Thursday - March 10, 2011

a brief lecture on the arab spring from the left … make em feel welcome europa

OK ... We’re overdue for a liberal lecture on The Arab Spring ...  And naturally this comes from Europa, in fact if you want to visit the site you can listen instead of read, to this side of the libtard, hand wringing, bleeding heart side of things.  Meanwhile, in the papers yesterday there were photos of the boats landing on an Italian island with thousands more on the way.
But this post just shows how much their liberal heads are buried in the sand.  You’re darned tootin’ there’s something to worry about. Unless of course you live on the left.

I guess I have to do this.  H/T World Radio Switzerland

Dateline CH: Revealing reactions to the ‘Arab spring’

Journalist Imogen Foulkes examines Europe’s reaction to the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. And it’s not very flattering:

Europe’s response to what many are calling the “Arab spring” has been intriguing. I’m sure many listeners can remember the autumn of 1989, and the euphoria which greeted the fall of the Berlin wall, the jubilant scenes as East Germans streamed over the border into the west.

Obviously the analogy can’t be taken too far–nevertheless I think it’s understandable that many in north Africa and the Middle East were a bit disappointed by Europe’s initial reaction to the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya. So what were those first reactions? Italy warning of waves of migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Europe–and the EU border agency Frontex beefing up its presence in the Med to prevent such a thing.

Italy’s Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, was especially supportive to the democracy protests in north Africa–he predicted a biblical exodus towards the EU, asked for 100 million euros from Brussels to help cope, and suggested Italy would send migrants on northwards if such help was not forthcoming.

Newspaper headlines across western Europe advised us to brace ourselves for something akin to an invasion–Swiss television’s flagship weekly discussion programme Arena debated not the sudden flowering of democratic protests, but what Switzerland should do if it too faced a wave of migrants.

Granted, there were some low-key words of welcome for the change apparently sweeping across north Africa and the Middle East, but they simply weren’t as loud as the worries about immigration. And here in Geneva, another reaction to the uprisings which I have heard several times, from aid agencies who have been present in the region for decades is “we just didn’t see it coming.”

Why is that I wonder? Why was it such a surprise, that in a part of the world with a very young, relatively well-educated population, with widespread access to the internet but low employment prospects—there should be frustration and impatience with governments who have ruled autocratically for decades, and lined their pockets while their people remained impoverished. Could it be that our own attitude to North Africa and the Middle East is a little patronising?

Have we assumed for too long that the people in those countries are somehow not as interested in freedom of speech, in democracy, as we are in Europe? Or have our governments been too comfortable with the autocratic status quo in our neighbours to the south, and encouraged us to believe that in the interests of stability, those regimes are worth doing business with?

In fact, I think our reactions to the momentous events of the Arab spring are rather revealing–about Europe, not about north Africa–and not all the revelations are especially flattering. Because instead of an instinctive welcome for a wave of protests from people who simply want a better future in their own countries, our instinct has been to worry that these same people might decide instead to invade our precious European space, and to close our doors even tighter, just in case.

Posted by peiper     on 03/10/2011 at 12:43 PM   
Filed Under: • International •  
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