BTW, if secularism and women's rights are the issues that trump all others, why not support dictatorship in the Middle East? Where populations have been still largely conservative, such as in the Middle East, women who enjoyed more rights than their Muslim sisters elsewhere mainly lived under dictatorship, e.g., Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Turkey.
Algeria has been a compromise formation: on one hand, it annulled the results of the elections that the Islamic Salvation Front won and killed Islamist terrorists and guerrillas ruthlessly; on the other hand, it enacted a new Family Code on 9 June 1984, incorporating strong elements of sharia. It's a kind of triangulation, what Bill Clinton would have done had he been an Algerian leader. A case can be made, however, that the Islamic Salvation Front would have done even worse for women. In Lebanon, those who resist Tel Aviv and Washington the most fiercely are Hizbullah, a religious outfit; and those who would accommodate Western imperialism and neoliberal capitalism are like the assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, supported by more socially liberal and secular-minded upper crusts of Lebanon. Democracy, women's rights, and resistance to imperialism sometimes go together in some parts of the world, but they don't always, and they seldom have in the Middle East. That's the hard reality that Western leftists have failed to confront head-on so as to come up with a practical principle on the conundrum. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
