The Arab Spring is great, says leading Israeli analyst | The Times of Israel

Yigal Carmon, founder of MEMRI, believes the current revolutionary shift is an essential first step in the Arabs’ long road ‘to ‘join humanity’

By Elhanan Miller February 13, 2013, 11:59 am

When discussing the series of popular uprisings commonly known as the Arab Spring, pessimism seems to be the prevailing attitude among experts these days. But one observer, who has been monitoring and analyzing the Middle East for decades, is surprisingly upbeat.

“People were warning us about the rise of Islamism, but from day one my attitude was exactly the opposite: I was shining,” said Yigal Carmon, founder and president of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. Carmon’s assessment, as someone who hails from the heart of Israel’s security establishment, might bear particular significance.

“It is indeed an Arab Spring,” he told The Times of Israel this week, “where people are fighting for freedom, putting their lives on the line every day against dictatorship. There can be no other name for it.”

Before the Arab Spring, Carmon said, the Middle East was “a frozen swamp of repression, on every level.” But that stagnation, which he said left Arabs and Muslims “outside the world in its progress,” is gone, never to return.....................

FULL ARTICLE HERE: The Arab Spring is great, says leading Israeli analyst | The Times of Israel