Don't Trust Anyone (Over 30) Who Claims to Know What the 'Middle East' Uprisings Mean

“The mass popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt and the uprisings shaking Bahrain and Libya at the moment are contributing to sinking the culturalist mythologies of this intellectually exhausted generation of militants turned into detached, sour commentators. Not all wines age well. One also hopes that these world-historical events will contribute to overcoming the simplistic binary logic of interpretation which have dominated public discourse on opposite sides of the political spectrum for so long: external causes vs. internal ones, imperialism and colonialism vs. Islam, political logics vs. cultural ones. The recent popular uprisings have contributed to the disintegration of what now became the old culturalist myth.”
 — Fadi Bardawil writes that the past two months show that Arab society is not what anyone thought it was. The dictatorships, the Western analysts, the former revolutionaries that make up the aging Arab intelligentsia — all wrong. Time for them all to fade away. Meanwhile, yesterday’s protests in Benghazi alone are estimated to have left 60 dead and hundreds injured.