A Gerecht Correction

Reuel Marc Gerecht claims (in a statement that made my morning tea spew out of my nose) that

One of the great under-reported stories of the end of the 20th century was the enormous penetration of democracy and individual liberty into the Muslim consciousness.

Andrew Bostom has some sense of why the "story" may have been "under-reported"--because it's a Western (and Gerechtian) fantasy:

Despite ebullient appraisals of events in Egypt, which optimistic observers insist epitomize American hopes and values at their quintessential best—there is a profound, deeply troubling flaw in such hagiographic analyses which simply ignore the vast gulf between Western and Islamic conceptions of freedom itself. The current polling data indicating that three-fourths of the Egyptian population are still enamored of the totalitarian Sharia confirms that this yawning gap still exists—strikingly so—in our era.

That's the West for you: ever "ebullient" over impending "change"; ever fated to have its hopes dashed once the horrible reality sets in about the Ayatollah or the Taliban or Hamas or whatever other Islamotarian agent of "change"--hello, Muslim Brotherhood!--happens to seize the moment.

David Solway has a term to describe the Gerechts, Friedmans and other "ebullient" ones--"useful jihadiots."

Update: The decidedly non-Gerechtian, non ebullient Barbara Kay writes:

The Muslim Brotherhood, the only well-organized movement in Egypt, like all revolutionary forces presents as democratic and reformist (remember the mullahs in Iran in 1977 forswearing their wish for political power?). But it is the fountainhead of a global Islamist movement as intent on conquering the United States -- and the rest of the world -- as communism was. Obama should not have pushed for a vacuum of leadership, for the Brotherhood is eager to fill it, and if they do, Obama will have been the midwife to yet another totalitarian country. Obama just doesn't get it at all.

Neither do Gerecht, Friedman, et al.