DEMOCRACY'S MORAL FOUNDATION: An Arab journalist, fired for writing about the atrocities committed by Muslims in East Timor, reflects on the failures of the political culture in his part of the world:
Democracy may be a political system, but it is also a social ethos. How responsive can a country be to such an ethos when its people have, for generations, existed with an ethic of fear -- fear of originality, fear of innovation, fear of spontaneity, fear of life itself -- and have had instilled in them the need to accept orthodoxy, dependence and submission?
Last year there was talk of an "Arab spring." The present season can best be described as the revenge of the tyrants. The success of our freedom policy is on the line.
Read the whole thing.
8:48:35 PM 
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