By, John R Bradley
2 min read
The Western media presented last week’s assassination of Chokri Belaid, Tunisia’s most prominent critic of radical Islam, as a pivotal moment in the Arab Spring.
That Mr Belaid’s murder was reported as atypical, or a kind of wake-up call, reveals only how Middle East correspondents continue to misrepresent the grim reality of these uprisings — unable as they are to admit that, from the outset, they got it all so wrong. For while Mr Belaid’s cold-blooded killing was dramatic and tragic, it was, sadly, just one more example of how Islamofascism is spreading like wildfire throughout the Arab world.
Most egregiously, Islamists groups that gained power through the ballot box are still being portrayed as distinct from violent Salafist organisations, when they are of course joined at the hip.
In their combination of highly disciplined party structure and fake denial of responsibility for random violence, the “moderates” resemble Europe’s far-right political parties who, too, have embraced the democratic process. The latter also rely on a grassroots network of thugs whose brutal beatings of Jews and immigrants in the streets they officially distance themselves from. Acutely aware of how this is playing out on the Arab street are Tunisia’s Sufi and Jewish communities. More than 40 Sufi shrines, long venerated as places to worship local saints and seek blessings, have so far been desecrated. The same relentless trend is found in Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. Meanwhile, some 68 gravestones were this month destroyed, and their graves looted, at a Jewish cemetery in the Tunisian coastal town of Sousse; and in Kef, western Tunisia, 10 Jewish graves were smashed to pieces, with skeletons left scattered around the cemetery.
