To the Great Ideological Battleground

[Valin]

PJ Media:

Michael J Totten

2/28/12

 

Tunisia was a quiet place when I went there eight years ago. Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime was a model of enlightened dictatorship compared with Moammar Qaddafi’s mad totalitarian prison state to the east. It was a model of stability compared with Algeria to the west where more than 100,000 people were butchered in the modern era’s most terrifying and bloodthirsty Islamist insurgency.

 

(Snip)

 

Tunisia is different, however. I don’t know if it’s different enough, but it’s different. Unlike in Egypt, the majority of its citizens voted against the Islamist party. Unlike Libya, it is not fractured tribally except in the Saharan south where hardly anyone lives. Unlike in Syria, the overwhelming majority belong to a single sect and ethnicity. Roughly one percent are Christian and another one percent or so are Jewish, but almost everyone is an Arab Sunni, at least nominally. Unlike Lebanon, Tunisia is not under the thumb of a hostile foreign dictatorship like Syria or Iran. It is free to seek its own destiny without sect, tribe, military junta, or foreign master as an obstruction.

 

(Snip)

 

I’m leaving for Tunisia next week and will travel up and down the country, from the somewhat Europeanized cities on the Mediterranean to the more conservative and Islamist towns in the interior and in the Sahara. I’ll talk to Islamists, liberals, socialists, Jews, Christians, Berbers, Tuaregs (hopefully), government officials, activists, professors, and foreign policy makers. I’m this close to landing an interview with the prime minister, a man who—by the way—was recently banned from even visiting the United States.

 

(Snip)

 

Recommend reading comments section