A rising tide of fundamentalism

As riots over the Danish cartoons continue to swirl, it didn't exactly come as a shock to read this.

Last Thursday night, just hours after it was announced that Hamas had crushed Fatah in legislative elections––an event that caused some right-wing Israeli politicians to declare the birth of a terrorist “Hamastan”—Harari welcomed a visitor to his home, in the town of Yavne, near the Mediterranean. While most Israeli and Arab-language news channels were broadcasting scenes of Hamas supporters in the Gaza Strip waving green flags as they celebrated their stunning victory, Harari had tuned in to a seemingly tedious military ceremony on Egyptian state television. “Look at the wives of the generals,” he said. “Many of them are wearing traditional head scarves. This was not so ten years ago. And this tells you where we are heading. When the women of Egypt’s pro-Western military élite are dressed like that, you know that the Hamas victory is not about Palestine. It’s about the entire Middle East.”

The great hope, at least for those who believe in a secular society, was that the rise and success of Islamist parties around the Middle East were the logical result of the parties' social institutions and charities in the face of an entrenched and corrupt opposition. If Egyptian generals' wives are wearing headscarves, something very different is happening.

Like so much of the half-baked thinking of preznit, his optimism that democracy will transorm the Middle East may be true, but his optimism may be misguided. Voters in Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon are rejecting a secular state. This may be good or it may be bad -- far be it for me to ridicule the poor or act "the white boy telling Muslims how to act," as some of the comments to Tristero's post infer. And I certainly don't want to be confused with a commentor at Little Green Footballs (no, no link to those clowns), but a rising tide of fundamentalism in the Middle East ain't going to make it any easier for a secular West to co-exist with the region. Mix that with a rising Christian fundamentalism in the politics of our own country, and, well, next thing you know you're reliving those heady days of the Council of Clermont.