So Much Trouble in the World...

Mohamed Bouazizi (RIP) really set the Middle East (and the world) ablaze when he lit himself on fire in rage against all the injustice he faced in his life; ultimately dying from his wounds. It's as if his life's story mirrored the average Middle Eastern Arab living under a despotic regime where it was common to have their voices unheard or neglected. His sacrificial act became the ignition for revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya with protests occurring in a dozen countries, each trying to bring about change from the bottom-up. Currently uprisings in Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya are taking news headlines but the situation in Libya in particular is most alarming. Col. Muammar Gaddafi and sons have waged a war against their own people, effectively telling the world and the Libyan people that their position in power is more important than anything to them. How these people can consider themselves public servants is beyond me, but then again -more often than not- rulers have trashed the noble ideal of public service for purely self-gain at the cost of their peoples' prosperity.

What I find most alarming is that these dictators think that if they just take out a few tanks, and deploy some air bombers and raid masses of innocent, peaceful demonstrators everything will be fine and go back to normal, right? Wrong. If anything has been shown through these demonstrations is that once the state uses violence to quell resistance, more people show up in protest and it now becomes an uprising, and when more are killed, jailed, and beat it turns into a revolution and as Malcolm X once said, revolutions are never without blood.

I am hopeful for change in the Middle East. I would like to see new democracies with governments by the people and for the people taking root over there because I believe this is the best thing for both the people there and Americans (& Israelis) since freedom is the core ingredient to a society's prosperity. In fact, one of the contributing factors of the rise of terrorism has been precisely because people didn't have their freedoms to assemble and express dissent in many of these countries. That doesn't make it right -- but it doesn't help it either. My fear is that the powers-that-be would rather drag out the situation in Libya so that this rapid gust of change finally dwindles down and stops spreading these flames of oppressed rage. If you think about it, 2-3 dictators over the course of two months is extremely fast and all this change is not good for the status quo (or rather for the people who benefit from it) so they will play up the 'stability' card and say this is not good for the region. This is exactly what we're seeing as tanks and airplanes shoot and bomb masses of innocent Libyans and the death toll rises well above 1,000, the world mostly sits back and watches, making the token idle threat to Gaddafi every now and then. Afterall, who wants their government to be next, right?

In any case, I sincerely hope the people get what they want and evil dictators meet the justice they deserve and a new understanding and perception of the Middle East is born out of this; one that helps Westerners see that freedom is everyone's right and not something only we "can handle" or the ridiculous notion that the Arabs "hate" our freedoms here when they're literally fighting and dying for it as I type these very words. Freedom is not a Western or Eastern concept, it is a human concept and right, and only when societies have free rights can they make healthy and responsible choices. I hope the world begins to realize this for the sake of one of the world's most oppressed peoples (i.e- the Palestinians) and an act of God brings much needed reform to that region and elsewhere in the world. If the Egyptian revolution proved anything, it proved that every media stereotype about Arabs being disunited, enraged, disorganized, and hateful was utterly a lie, and that the commoner and well-to-do, the majority and minority, the religious and secular, men and women - all can get together to affect change and be civil, and even clean up after themselves! So I hope the world can see that Muslims are peaceful and freedom loving people too, just like the rest of the world. Down with evil despots and viva people power!