MAYHEM IN THE MIDDLE EAST: In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, FDD Senior Fellow Emanuele Ottolenghi notes one important lesson of the current upheavals:
Western mandarins always assumed that Palestinian freedom was all that the Arab world needed, and in the process they resigned themselves to the region's rampant corruption, repression, and persecution of women and minorities. Yet Mohammad Bouazizi didn't set himself on fire in December, thereby triggering Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution, to express solidarity with Palestinians. Instead, his suicide was a direct response to the economic and social strictures in his own country. Meanwhile, his countrymen's spontaneous reaction to that desperate act stood in sharp contrast to the customary Arab displays of solidarity with Palestinians—usually staged, regime-backed affairs.
So suddenly, Arab freedom has taken precedence over Israel and Palestine—or so says the much-maligned Arab Street, as it topples one tyrant and challenges the next. The conventional wisdom that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the mother of all problems in the region has now been exposed as nothing but a myth. Will Western leaders finally learn?
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