And from their "Get The Vote Out" Campaign  

Enti Essout (translation:  You are the Voice, or, more idiomatically, "It's Your Call"). 

A universal message of what makes a democracy a democracy....

Enti Essout (sous titre Anglais) from Enti Essout on Vimeo.

And to show how those deprived of democracy react to the opportunity....

Turnout was more than 90 per cent – a mark of Tunisians’ determination to exercise their new democratic rights after decades of repression.

     Globe & Mail, October 24, 2011

Those who have reaped the benefits for generations should be so active.

Well said, LBM....we take a lot for granted here.  

I learnt a few things talking to people in our congregation from ex-communist countries.  Life in communist Romania--grim.  

There was no arab spring. the Spring parts were crushed by Saudi Arabia and Bahrain - and by the US in Egypt and Libya. the US wants to conquer Africa. It has no interest in democracy - and never has had any.

You know who led the world after The First World War in crushing colonial hopes of independence? It was President Wilson. (who was also the first president to segregate the White House Staff. He preached independence. But he refused to give it ot any
American-controlled country. (Yes, the US did have an Empire, even then.)

Graeme, I agree.  However at some point there is a need to recognize that cynicism perpetuates the problem.  Tunisians went to the polls in record numbers; numbers that put our electorate to shame.  They did so because they were filled with hope.

The desire, hope and want for change is encircling the planet.  They will live or die by the encouragement given, not by politicians, but by each other.  Politicians will shift with the changing winds, they hold no allegiance to anyone but themselves.  It is the people who need to encourage one another and hold onto hope.

LB

-----------------------

It's hard to argue against cynics - they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side.

     Molly Ivins

Mmmm, trouble is that one of the "people" becomes a politician.

It wasn't that long ago that the "people" were full of naive optimism about Obama. (including me).....................

In the case of the middle east and africa, the central problem is that the US will permit a democracy to exist ONLY if it is subservient to US wishes. I certainly am cheered by the participation of the Tunisians. But the US has never been a friend to any real democracy.

Optimism, particularly the naive, creates false expectations.  When those expectations are not met it leads to disappointment and ultimately cynicism. 

I feel for Obama.  The optimistic created a super hero and like all super heroes it was a work of fiction.  The reality is he is one man.  Yes a man with more power than most but still one man.  He needed the cooperation of many other men and women and he was not afforded that.  Instead of holding those others responsible, that one man, Obama, is held totally accountable.  Putting the credit or blame on the shoulders of one man in a democracy is similar to holding one snowflake responsible for an avalanche; not only is it not possible it is reckless and a recipe for disaster. 

Optimists need to understand how the system works to avoid becoming cynics.

Cynics, on the other hand, doom everything to failure before the process is allowed to operate. 

Put the two together, the cynic and the optimist, and the process always fails.  The one giving no opportunity and the other demanding the unrealistic.  There needs to be a more balanced approach.  One that combines realistic expectations with the opportunity to work cooperatively to achieve them.  The either or, black or white, my way or the highway, mentality has never worked and it never will.

The founding fathers of democracy held realistic expectations of the process.  They knew that such a process was fragile, that it gets both its strength and weakness from the people not the elected.  If the people permit the process to erode, if they grant too much power to too few then democracy fails.  It is the people, not one man, who holds the balance of optimism or despair.

The democratic erosion in the US has been going on for some time.  Long before 9/11 and certainly long before Obama came into office and in their complacency and cynicism the American people permitted this decline.  Other democracies, such as our own, are on similar paths.  We can continue to blindly follow or chose to change our own direction.  We can stop emulating or blaming the Americans and take responsibility for our own countries.  Who knows maybe the Americans could learn something from us, just as we can learn from the budding democracies.

LB

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The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

      John Adams, 2nd US President (1735-1826)

you are too kind to Obama. He never was a man of any substance. He was heavily backed by big money from the start - even before he ran for president. He was always a bought man. And he said nothing of any substance in his campaign.

You seriously think the US is behind this?

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/protests-turn-violent-in-tun...

In Sidi Bouzid, the Tunisian town seen as the birthplace of the Arab Spring, crowds of angry protesters on Friday burned a government building, a day after video emerged of men ransacking the local office of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that won a plurality of seats in this week’s parliamentary elections.

Thick clouds of smoke billowed out of a large courtroom and police complex as tires burned in the street. Security forces did not move to control the situation initially, Reuters reported, as hundreds of protesters controlled a central square and chanted against the government.

Twitter feed

Large protests in #SidiBouzid #roadblocks tires burning. People shouting “the revolution is ours and you can’t take it from us” #tnelecThu Oct 27 21:25:09 via Twitter for Mac

It is not a question of kindness.  It is the recognition that a president or a prime minister is the face, not the body, in a democracy. 

I am far  more interested in who the mandarins of a political party are than the man (or rarely the woman) who is the party poster child.   As  long as people only focus on the face they will miss who is in actual control;  the real puppet masters remain undetected and, therefore, protected to continue.

LB

-------------------

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

      John Godfrey Saxe, The Blind Men and the Elephant

I have no idea what the US involvement in Tunisisa might be.

I do know it has never approved of any democracy that was not a puppet for it. And it has approved of a great many dictatorships that were puppets.

For the people who control the US, democracy is irrelevant - even in the US.. All that counts is whether nations do what they are told.

Funny thing. Arab countries call for democracy, and it's labelled arab spring. Americans call for demcracy - and they are either ignored by the media or beaten up by the police. Nobody mentions and American Spring.

NATO exits Libya

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/article3211217.ece ($)

Message of thanks takes a hit as chaos continues

...foreign jets prepared for their final sorties today, with their seven-month mission against forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi due to end one minute before midnight tonight.

The interim Libyan leadership had called on Nato to stay until the end of the year, fearful of the threat posed by Gaddafi loyalists. The 28-member alliance, however, decided last week that its job was complete, particularly after the United Nations Security Council voted to end the mandate to protect civilians from attack by Gaddafi forces.

Although the National Transitional Council holds the towns, Nato’s exit caused some anxiety about its ability to secure the borders and deserts.

“I think we still need surveillance patrols along our borders. Without planes doing this job then the first we will hear about any incident in the desert, it might be too late to respond,” a deputy commander of a revolutionary brigade in Tripoli said.

Life was gradually returning to a semblance of normality in the capital, with about 80 per cent of the regular police force back at work and rebels being encouraged to hand in their weapons and return to their civilian jobs or join the official security forces...

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/archaeology/article3210521.ece ($)

Priceless treasures stolen from Libyan bank in “inside job”

A priceless haul of ancient coins known as the Treasure of Benghazi has been stolen from a city bank in what has been described as “one of the greatest thefts in archaeological history”.

The 7,700 gold, silver and bronze coins appear to have been taken from a subterranean vault under cover of the Libyan second city’s bitter battle for survival in the face of sustained attacks by Gaddafi’s troops.

A highly organised gang drilled through the concrete ceiling of the vault at the National Commercial Bank of Benghazi to reach the coins, which date from the time of Alexander the Great.

Steel lockers had been prised open and the red wax seals on the wooden trunks housing the collection were broken. The burglars had targeted the ancient treasures and left items of lesser value untouched.

“It may have been an inside job. It appears to have been carried out by people who knew what they were looking for,” Hafed Walda, a Libyan archaeologist based at King’s College London, told TheSunday Times.

Some of the coins date as far back as 570BC. Also taken were antiquities including jewellery, medallions, bracelets, anklets, necklaces, earrings, rings and gold armbands. The haul included about 50 small monuments, figurines of bronze, glass and ivory and a small cache of precious stones.

Putting a value on the missing treasures has been deemed impossible, but as a guide to the haul’s worth, one single ancient Greek coin from Carthage sold earlier this month for the record price of £286,000 at an auction in Paris.

Serenella Ensoli, an archaeologist at the Second University of Naples and a specialist in Libyan antiquities, described the robbery as “a very serious loss for archaeological heritage on a global scale”.

“The collection is not well studied, it is a huge loss for Libya’s heritage,” she said.

The raid took place in May but has only just been revealed by Libya’s new government amid speculation that the fledgling National Transitional Council, which is seated in Benghazi, feared negative publicity.

Fadel Ali Mohammed, the new Libyan Minister for Antiquities, raised the alarm with Unesco, the United Nations heritage watchdog, in July. Descriptions of the stolen goods have been distributed to customs authorities, police forces and auction houses worldwide.

The theft happened soon after an attempt to set the bank on fire. The arson attack had been deemed part of the uprising against the dictatorial 42-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi, but has since been linked with the subsequent burglary.

At the time, Benghazi was the centre of the anti-Gaddafi revolution. Firmly held by the rebels, the city was coming under sustained attack from loyalists.

Interpol has been alerted, but the trail has gone cold and archaeologists fear that returning the stolen antiquities could be difficult once they have been taken across the Libyan frontier.

Reports are emerging of valuable antiquities appearing locally for sale. Islamic and Greek gold coins have cropped up in Benghazi’s gold market, said Khaled Mohammed Haddar, an archaeology professor at Benghazi University, and an Egyptian newspaper has reported that a farmer tried to smuggle through the Egyptian port of Alexandria 503 gold coins and a 3in gold statue from Libya.

Most of the Benghazi treasures were recovered between 1917 and 1922 from the temple of Artemis in Cyrene, an ancient Greek colony known in modern Libya as Shahat. The treasure spent the Second World War at the Museum of Italian Africa in Rome and was returned in 1961, when it was deposited at the bank.

There is an active secularist component to the Egyptian population.  And they are mad as hell at the Muslim Brotherhood.  Read on.... (Wall Street Journal)

The Financial Times reports how the Arab Spring has hit the Thomas Cook travel company:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5bf90ba2-177b-11e1-b00e-00144feabdc0.html...

Thomas Cook got its start in 1869 organizing the first package holidays from the UK to pyramids, according to the story (which I cannot cut and paste due to the policy of that site).   It is now facing "a cripping cash crisis" in part due to the unrest in Egypt.  Two companies dominate the Egypt holiday trade, Thomas Cook and Tui Travel.

But consider what this must mean for Egypt.  The loss of a major source of income, at a time when there is already civil unrest.  

Arab Women Fight to Defend their Rights

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,800447,00.html

The last greatest theft in archeological history was during the Iraq invasion. Not a coincidence.

A writer in The Globe and Mail (with whom I am not familiar) talks about the Arab uprisings:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/doug-saunders/the-economic-for...

Excerpt:

How do we understand the new politics of the Arab world? Here’s a suggestion: Don’t even try. You’ll learn far more if you make an effort to understand the economics. For what happened this year on the southern shore of the Mediterranean was far more an inevitable response to economic change than a spontaneous outburst of resistance. And to understand what happens next, you need to know what, economically, has come before.

The most important voice this year is the Cairo economist Samer Soliman,whose book The Autumn of Dictatorship is not just crucial to explaining the Arab uprisings, but also offers the key to understanding almost all transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, and the troubles that occur along the way.

In his detailed analysis of 60 years of finances, it becomes evident that at the beginning of 2011, Egypt and Tunisia were at about the same place, economically, where you would have found Eastern Europe and Russia in 1988, or Brazil in the early 1980s, just as their authoritarian regimes were about to collapse.

Let us hope the antiques of Egypt are not under threat.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/gta/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=388...

SALAFISTS TARGET WORKS OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS 

Jamestown Foundation

Egypt’s Salafist parties, which did surprisingly well in the first round of parliamentary elections with 24% of the vote, have tried hard to present themselves as compatible with modern norms, so long as they fit the moral standards established by Islam’s earliest generations. Youssry Hamad, a leader of al-Nour (The Light) Party, the leading Salafist movement in Egypt, has protested claims that the Salafists wish to turn back the clock in Egypt: “"We are surprised to find that the liberal and secular current, which rejects the doctrine of Islam, distorts our image in the media through lies and speaks about us as if we came from another planet… We will not tell people to ride camels, as others have said about us. We want a modern and advanced Egyptian society of people" (al-Masry al-Youm [Cairo], November 19).

Egypt’s rapidly expanding population is facing a host of major problems that will require the attention of any new government. There have been fears, however, that an Islamist-dominated parliament might devote itself to social issues such as reforms directed at dress, gender mixing and alcohol consumption at the expense of more pressing concerns. While the Muslim Brotherhood continues to keep its distance from suggestions it might have a radical Islamist agenda, many Salafists have embraced the opportunity to express extremist interpretations of Islam in the post-Mubarak environment. Some Salafist preachers have suggested it is time to put an end to the “idolatry” encouraged by the monuments of Ancient Egypt. Though the last known worshipper of the ancient Egyptian religion converted to Christianity in the fourth century C.E., these Salafists have suddenly decided to address the danger posed to Islam by these monuments, suggesting their destruction or concealment as a solution.

A Salafist leader and al-Nour Pary candidate for parliament in Alexandria, Abd al-Moneim al-Shahat, described the civilization of ancient Egypt as a “rotten culture” that did not worship God (Ahram Online, December 2). While al-Shahat has not called for their complete destruction, he has suggested that the ancient works be covered with wax to prevent their worship (Reuters, December 9). Al-Shahat has also voiced his concerns over the literature of Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, denouncing it for inciting “promiscuity, prostitution and atheism” (Ahram Online, December 2).  Though running in an Islamist stronghold in Alexandria, al-Shahat lost the run-off election last week to an independent candidate supported by the Muslim Brotherhood after Copts and Liberals banded together to defeat the controversial al-Nour candidate (Reuters, December 8).

The growing signs that the newly ascendant Salafists might begin a campaign against Egypt’s vast archaeological and cultural legacy, one of the most impressive in the world, have sent shock waves through Egypt’s tourism industry. The legacy of the ancient Egyptians represents the nation’s principal source of foreign currency and over a tenth of Egypt’s gross domestic product.

In response to the Salafists’ verbal attacks on the ancient remains, a group of roughly 1,000 protestors gathered in Giza near the site of the Great Pyramid to denounce the Salafists’ remarks (Reuters, December 9; Ahram Online, December 10).  Al-Shahat’s suggestions for dealing with the issue of idolatry in Egypt were later soundly refuted by Shaykh Mahmoud Ashour, the former deputy leader of Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the most respected center of Islamic scholarship in the world. Referring to the great Caliphs and other respected Islamic leaders who had ruled Egypt, Ashour noted that neither the 7^th century Muslim conqueror of Egypt and companion of the Prophet Muhammad, Amr ibn al-As, nor any of the other Islamic rulers of Egypt “had a problem with ancient Egyptian monuments or thought they have to be destroyed or that they are against Islam” (al-Arabiya, December 12; Bikya Masr [Cairo], December 13). Abd al-Nour, a former leader of the Wafd Party and current Minister of Tourism in the interim government, blasted the Salafists’ approach to tourism, saying that the “rejection of God’s blessings [such as Egypt’s] unique location, a shining sun and warm water, is tantamount to atheism” (Ahram Online, December 10).

To counter fears that an Islamist government could mean the end of Egypt’s vital tourism industry, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hizb al-Hurriya wa’l-Adala (HHA - Freedom and Justice Party) and the Salafist al-Nour Party both announced they would hold “tourism conferences” to promote the industry. Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have shaken hands with tourists in Luxor and visited the Giza Pyramids to show their support for tourism based on Egypt’s ancient monuments. A Nour Party spokesman, however, has said his party supports tourism, but prefers a type of “Halal tourism” that would ban immoral conduct and be consistent with Salafist ethics (Bikya Masr,December 12).

In some ways the modern Egyptian Salafists appear to be opposed to the views of the early Arab Muslims they emulate, Muslims who were very familiar with the civilization of Ancient Egypt after centuries of Arab migration to Egypt (there is ample archaeological evidence of some of these Arabs adopting the religion of ancient Egypt in the pre-Islamic era). Though the Arab Muslim conquerors that arrived in the Seventh Century were avid treasure hunters and not above stripping pyramids and other monuments of useful building materials, early Islamic scholars from across the Islamic world visited Egypt to investigate its monuments, culture and history in the interest of expanding knowledge of the world and recording the monuments as evidence of the Holy Scriptures in which they are mentioned.