time and strength to do it. The youth are not bought in by the Brotherhood and more extremist groups' claims -- they want a future, a real future -- but just how far can they demonstrate and popularize? The generals don't like their demonstrations any more than the Islamist groups, and as the world pays less attention to Egypt they tread less carefully over the people's sovereign rights.

What baffles me is why people concentrate on Israel's building homes for Jews. I don't get it at all.

Israel is seen as something of a Western intrusion, displacing native Arabs and all that, a relic of the despised colonial era. I say after 60+ years they belong there as well as anyone (plus, they won two wars over their right to be there), but building settlements encroaching upon Palestinian mandated territories in a strategic attempt to isolate these communities is provocation, simple extremist provocation.