July 9, 2005
Democracy is NOT enough!
Rena Cohen, writing for Townhall.com, discusses Palestine’s “perversion” of democracy.
…a deadly charade is being carried out in another part of the world under the banner of democracy. While Israel is pulling out of Gaza and parts of the disputed territories of the West Bank to foster peace, the Palestinian Authority and its allies are preparing for the next terror war.
…
Sad as it is for both the Israelis and the people living in Gaza and the West Bank, it is clear that in Ramallah democracy has become merely another tool in the hands of the merciless. History has shown that elections are not a sanitizing process. Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany after winning a plurality in the January 1933 elections and being “democratically†selected to form a government. Elections cannot make a terrorist into a democrat anymore than awarding Arafat the Nobel Prize made him into a peacemaker.
Looks like unbridled democracy has failed. That’s no surprise to anyone. When an entire society that has been brainwashed from birth to hate the Jews gets the chance to vote, is it any surprise that they vote someone into power that hates Jews? When Cohen cries about how the election didn’t turn Abbas into a “democrat”, did she ever think they would? She thinks that democracy will solve all problems, when there are wider issues at play here.
I’ve posted previously about how the term Democracy has been changed from a simple idea of majority rule to mean our Western style civilization, with limited powers of government, individual rights, and the rule of law. Too often, we forget that when we push a “state” like Palestine to hold democratic elections, it doesn’t mean that they’ll also take on the rest of the ideals of western civilization.
We’re trying, with Iraq and Afghanistan, to not make that mistake. Building things such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and limitation of government powers into their constitutions, we hope to help them avoid the pitfalls of the Palestinians. But we can’t sit there and expect bringing in “Democracy” will fix what’s going on. It won’t fix it in the middle east. It won’t fix it in Africa. If we expect to see any improvement in that part of the world, we need to set up a system of rule of law, and even more, rule of just laws. Democracy is only one part of the equation; expecting them to live up to our standards without the other parts is plain nonsense.
1 Comment
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I couldn’t agree more. For me, at least, when I talk about “democracy” I assume that we’re talking about Western-style rule of law. Sharansky makes the same point in his book. Unfortunately, there are still too many out there who believe “the people” are the solution to most every problem.