Foreign Dispatches

So Much for Egypt's "Arab Spring"

A few years ago, I made the prediction that the so-called "Arab Spring" was doomed to fail in Egypt, in light of the fact that the vote had been given to millions of Egyptians with no real grasp of literacy, let alone the rarified Enlightenment concepts upon whose foundations Western liberal democracies had been constructed. I was admonished by at least one commenter back then about my lack of faith in the good sense of the average Egyptian, and indeed, a part of me hoped to be proven wrong by succeeding developments, but that is not quite what happened (to put it mildly).

Too Much Democracy Too Soon

It was only a few months that I expounded on the dangers of assuming that where democracy is concerned, "more" necessarily means "better." What I hadn't foreseen at the time was that events in the Middle East would so thoroughly vindicate my skepticism about the supposedly inerrant wisdom of "the people", especially when all segments of a society are given a voice in equal proportion to their numbers, however ignorant, illiterate and subservient to religious superstition each such voter may be.

Nonsense in the Netherlands

No one who has read this blog over the years can accuse me of having closed my eyes to the problems which have accompanied large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe, but there's a clear divide between taking sensible measures to contain a problem before it gets out of hand and pandering to the rawest prejudice - a line which Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party have marched right past.

Under current law the third generation children of immigrants in Holland are classified as Dutch, in terms of government statistics and entitlements, as long as both their parents were born there.

But the anti-Muslim Freedom Party is concerned that by treating the grandchildren of immigrants as Dutch, 80 per cent of whom are under 10 years old, it will stop being possible to measure their integration.