A tale of two systems: general elections in UK and Israel

A few months ago, I was invited to make a presentation on some ‘hot’ political topic in the West Midlands, in front of an audience made up of local Labour Party activists.  During the Q & A session that followed, I happened to mention the concept of ‘democracy’.  One of the participants intervened: “The question is”, he pompously intoned, gazing down at me along his nose, “what is democracy, actually?  We cannot impose our Western views on other people.  What we see as democracy, other nations may see as something else – and the other way around”.

Whether born of sheer ignorance or moral relativism, such thinking (or lack thereof) is not uncommon among activists, journalists, politicians and even professional diplomats.

Take, for instance, the opinion of Andrew Green, a former British Ambassador who represented his country in Syria and Saudi Arabia.  In a Telegraph article entitled ‘Why Western democracy can never work in the Middle East’, Mr. Green states:

“Democracy is emphatically not the solution for extremely complex societies and Western meddling only makes matters immeasurably worse. The fundamental reason for our failure is that democracy, as we understand it, simply doesn’t work in Middle Eastern countries where family, tribe, sect and personal friendships trump the apparatus of the state. These are certainly not societies governed by the rule of law. On the contrary, they are better described as ‘favour for favour’ societies.”

To paraphrase Mr. Green, I would suggest that “The fundamental reason for our failure is the stupidity of our diplomats”.  To even use the term ‘Western democracy’ denotes ignorance; the rest of Mr. Green’s peroration is suffused with the falsely-tolerant but actually supremacist idea that cultural issues are either immutable or taboo.  Let me suggest to Mr. Green that the reason why in some countries “family, tribe, sect and personal friendships trump the apparatus of the state” is that that “apparatus” represents an artificial state, one that is not based on any true form of identity, such as national or religious identity.  Such artificial ‘states’ have been created by Mr. Green’s ‘imperial’ predecessors and are being ruled (‘oppressed’ may be a better description) by local despots with the ‘benevolent’ complicity of Mr. Green’s colleagues and bosses.

There is no such thing as ‘Western democracy’.  There is liberal democracy – a political system that may have originated in the West (although, unlike democracy, ‘West’ is a relative term), but that is equally suitable to nations vastly dissimilar in terms of society and culture.  Liberal democracy works in Asian Japan just as well as in the United States of America.  It works in European France and Middle Eastern Israel.  Germany’s Western European culture did not stop it from becoming a Nazi state in the 1930s; North and South Korea are home to the same Asian nation, yet one is a liberal democracy – the other an autocratic inferno; China may still be described as a “favour for favour society”, but liberal democracy rules culturally akin Taiwan.

Inane journalists often reduce ‘liberal democracy’ to the much-much narrower concept of ‘free elections’.  The BBC, for instance, informs its audience (‘misinforms’ would be a better description) that

“Mohammed Morsi was Egypt's first democratically elected president…”

Needless to say, while Egypt may have experienced one round of (almost) free elections, Morsi could not have been ‘democratically elected’, because the country does not have the basic infrastructure of a democracy: freedom of press, freedom of speech, expression and dissent, a healthy public debate, etc.

Had the West Midlands Labour Party activist been forced to live for a few months under a dictatorial regime, he would have developed a better understanding of what democracy actually is.  Had BBC journalists been forced out of their five-star hotels and forced to live like most Egyptians, they would have understood that there is nothing ‘democratic’ in that country.

But while politicians, diplomats and journalists wallow in intellectual paucity and moral relativism, the good news is that liberal democracy survives and flourishes.  Because, while people on the street may have difficulty in defining it in academic terms, they understand and appreciate its blessings; honest, down-to-earth street smarts easily beat vacuous Etonian and Oxbridgean arrogance.

It is heartening to see, therefore, that within the space of just a couple of months, truly democratic elections have taken place in two liberal democracies, on two different continents: Israel and the United Kingdom.  And it is not just that elections have taken place; in true democratic fashion, they have taken place after intense – sometimes to the point of stridency – public debate.  And in both countries – again in true democratic fashion – the losers have neither declared a coup, nor have they been imprisoned by the winners; rather, they have more-or-less graciously admitted defeat, while vowing to continue – as democratic opposition – to provide checks and balances on the winners’ power.

Israel and the UK have very different electoral systems: the United Kingdom is divided in electoral wards (constituencies) – each electing a Member of Parliament from among several candidates.  The winner is the recipient of most votes, irrespective of whether s/he achieved an absolute majority (the ‘first past the post’ system).  The Israeli system is a purely proportional one: it views the entire country (Israel is almost exactly the size of Wales) as a single constituency, whose inhabitants vote for one of several political parties.  The number of Members of Parliament elected from each party is in direct proportion to the number of votes received (i.e. a party that received 10% of the votes will have 10% of the seats in Parliament).  Each system has advantages and disadvantages; but whatever the technicalities, both give suitable expression to the collective will of the people.

In both countries, that collective will has this time favoured the incumbents.  In both countries, the winners belong to what I’d call the Sane Right, as opposed to the Sane Left who came out as the main losers.  In both Israel and the UK the media and pollsters (who, in both countries, typically lean left) allowed wishful thinking to taint their professional judgment – and as a result issued erroneous predictions.  The difference between the two electoral systems produced a governing party in the UK, but a coalition government in Israel.  Crucially, however, in both countries democratic rule will continue unabated.

Not everybody accepted the electoral verdict, of course.  In the UK, ‘protesters’ belonging to the extreme-left Socialist Workers Party ‘laid siege on Downing Street’ and clashed with the police, intent on ridding the country of the ‘F*****g Tory scum’.  In Israel, a host of ‘NGOs’ is in continuous ‘protest’ against the country’s democratically expressed will.  Like the British ones, most Israeli ‘protesters’ identify with what I call ‘Red Mad’: the extreme-left communist/anarchist/’just-gimme-a-cause’-ist fringe of the society.  In both countries, the ‘Red Mad’ hope is that ideology will trump democracy; having failed at persuasion, these people attempt coercion.  But that’s where the similarity stops: lame as they may be, the British ‘protesters’ are at least an internal phenomenon, rather than a foreign intervention; far-left extremists are not funded by Israel, nor supported by the United States; Israeli media shows little interest in their ideologically-skewed utterings.  Not so with the Israeli ‘protesters’: these ‘Non-Governmental Organisations’ (Foreign-Sponsored Subversion Agencies or FSSA would be a better descriptor) are typically funded by foreign governments, either directly or through other NGOs; and they are the ‘darlings’ of mainstream media, which showers them with attention massively disproportionate to their weight within the Israeli public opinion.

Unwittingly, undemocratically and unbeknownst to most British taxpayers who foot the bill (but under the advice of Mr. Green’s ilk of Middle East ‘experts’), the United Kingdom is, sadly, among the countries fomenting sedition in a fellow liberal democracy.  In that respect, it is not just the Israeli democracy that is undermined, but also the British one.  After all, democracy implies transparency and majority rule; but in allowing part of its foreign policy to be underhandedly hijacked by a militant minority, the United Kingdom deviates from both those principles.

In a future article, we will analyse the issue in detail.  Watch this space!

Progressive blindness

Egyptian masses may have no experience of democracy; but their instincts are better than those of some Western “progressives”.

I will never understand the weird empathy that certain self-proclaimed Western “progressives” chronically manifest towards Islamism.  Perhaps they are unable to distinguish between Islam (a monotheistic religion akin to Christianity and Judaism) and Islamism (a supremacist ideology which manipulates and misuses religious concepts in order to achieve political goals).  At home in the West, progressive persons strive towards complete gender equality – and (needless to say) rightly so.  When it comes to Islamism and its proponents, however, some Western “progressives” barely dare to tiptoe around the issue; let alone call the spade a spade – i.e. blatant, abhorrent discrimination, oppression and often outright gender apartheid.  In the West, progressives battle for full equality of same gender couples in the eyes of the law.  So why wilfully ignore the fact that for Islamists homosexuality is a capital crime?  In the West progress means, as a matter of course, the separation of Church and State; elsewhere, however, some “progressives” applaud “moderate Islamists”.  Do you get it, folks?  “Moderate” Islamism – i.e. “gender apartheid –light”, rather than the full version.  It appears that, in the eyes of some “progressives”, what is good for British, French or German citizens is not necessarily good for Egyptians, Tunisians or Libyans.  If that is not racism, then I suggest that – for the sake of consistency – those “progressives” also need to revise their attitude towards “moderate” Ku Klux Klan leaders.
The latest evidence of such profoundly flawed (and fundamentally racist) attitudes is provided by an editorial recently published by The Guardian.  Written in elegiac tones, it refers to the recent events in Egypt, which resulted in the dismissal of Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood regime.  Guardian empathises with Morsi, calling him the “democratically elected president”.  Referring to Egypt’s presidential elections as “democratic” is at best a misuse of the term and at worst an attempt to deceive.  Those elections may have been “free” – even calling them “fair” is very problematic, for a number of reasons.  But “democratic”??  Need we remind the editors of The Guardian that democracy (a concept they purport to promote) involves more, much more than free elections?  For instance, such “small details” as the rule of law, the separation of powers, a free press, an open public debate with no imposed taboos?  All of which were conspicuously absent in Egypt at the time of Morsi’s election – and still are?  Not to mention that, while shamelessly characterising Morsi as “democratically elected”, not even Guardian can bring itself to claim that he ruled democratically.  In fact, as Egyptians know only too well, once elected Morsi did nothing to build democratic institutions (the mandate he was actually entrusted with); quite the opposite: he did his utmost to weaken any institution showing signs of independence – and ruled by decree, in the “best” tradition of dictators.
While The Guardian admits (rather euphemistically) that “Morsi failed to make good on [his] promises”, they still choose to deplore his removal.  “[W]hich standard is more important than the one which decrees that transfers of power can only be enacted peacefully and through the ballot box?” asks The Guardian mournfully and rhetorically, decrying Morsi’s toppling.  Indeed, peaceful transfer of power is what characterises a democracy.  But under the Muslim Brotherhood regime Egypt was not a democracy – nor was it likely to become one.  President Morsi was no democrat; he was a dictator-in-the-making who (as dictators do) used democratic jargon to cover very undemocratic actions.  Dictators are not removed by “peacefully enacted transfers of power”; they are toppled by popular revolt supported by the military, just as Mubarak was.  The Guardian’s lack of intellectual honesty is made even more blatant by their characterisation of the events as purely a “military coup”.  Sure, the military were the ones that “closed the deal” – that’s what usually happens.  That’s what happened in the end also when Mubarak was toppled.  After all, ultimately someone needs to forcefully remove the dictator – and it can only be done by the military or with their support.  But Guardian dishonestly ignores the millions of Egyptians who called for Morsi’s removal.  The formal act of deposing Morsi might have ultimately been performed by the military; but to call it purely a “military coup” is to close one’s eyes and ears to the unequivocally expressed will of the Egyptian masses.
Where The Guardian finally loses any sense of ridicule is where it claims that “[t]he ousted Muslim Brotherhood […] are now fighting for constitutional democracy”.  No, they are not.  They are fighting to impose their supremacist view of the world, which should be anathema to anyone who calls him/herself progressive.
It is too early to predict where the latest events in Egypt will ultimately lead to.  But, in the case of Morsi and his regime, the judgement expressed by the Egyptian people is the right one – and that should be a source of optimism.  Perhaps the false “progressives” in the West ought to learn from the good instincts of Egyptians; those Western “progressives” might thus be reminded that while being elected bestows legitimacy, it does not bestow unconditional legitimacy.  Being elected by the majority does not confer a mandate to rule by decree, but to rule within a fair framework of checks and balances.  That is precisely what distinguishes democracy from a “tyranny of the majority”.  The Nazi party came to power in Germany as a result of free elections.  That did not make their hateful regime “legitimate”.  Unlike Guardian’s confused editors, true progressives understand that legitimacy does not arise just from the way a leader is elected, but – crucially – from the way s/he rules.