Daniel Lubetzky

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

-Herbert Clark HOOVER
31st President of the United States (1874-1964)

This, indeed, is one of the paramount challenges faced by democratic systems.  Democracy cannot exist without freedom of expression.  And yet how can it safeguard from demagogic populists who once in power may seek to dismantle democratic systems? Nowadays it is fashionable to criticize democratization efforts in the Middle East – after all, look at what Hamas is doing in Gaza, and what is going on in Lebanon with Hezbollah, and the rise of salafis and fatalists wherever any openness is shown. 

There are three keys to a successful democratic system:

• Security By A State Accountable to the People – so people can act on their beliefs without intimidation or coercion, and so militias cannot enforce their will and bully others – think of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine;
• Freedom of Expression and Thought – so all arguments can be truly exposed to scrutiny and thought
• Repeat Election Cycles – so if people make mistakes as they are apt to do, they can undo those who governed badly in the next election cycle – as they did to Hamas the sole time that the people saw them govern and had a chance to vote again; this is the big achilles heel to democracy in the Middle East, as Bernard Lewis commented that fundamentalists had used democracy as "one man, one vote, one time" – and once in power done away with future free elections; this is the problem in Iran, but also in places like Chavez’s Venezuela, and of course Gaza and Lebanon.

• and to be fair in the analysis, a variation of the problem also exists in the West Bank; on one side those in control of the PA

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Did you see the latest ad from iTunes, promoting Coldplay’s new album?!

How does Apple do it? Their ads are always so fresh, so ahead of the pack, so audio-visually on the cutting edge of art and pop. 

"The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy".

- Montesquieu

With regards to the Hezbollah-Lebanon-Doha debacle, and the article by Barry Rubin that I blogged about here, I received some interesting comments from Ami Isseroff, who runs MideastWeb and who I consider one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking analysts on the Middle East:

There is no use comparing everything bad that happens to Munich. This was more like Abbyssinia – including the toothless sanctions. Iran can only be stopped in Iran. Nothing could be done in Lebanon. As for us [in Israel], we have Iran in the north and Iran in the south. There cannot be peace as long as Hamas exists. Your Gaza correspondents are right, and the Palestinian public opinion surveys confirm that Hamas have little support. But in elections, it doesn’t matter what people think. It matters who has the most guns and counts the votes. Read the book Point of No Return about Iran/Hezbollah by Ronen Bergman . …Iran cannot be negotiated with. They will not give up until they are confronted with overwhelming and decisive force. A blockade by sea and air at least,

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A major challenge to letting democracy and freedom take root in the Middle East is that the region’s politics are submerged in an overwhelming culture of resistance.  For decades, Arab rulers have fed the Arab street with anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israel epithets to such pathological degree that now every movement is defined through this prism.  Those who oppose or attack Israel and the US are instant heroes of the street.  It is hard for progressive reformers to gain traction in Arab elections.  It is either the status quo of corruption and authoritarianism or revolutionary anti-Western opposition.  Thus, according to Yasser Abu Hilala writing in Al Ghad, in Kuwait’s recent elections, the winners were Salafis and Shiia candidates who eulogized Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh.  The situation is so extreme, that reporters who even just interview President Bush are considered infidels and threatened with their lives, and calls abound for countries like Egypt to break all relations with the US and Israel.

I am a staunch independent and find partisan politics to be too narrow minded in general, but if just 10% of Recount, HBO’s telling of the 2000 election Florida contest between Bush and Gore is true, one has to be

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The New York Times periodically rotates bureau chiefs and reporters across cities and regions.  When tracking the Jerusalem bureau, it is interesting (and sad perhaps) to notice a trend where many of them arrive with a positive outlook and are moved elsewhere after they start adopting an increasingly dour (if not pathologically cynical) perspective with regards to peace prospects.  Steven Erlanger used to write extremely insightful and diverse stories, then slowly gave in to total bleakness, and now I notice he is writing out of France, as he has eased Isabelle Kershner into the position.  She seems to be much more balanced on the topic.  Will she also be overcome by despair before too long?  I recall years ago noticing how Clyde Haberman went through this arch of perspectives, from positive to balanced to pessimistic.  Peter Bennett seems to have avoided the curse, but it is quite hard, perhaps impossible – and arguably it is a sign of dark wisdom.

It is not news that our bodies rely on bacteria to perform many functions, such as the bacteria in our digestive system that help deconstruct and process food. 

But what is fascinating according to a story in Genome Research reported by The New York Times, is the sheer volume of such relations, to the point that:

…bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome.

Since humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.

The Economist wrote an interesting piece on what they think are the motivations of Olmert and Assad to negotiate.

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