The Strengths and Weaknesses of American Democracy

PHILADELPHIA -- I had one particularly enlightening and depressing day last week as a student of American democracy and Arab-Israeli diplomacy, and know better now why most Arabs have totally given up on expecting anything positive or fair to emerge from the United States vis-à-vis our region. Democracy is a great and noble venture and a most utilitarian governance system, but it also has a dark and ugly side that is very visible here in the U.S. these days.

My day started out while I was reading the New York Times on the flight from Boston to Philadelphia, including a front page article that noted that, “The growing influence of Islamists in Libya raises hard questions about the ultimate character of the government and society that will rise in the place of Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s autocracy.”

In what has become nearly the norm in American and some other Western societies’ journalism, even among quality media, wildly vague, unattributed and mostly unsubstantiated assertions are made about Arab or Islamic societies that include pessimistic expectations about what might result from the current revolts. Will Islamists take over? Will we have more Irans? Will democratic Arabs threaten Israel and badmouth the United States? Will the democratic moment wither away to be replaced by the authoritarianism that Arabs seem to know best?

Such attitudes reflect prevailing concerns, biases, fears, assumptions and preconceptions among some quarters across the United States, without really subjecting the issues to any sort of rigorous intellectual or even professional journalistic scrutiny. This trend has been with us since the Arab Awakening started last December, and reflects not only Western fears and prejudices, but also some lingering Orientalism and a bit of racism here and there.

My second lesson in the vagaries in democracy -- at least as practiced in the United States -- occurred later that same day when I attended a city council meeting in Philadelphia. I went to hear the discussion about a resolution, which passed, as expected, strongly supporting U.S. Senate Resolution 185 that denounces the Palestinian request for UN recognition of statehood, threatens the Palestinians with American financial aid cutoffs, attacks Hamas in every possible manner, and generally repeats a litany of pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian positions that come right out of the Israeli lobby handbook of distortions, exaggerations and general hysteria.

There was good news and bad news here, though, because the ...