Arab Spring Defeated

[Minimalist]

Speaking of Egypt.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36775035

Hundreds forcibly disappeared in Egypt crackdown, says Amnesty

Egypt's security services have forcibly disappeared and tortured hundreds of people in the past year in an effort to wipe out dissent, a rights group says.
Students, political activists and protesters - some as young as 14 - have vanished without a trace, according to a new report by Amnesty International.
Many are alleged to have been held for months and often kept blindfolded and handcuffed for the entire period.

Mazen said that after he denied the charges, interrogators repeatedly raped him with a wooden stick in order to force him to "memorise" a false confession, applied electric shocks to his genitals and other parts of his body, and threatened to arrest his parents if he retracted the confession.

I bet Dick Cheney is jealous.

[Anomalocaris]

Could Arab Spring ever have led to anything other than disillusionment and radicalization? I don't think so.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I'm on my phone right now at work, but I'll look it up when I get home. I don't doubt that there's some synergy going on, but iirc they were Belgian citizens by birth.

I forgot about this, sorry. One of the Paris attackers was apparently born in Belgium; another was apparently from Toulouse; yet another was also Belgian. The French Prime Minister also asserted that others involved were immigrants, but the Wiki shows no further details.

Of the Brussels airport attackers, two were of Belgian birth, one Swedish birth, one Moroccan birth, and one doesn't have his birthplace given.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_El...background
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najim_Laac...background
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Ab...background
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El_...background
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_Kray...background

[Minimalist]

Could Arab Spring ever have led to anything other than disillusionment and radicalization?  I don't think so.

Not without fundamental cultural change.  And I just don't think they are ready for that.

No people who wastes as much time praying as muslims is ready for the modern world.

And the modern world therefore does not give a fuck about them.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Well, not even Islam itself changed the culture much at all, Min. It only glommed onto the Bedouin culture already in place, and expanded it. The same tribal organization, the same in-group/out-group dynamic was carried forward.

In a sense, Islam wrapped itself around the culture, justifying its own existence by giving inshallah to the cultural norms already in place. It didn't attempt to change tribal structure, but rather, codified it.

[Minimalist]

I don't know if that applies to Egypt, though.  Egypt has been an agricultural nation since the 4th millennium BC if not earlier.  When the Arabs arrived they ruled as an elite over a largely coptic xtian nation which only slowly adopted islamic bullshit instead of their own.