Another Comment on Arab Solidarity

Apparently the Egyptian leadership isn't happy that Hezbullah's Nassrallah has called for masses of Egyptians to rise against their leadership and march to the assistance of the common brothers in Hamas. According to Y-net (but not the BBC), the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Aboul Ghreit, said earlier today

"This man (Nasrallah) spoke of Egypt's armed forces. These honorable armed forces are meant to protect Egypt and if he does not know that, I am telling him: No and no! "The honorable armed forces are capable of defending this homeland from people like you. You want to create chaos in this region as a service to interests that are not for the good of this region."

Now, it's of course a pleasure to poke fun at the prophets of "the angry Arab street" in the Western media, and since these are grim days, finding things to draw pleasure from is OK. On a more significant level, the divisions in the Arab world are a sign of hope. If they all operated by the same Stalinist (or Nasserite) Groupthink, it would be impossible ever to live with them in peace because the extremists would dictate the line for everyone.

The Groupthink folks in the West, by the way, look at the same set of facts and tell you that the Arab regimes are all evil puppets of the even more evil Americans, themselves controlled by the Big Corporations and Oil Companies, while it's the Nassrallahs of this world who represent the brave alternative, as demonstrated by the fact that the Arab Street backs them, across the Arab World. All 12,000 of them.