From Arab Spring to Shariah Fall?

No one is mourning the demise of the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, much less the fall of the terrorist Moammar Gadhafi.  The Middle East has for a long time groaned under the weight of oppressive dictators.  Revolution, however, can be a very dangerous thing.

We Americans have a soft spot for popular uprisings, for very good reason.  Our own revolution created not only the world’s most prosperous, powerful, and virtuous democracy, it created a beacon of freedom for the entire world.  But more common than American-style revolutions are revolutions in the French style – bloodbaths that unleash the pent-up frustrations of very different cultures and ideologies.

Now, out of the ashes of the Libyan revolution comes news that its revolutionaries intend to impose Shariah law, Tunisian elections now expect to bring an Islamist party to power, and the power of the Muslim Brotherhood in the “new Egypt” is well-documented.  As thousands of missiles have gone missing in Libya and Egypt’s Copts face renewed persecution, it’s time to face the reality that revolutions are only as good as the cultures that spawn them, and we now face an Arab world more radical, more hostile to Israel than we faced last Fall.

In the aftermath of World War II, as Winston Churchill saw the Soviet Union tighten its grip across Eastern Europe, he declared that an “iron curtain” was falling across the border between the free West and the communist East.  Is there a new kind of iron curtain falling in the Middle East?  Are the already-damaged cultures of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia on the verge of taking a darker turn?