Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Islam historian Bernard Lewis and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz discuss democracy in the Middle East.
“The so-called Arab Spring, which was taken by many people to be a promising beginning to a democratization of that world, has turned out to be much more like an Arab Winter. The fact that there have been free elections in Egypt, for example, is no great consolation. It brought to power the Muslim Brotherhood, which, in my view, is a far worse regime and also adversary of the United States than the Mubarak regime was. And I think that you will find that in Syria, when and if Assad falls, a similar group will take over.”