Fast forward 1300 years, pass up a few crusades and Jihads (which were both created through the religious ideal of Holy War), a restructuring of governing principalities after WWI, the Iranian issue after WWII, and the Zionist victory, we have our Revolution. Is it any wonder why the Arab nations wish to control their own nations for once? British and US interests have been dictating policy over there for quite some time, very similar to the way the British government dictated policy to the Colonies before they revolted. Now, Arab colonies are rebelling. The only problem is that, for the most part, they are revolting against the NATO selected governments. This poses a problem, because we still have this underlying fear of Islam, and many of the governments elected have Islam as their principle document of Faith in the writing of their constitution. Yes, in many ways, this has the possibility of removing many of the rights women have. But should we not have faith in their system of government to be able to gradually restore or grant those rights? Let's look at a country who had similar beginnings.
In 1776, the United States of America was created. After suffering horrible losses in the French and Indian War/The Seven Years War, the Colonies, now under much heavier British control, demanded a say in parliament for the taxation of their goods and services that were paid to the crown. Some of these colonies were Puritan - the New England region. The Puritan government was based solely on the religious orthodoxy and dogmatic principles they embraced. They were seen as extreme Christians by outsiders, and were persecuted for their religion in England. They helped create the doctrine in the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Many of our founding fathers originated from the New England Puritan Colonies - and quite a few of our Presidents. We didn't have our "perfect document" right at the start. When we won the Revolution, and gained our Independence, we did not go right into our current Constitution. We began with the Articles of Confederation, which did not succeed in the long run. We found we had to have the proper balance between federal and state governments, while giving everyone a voice through representation. It took a few years for us to realize our mistake, but in the long run, we made it to our living law.
I will also note several things we did as a budding nation - slavery not needing to be mentioned for the obvious social flaw. Women could not own property in many states. Those that did allow women to own property only granted it through a husband's death - as frontier territories and states allowed, since husbands would often get killed by Indian raiding parties. But that still didn't get women a vote. After the Civil War, certain Amendments were made to allow every race a vote - but not every gender. We didn't give women the right to vote for well over a century through our country's progression. Even then, we allowed laws to separate which rights applied to which people based on color or gender. They were eventually overturned, and cultural progression advanced to our present state, where we argue whether or not certain laws should apply to certain sexual orientations.
We have no right to judge our fellow man for basing a country's principle document on religious belief - we did the same. We have to accept that Islam is not inherently evil, as we hear from FoxNews over and over, because we have the same principle of Holy War within our religious dogma as they do. The Christian principle may be a bit different, but the overall ideas are the same. We need to understand that when some crazy guy calls out a Jihad against the United States, not everyone in the Islamic community will follow. We need to trust that the government will track down and possibly capture/dispose of them before they are able to come into the United States. While 9/11 was a tragedy of massive proportion, and someone had a definite inside track to be able to pull it off, there is a lot of evidence towards it being a false flag operation. Regardless, we eventually tracked down and eliminated the person who supposedly plotted the attempt. We got our revenge/justice. Now, we need to back off and let the region start governing for itself. We need to let them go through their own progression of statehood, learn what works and what doesn't, without getting terrified of who's leading them. We had the Insurgent George Washington, who fought many British soldiers using guerilla warfare tactics before the term existed, as President of our country. Yet, we have a sector of our American culture that insists Washington is a hero, while proclaiming Arabic leaders terrorists, even though many of them used similar tactics if translated through time and technological progression.
Why should we accept the Arab Spring full out? We'd be hypocrites not to.
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