"One Day Ramallah Will Rise Up"

Richard Silverstein, an American Jewish writer, working from Seattle, Washington, joins Uri Avnery and Gideon Levy in recognizing the "hidden mechanism" around us.

Silverstein writes a blog, Tikun Olam. His latest posting is Israel and Arab Spring: "Do Not Ask for Whom the Bell Tolls,  It Tolls for Thee."

In that posting, Silverstein addresses, with disapproval, those writers who reject radical Islamists as potential government leaders.

Silverstein sees this disapproval as a "convenient conviction because it further bolstered Ehud Barak's old saw that Israel was 'a villa' in the Middle East 'jungle.'" If the region could be portrayed as a nest of Muslim terrorists or terrorists-in-the-making, it would make Israel the only friend the U.S. would have left.

As the Church Lady would say, "How  conveeenient , indeed. Silverstein continues:

"This, of course, was the same thinking that led Bibi Netanyahu to see 9/11 as good for Israel because of his certainty it would show that Israel and America were lone bastions of democracy amid a sea of Islamic terrorism.

"Unfortunately, Netanyahu's vision was largely realized, thanks to a Bush administration that played the terror card quite deftly and an Obama administration that inherited and expanded upon this sordid legacy.

"But developments in Egypt and Turkey have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no such thing as an Islamic Winter. That the revolts of the Arab Spring are progressing toward more democracy and more openness. I won't go so far as to say they're progressing toward secularism, because that's a loaded term in countries like Turkey. But there is a clear movement away from authoritarianism and toward something radically different."

Politicians who cling to power are driven to see the world as a reality of their making, not as it really is. That has led a columnist like the New York Times' David Brooks to embarrass himself by writing a column, "Defending the Coup," which denigrates radical Muslims as incapable of leadership.

Brooks made this outlandish assertion, for which he has been criticized, in writing about the change of government in Egypt.

He is wrong, of course, so wrong that it hardly seems worth the time to point out to Brooks that the United States was initially led by a motley largely Protestant collection of farmers, lawyers, shop keepers, slave owners, and opportunists of all stripes. These citizens made mistakes at the outset.

Slavery and oppression of Native Americans through racial segregation are just the more blatant examples. Their current successors continue to do so. Governing is always a messy business.

Those first generation American white, male largely Protestant citizens created a new union which, like all nations, remains a work in progress. In the same manner, new Islamic-led governments will be forced to find their way forward in a new modern environment in the 21st century.

These governments must be judged not by the "cut of their jib," to use an old nautical term, nor by the religion to which they adhere, but rather, by the way they treat their own citizens and how they relate to neighboring states.

The photo at top of a young protester was taken during a demonstration in Ramallah in 2012.