It would be useful for secular oppositionists to wake up from all the illusions about the “dictator” that they have succumbed to. Facing them, in the most democratic country of the entire Islamic world, is a government that has earned its right to rule through the most legitimate means imaginable. A reality-check is in order.
Regardless of what anybody might say in defence, to try to explain a movement that persists in ceaselessly murdering hundreds of people by reference to global injustices is bound to open a window of legitimacy, in normal human perceptions, for such massacres.
Just where has IS come from? Is it not a product of the desperation caused by the disasters that have struck Iraq and Syria, the resulting rage of the excluded and humiliated Sunni Muslims, and their loss of any hope for their future? And just how has this environment been created?
If, faced with an extremely savage sort of violence predicated on a set of [Islamic] values that it considers to be its own, a society cannot respond with anything more serious than “it is the West that has created these demons,” I cannot help thinking that it has no chance of competing with the West either.
Whether it is going to be a parliamentary or a presidential system, this is not going to have any bearing whatsoever, implicitly or as a direct imposition, a fait accompli, on establishing the spirit of the constitution.