A critic of the fascist Assad regime has apparently been killed in a car bombing in Lebanon.
While most people I know who watch Middle Eastern politics in a casual way are still insistent that the problems in this part of the world are mostly due to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, events of the last few years I would think would put that nonsense to rest. The Israelis were always the convenient whipping boys of authoritarian regimes like those of Syria, some of the more brutal elements in Lebanon and Egypt, and so on, but that was mostly a distraction. What’s really been the problem for the Arab world for the last few decades has been nondemocratic rule by brutal thugs like Assad, and as calls for freedom and democracy continue in the Arab world–as I predict they will for many years to come, they may be quieted now and then but never will they go away until they win their cause–then violence by brutal Arab regimes toward their fellow Arabs (and other non-Israelis in the region) will increase.
The violence, persistently still described by shallow observers as religious in nature (a Shia-Sunni split) will also, I predict, continue to get it wrong, since the real conflict isn’t religious, it’s between those who want unaccountable autocratic power and those who want freedom and equal rights for all. Dictatorships want the former, and will do anything to prevent the latter from happening.
Dean Esmay is the author of Methuselah’s Daughter. He has contributed to Dean’s World, Huffington Post, A Voice for Men, Pajamas Media. Neither left nor right wing, neither libertarian nor socialist.