“What was meant to be the highlight of the government’s election campaign – a mass rally in Algiers at the weekend addressed by prime minister Ahmed Ouyahia – seems to have backfired. Ouyahia’s speech was certainly memorable, but mostly for the wrong reasons. Harking back to the country’s independence struggle against France, he said: “The Arab spring for me is a disaster. We don’t need lessons from outside. Our spring is Algerian, our revolution of 1 November 1954.” Unlike the glorious days of 1954, the current Arab spring is “a plague” sweeping the region, he told voters. Its effects can be seen, he said, in “the colonisation of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the partition of Sudan and the weakening of Egypt”. “The revolutions that engulfed brotherly and friendly countries such as Iraq, Sudan, Tunisia, Mali, Libya and Egypt are not accidental but are the work of Zionism and Nato,”………..”

Zionism was behind the Arab uprisings? That sounds like the Saudi Mufti Shaikh Al Al Shaikh talking (or maybe the Saudi king or Muammar Qaddafi or the al-Khalifa of Bahrain or the Assad regime in Syria). They have all blamed “foreigners” and Zionists and drugs and even obsession with sex (Tahrir tents and virginity tests) for the uprisings.
Interesting that he called the ‘Arab Spring” a plague , maybe he is a fan of Albert Camus (another native of Algeria). I suppose it all depends on how things turn out in the end (whenever that may be). Who knows how it will turn out in the future, but at least people are voting for their own governments in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya (as they do in Lebanon and Iraq). They are NOT voting for their own governments in Syria and Bahrain and Yemen and Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the Sudan. I may not like the government they vote for, most likely I don’t in these cases, but it is their choice.

Cheers
mhg


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