When discussing the series of popular uprisings commonly known as the Arab Spring, pessimism seems to be the prevailing attitude among experts these days. But one observer, who has been monitoring and analyzing the Middle East for decades, is surprisingly upbeat.
“People were warning us about the rise of Islamism, but from day one my attitude was exactly the opposite: I was shining,” said Yigal Carmon, founder and president of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. Carmon’s assessment, as someone who hails from the heart of Israel’s security establishment, might bear particular significance.
“It is indeed an Arab Spring,” he told The Times of Israel this week, “where people are fighting for freedom, putting their lives on the line every day against dictatorship. There can be no other name for it.”
Before the Arab Spring, Carmon said, the Middle East was “a frozen swamp of repression, on every level.” But that stagnation, which he said left Arabs and Muslims “outside the world in its progress,” is gone, never to return.
Claiming that Arabs cannot build real democratic societies is simply racist, Carmon argues. Similar arguments, he recalls, were made about the Japanese during World War II and about the Soviets during the Cold War. In both cases, history proved the skeptics wrong.
“They have begun their long quest to join humanity. This is an honorable journey which I have the utmost respect for,” he said.