Dirty Old MP?

Recently elected Tunisian MP, Zouheir Makhlouf and human rights advocate found himself at the centre of a #MeToo storm.

Explaining It To The Wife, May Not Have Been Easy ....

.... after a photo was taken of him with his trousers pulled down, ointment or cream on one hand, in a car outside a girls high school.

Voting Rights and Wrongs

There are two essential parts to any democratic system and those are that

(a) The people can vote for whomever they want (within some limitations on parties advocating violence against other citizens), and

(b) People who exercise their vote, do so with the knowledge that they are responsible for the end results.

Tunisia is the first of the "Arab Spring" countries to vote for a new government and has just voted for the Islamist party 'Ennahda' as the biggest party in its constitutional assembly, how this turns out will become clear in the coming months. It may be a mistake that just leads to Sharia law and an Iranian style regime.

The people of Gaza voted for Hamas, and then complained that because they had democratically elected an terrorist organisation as its government, then the rest of the world should accept that this legitimised them and their policies .... wrong.


Voting For These, Is Hard For Democracies To Digest  

If Hitler, or Stalin were 'democratically' voted into office today, would this mean that we should all accept that the 'holocaust', or 'the Purges' were legitimate policy goals, or treat them as pariah states? Well most Hamas supporters believe in much the same policies towards the Jews as Hitler (who is popular in the Muslim world)  ....

As discussed earlier, having a democracy make you responsible for the standard of the government you have voted to represent you. The Tunisians are responsible for what they may end up getting by dabbling with Islamic politics, and the people of the Gaza strip have to live with the results of voting for a terrorist group as their government.

Too many of the deluded apologists for these nasty little regimes in the West forget this second responsibility when they bleat on about the democratically elected groups of the Middle East, and it might be better if responsible democracy rather than oil supplies governed US and Western policies in the Middle East.

Strange Comment By Dictators

Over the last few weeks, as regime after regime in the Arab world has come under pressure from protesters, there have been strange utterances from each of the dictators who have been threatened. In  nearly every case they have said that the protesters were being misled by outsiders, or "armed gangs" of foreign-backed militants...... but also they are "drunk" or "drug addicts".


Libyan Drunks Marching ..... 

The Libyan woman lawyer who was gang raped by Gaddafi's men in Tripoli, and who in her distress went to the foreign press hotel to complain (before being bundled away by secret police, to not be seen again), was also described as "a drunk, a prostitute and a thief" by a regime spokesman.

Now, apart from the ludicrous nature of these statements, which are the same claims that these regimes have made against opponents for the last thirty or forty years, there is the strangeness that alcohol is illegal and prohibited to the Muslim faithful in any of these paradises on earth ..... alcohol is actually one of the principal rewards (along with sex) that is given to the faithful when they die (men only - women get nothing), so they only get to drink an alcohol beer when they are dead (which many of the regimes have tried quite hard to arrange).

All The Taste ... But None Of The Fun!

In fact alcohol is not sold anywhere openly in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia or Yemen where these protests broke out - only non alcoholic beers .... so just where are all these 'Drunks' coming from? 

I just can't work out where these dictators think all these are gangs of drunks were actually hiding for the last thirty years, nor where they were getting their drinks from to become 'Drunks'?

Post Script: The woman lawyer, Iman al-Obeidi ended up in Colorado USA, where she was later charged with a number of violent offences, including a February 2014 assault on two patrons at a down-town bar in Boulder, Colorado for which she was convicted in May 2015 of a Class 4 felony - she was sentenced in Boulder District Court to 6 years in prison. So she was in fact a violent drunk after all. Life is odd sometimes.

Nobel Prize, Ignoble Politics

China's behaviour over the award of the Noble Peace prize to Liu Xiaobo one of their own citizens, but one who is in prison for protesting for human rights, has been nothing less than shameful

..... but the behaviour of some of their 'friends' around the world has been equally disgraceful.

 

North African Dynasties

A few weeks ago I posted a comment on the trend towards new heredity dynasties being created around the world.

The Men Who Would Be Kings

This occurs when the 'democracy' didn't take, and is most obvious in the Muslim world, but the ex-communist countries such as North Korea have espoused this idea as well.