Do you recall our article regarding the Arab Barometer surveys? If not, I would recommend that you take some time to read it in order to get a general picture of what’s to come.
Basically it highlights the usual double standards of the Western media when it comes to Islam: They enthusiastically shared the news of Arabs becoming irreligious, basing this on previous Arab Barometer “findings.”
Yet they didn’t cover another finding of the Arab Barometer research when it revealed that Arabs were actually becoming increasingly more religious.
But recently they did, well at least some of them… and those few either chose not to accentuate the rise of religiosity, or they decided to shift the focus onto something else altogether.
Take the BBC for example.
Unlike the triumphalist tone they took when it came to reporting the hypothetical supposed mass apostasy of Arabs, we now get a very mellow “BBC News Arabic reveal findings from major MENA survey.”
The part about the rise of Islam is timidly put as follows:
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I wonder why there are no staggering headlines full of exclamation points now? Such as:
Or:
Yet, even if they don’t feel the need to talk about the strength of Islam, they do deem it necessary to lament the decline of another religion, or pseudo-religion: Democracy.
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The same BBC dedicated an entire news article to this phenomenon titled “Arabs believe economy is weak under democracy.”
We read:
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This activation of panic mode is understandable coming from the BBC, and Westerners as a whole, since the democratic set-up is one of the most effective ways to spread cultural liberalism. Democracy is predicated upon the “sovereign individual,” a liberal anthropology which deifies man, where the human ego is made the beginning and end of the whole political set-up.
Democratic egalitarianism mutates every man into a miniature Fir’awn.
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In fact, even a liberal thinker like Alexis de Tocqueville observed over a century ago that modern individualism is a direct by-product of democracy.
In his classic Democracy In America, book 2, chapter II, he writes:
This individualism, where man becomes an atomized individual with his only value being as a brainless consumer, would be sufficient to discredit democracy. However, we could also present the innate flaws in the electoral process itself and whether democratic politicians even genuinely represent the masses when it’s always the same liberal elite that are re-elected while they hide behind the facade of the “right” and “left” dichotomy.
This is the reason why the West is so obsessed with spreading democracy; even waging wars in its name. It’s just one of the most subtle ways to liberalize a society. All you need to do is inject a heavy dose of individualism—the bedrock of the liberal worldview.
It would also empower an easily corruptible liberal elite that would be connected, in the name of democracy, to the Western neoliberal world-system. For instance, through its financial institutions such as the IMF. And in this way, the native elite will continue the liberal agenda on its own for economic reasons.
Democracy thus impacts non-Western societies on both the level of the masses and also the level of the elite.
These are the reasons why the BBC, and the West as a whole, gets triggered when Arabs (or others) rebuke democracy.
So in essence it seems like the Arab Spring—which was supposedly going to democratize the Arab world—is being replaced by some form of Islamist Boy Summer.
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