With a hat tip to VFR, here’s Charles Krauthammer on the “Arab Spring”:
Many Westerners naÁ¯vely believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square.
Well there were, after all (ahem!), some observers here in the West who saw things a bit more clearly.
Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no match for the highly organized, widely supported, politically serious Islamists who effortlessly swept them aside in national elections.
This was not a Facebook revolution but the beginning of an Islamist one. Amid the ruins of secular nationalist pan-Arabism, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to solve the conundrum of Arab stagnation and marginality. “Islam is the answer,’ it preached, and carried the day.
Yes, quite a “conundrum”, that stagnation and marginality. Not to worry — the Ikhwan will have that turned around in no time, I’m sure.