"This weekend, I asked that long-standing, brave nihilist Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s minuscule Druze community and one of Bashar al-Assad’s most constant critics, if he agreed with me.
He condemned “the willingness of some people to have police states like before”. And Jumblatt, never one to miss a floral parallel to the iniquities of the region, referred to a “spring” which “had blossomed a variety of unique ‘flowers’ like Isis, Jabhat al-Nusra and so many other exotic varieties.
Thanks to climate change, we have remarkable new cactuses, like Maliki and Sisi, plus a new brand of exquisite truffles, with a delicious flavour, newly catalogued as Ghannushi and Morsi.”
Jumblatt’s contempt for all their houses – for the Islamists fighting Bashar in Syria, for the pseudo-dictators Nouri al-Maliki and Abdul Fattah al-Sisi of Iraq and Egypt, for the “elected” Islamist leaders Mohamed Morsi of Egypt and Rashid al-Ghannushi of Tunisia – was in keeping with his scorn for the Syrian President, “expert in ‘botany’ … obliged to safeguard these unique blossoms with some needed ingredients, home-made chemicals blended with phosphorous”."
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-fisk/flowers-of-the-arab-spring-are-so-distracting-that-ariel-sharons-death-has-barely-raised-a-whimper-29910086.html
Not sure what is wrong with cactuses. but otherwise a great analogy.
Freedom in the Middle East isn't really taking. It just seems to lead to the expression of extremism which in turn invites the argument of security from the strong men.
There's no comfortable competition of philosophies. The underlying belief in jihad means violence inevitably emerges.
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