Barack, Barak, Mubarak (What happens when a community organizer tries to run the world)

Senator Barack Obama with Ehud Barak, July 23, 2008

In this handout photo provided by the Ministry of Defence (MOD), presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is briefed by Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak (R) and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (2nd L) on the strategic balance of power in the Middle East as they sit in an Israeli Air Force helicopter before taking off for the southern town of Sderot July 23, 2008 from a helipad in Jerusalem. Obama defended his proposal to negotiate with Iran, saying he'd use "big sticks and big carrots" to turn the country's leaders away from developing nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton with Ehud Barak, Feb 26, 2010

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak speaks to the media as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stand by on February 26, 2010 in Washington, DC. Clinton and the defense minister met in a bilateral meeting to discuss a variety of issues to both nations.

President Barack Obama's White House Middle East Peace Talks, Sept 1, 2010

(L-R) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, U.S. President Barack Obama, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah II of Jordan enter the East Room for statements at the White House on the first day of the Middle East peace talks September 1, 2010 in Washington, DC. The White House has kicked off a new round of direct peace talks for the Middle East, the first one in more than 18 months.

Middle East Peace talks, Sept 1, 2010

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (2L) shakes hands with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (L) as Jordanian King Abdullah II (2R) and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak look on during statements on Middle East Peace delivered in the East Room of the White House September 1, 2010 in Washington, DC. The White House has kicked off the first new round of direct peace talks in more than 18 months with leaders of Middle East countries, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah II.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak abruptly quits Labor Party, Jan 17, 2011

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak attends a press conference in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem, Monday, Jan. 17 2011. Defense Minister Ehud Barak abruptly announced Monday that he was leaving his Labor Party and forming a new parliamentary faction inside the governing coalition, completing a split in the iconic party over the handling of peace talks with the Palestinians. The dramatic and unexpected move did not immediately threaten the stability of Prime Minister Benjamin Neta.

Anti-government protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square reacted angrily to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's televised statement late Thursday. (Tara Todras-Whitehill/Associated Press)

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2011/02/11/egypt-cairo-protests-mubarak.html#ixzz1DeCvBiRU

February 11, 2011 [Israeli Defense] Minister: Israel must move ahead toward peace [excerpt]UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Thursday the country must move forward with the Mideast peace process and try to promote stability with all its neighbors despite the turbulence in the region.

The Israeli minister spoke to reporters briefly after meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The meeting took place as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was announcing that he would remain president but was handing his powers to Vice President Omar Suleiman.

"We have to continue the whole time to look for ways to move forward in this new reality because the alternatives are more complicated, more complex and more dangerous from any other option," Barak said in Hebrew. "We have to continue to move towards trying to find arrangements with all our neighbors."

Barak said he would not respond to what is happening in Egypt, explaining that "it's up to the Egyptian people to find a way and to do it according with their own constitution, norms and practices." [end excerpt]

Senator Barack Obama speaks in Berlin, July 24, 2008

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama waves to the crowd as he delivers a speech in Berlin on Thursday. (Markus Schreiber/Associated Press)

[excerpt] Europeans and Americans must work together to protect their common security by tearing down the walls that divide them, U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama told tens of thousands gathered in Berlin on Thursday during the first formal speech of his foreign tour.

Speaking to a crowd estimated at more than 200,000, Obama said there is an all too common view in Europe that the United States is part of what has gone wrong in the world. Conversely, he said, there are those in the U.S. who deny and deride the importance of Europe's role in the world to provide security.

Both views miss the truth, he said.

"That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another," Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once split the city.

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot stand.

"These now are the walls we must tear down," Obama said, drawing loud applause from the massive crowd.

Obama said he had come to speak not as a presidential candidate, but as a proud citizen of the United States and a "fellow citizen of the world." Source

Cairo, Egypt, Feb 11, 2011

Feb 11, 2011/Egyptian military members block protesters from President Hosni Mubarak's presidential palace in Cairo on Friday. (Amr Dalsh/Reuters) Egyptian military pledges support to Mubarak/Protesters fill Tahrir Square and take positions outside government buildings

[excerpt] ".....For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal—"social justice"—is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails.

Because the transformation progressives seek is ultimately total, the power they seek must be total as well. In the end, the redemption they envision cannot be achieved as a political compromise, even though compromises may be struck along the way. Their brave new world can ultimately be secured only by the complete surrender of the resisting force. In short, the transformation of the world requires the permanent entrenchment of the saints in power. Therefore, everything is justified that serves to achieve the continuance of Them....." [end excerpt] The Third Way 2000

[excerpt]....“Solidarity with oppressed peoples,” Bruckner wrote, "is above all a gigantic weapon aimed at the West. The logic of aggression is at work in Third World solidarity, and this has made it a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Being non-European is enough to put one on the side of right. Being European or being supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such trifles will not restrain the progress of these peoples toward socialism. What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of washing away the far greater crime of colonialism."

Clearly, Bruckner’s message is as pertinent today as it was in the 1980s—more so, perhaps, since the attitudes it chronicles, if often less histrionic, are today more thoroughly institutionalized, more thoroughly absorbed into established opinion.

It is worth pointing out that, unlike many Third Worldists, Bruckner had firsthand knowledge of the problems about which he wrote. Having worked as a member of the International Action Against Hunger, he animated compassion with deeds. If this tempered his romanticism, it also sharpened his vision. Bruckner did not march arm-in-arm with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was not a beneficiary of UNESCO’s extortionist escapades. He did not rail against Western oppression. He did not curse the evils of colonialism. On the contrary, he understood that the West’s real crime was not pursuing but rather abandoning its responsibilities as a colonial power.

Bruckner is an articulate anatomist of such guilt and its attendant deceptions and mystifications. “An overblown conscience,” he points out, “is an empty conscience. Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity. Our “soft pity,” as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim, the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged. Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong."

The universalization—which is to say the utter trivialization—of compassion is one side of Third Worldism. Another side is the inversion of traditional moral and intellectual values. Europe once sought to bring enlightenment—literacy, civil society, modern technology—to benighted parts of the world. It did so in the name of progress and civilization. The ethic of Third Worldism dictates that yesterday’s enlightenment be rebaptized as today’s imperialistic oppression. "For the committed Third Worldist," Bruckner points out, "salvation consists not only in a futile exchange of influences, but in the recognition of the superiority of foreign thought, in the study of their doctrines, and in conversion to their dogma. We must take on our former slaves as our models. . . . It is the duty and in the interest of the West to be made prisoner by its own barbarians."

Whatever the current object of adulation— the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America —the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.

It is all part of what Bruckner calls “the enchanting music of departure.” Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world—its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition—are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. “Ignoring the real human race entirely,” Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, “I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world.” The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts “were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history.” .....[end excerpt] source

CBS News After Egypt, How Will the Dominoes Fall?

[excerpt] In the 20th Century, the phrase "domino effect" brought to mind the spread of communism to vulnerable states.

Today, a popular anti-government uprising in Tunisia has turned that phrase on its head, as protesters throughout the Middle East have begun rising up against their governments in support of more democratic reforms.

Once Egypt's populace became inspired by events in Tunisia and rose up against the 30-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak, news and political pundits took to the airwaves, guessing who will be next. The truth is, no one can possibly know, just like no one knew that an enraged Tunisian fruit vendor from a rural town who lit himself on fire in frustration against government policies would inspire millions to take to the streets in protest of government policies and economic duress.

Below is a list with information on the major countries in and close to the Middle East region, many of whom could be vulnerable to popular uprisings similar to those in Tunisia and Egypt. [end excerpt]

Ahmadinejad: Egyptian protests herald new Mideast TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's president said Friday that Egypt's popular uprising shows a new Islamic Middle East is emerging, one that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims will have no signs of Israel and U.S. "interference."

The Iranian leader spoke as the country marked the 32nd anniversary of its 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the pro-U.S. shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought hardline clerics to power.

Ahmadinejad's remarks came hours after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced he is transferring authority to his deputy but refused to step down, angering hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who have been demanding he relinquish his three-decade grip on power.

Tens of thousands marched down Tehran's main boulevard in state-organized anniversary festivities, chanting in support of Egyptian anti-government protesters. Some Iranians set an effigy of Mubarak on fire while others shouted: "Hosni non-Mubarak, 'Mubarak' (congratulations) on the uprising of your people."[end excerpt]

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