Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
30 November ’11

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/11/donkey-is-dead.html

Once upon a time a mad Caliph demanded of an old servant of his that he teach a donkey to talk for his amusement. If he refused, he would be put to death. If he failed he would be put to death as well. The old servant shrugged and asked for a year’s time in which to complete the task. When other servants asked him why he had accepted, he answered. “A year is a long time. Either the Caliph will die, the donkey will die, or the donkey will learn to speak.”

It’s been quite a few years and the donkey is on its last legs. Obama has done to half a dozen countries what Carter did to Iran. The Islamists are in ascendance and the Caliphate genie has been let out of the bottle. Down the road they may well implode, but for the moment they are a rising political force in the region. The handful of Muslim countries that could have been accused of having moderate governments are gone now.

The posse of “Islamist Whisperers” in the press, lead among them Thomas Friedman, are busy looking for fallback positions. In his latest column he explains that the Islamist victories only came about because the dictators prevented “independent, secular, democratic parties” from developing. What he fails to understand is that the dictators were the only force maintaining a modicum of secularism, not because they were freethinking atheists, but because many of them had come out of the military and wanted a functioning state, instead of a theocracy.

Read more: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/11/donkey-is-dead.html