Barry Rubin: Good-Bye, Middle East! Liberals and Minorities are Fleeing

Good-Bye, Middle East! Liberals and Minorities are Fleeing

By Barry Rubin

What’s so terrible about the ideological, agenda-based domination of the mass media and academia is that people don’t ask critical questions that undermine their political positions. Here’s one:

The Egyptian government says it will put on criminal trial 16 people who distributed funds to Egyptian moderates from pro-democracy forces. One of them is the son of U.S. Labor Secretary Ray LaHood. The prosecutions are going forward despite Obama administration threats to cut off all aid to Egypt, which mostly goes to the Egyptian military, which happens to run the country at present.

If Egypt’s government is ready for a confrontation risking its U.S. aid over this tiny and insignificant issue, then why should we believe that the fear of losing U.S. aid will keep it from imposing Islamization on its people, sponsoring anti-Israel terrorism, becoming entangled in a war with Israel, and doing all sorts of much more important stuff?

Haven’t seen that anywhere else, right?


Doesn’t this incident undercut all of the soothing words about how Egypt (or Libya, or other countries taken over by Islamists) will be constrained by such things?

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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media
Technorati Tag: Middle East and Arab Spring.