Forum Post: Tariq Ramadan: The question to ask is if the West is ready for Arab democracy

If you are unfamiliar with Tariq Ramadan, this is a link to his website and an article from June of 2012.

Some call him the “Martin Luther of Islam,” while others see him as the “most dangerous man in Europe.” In 2008, Britain’s Prospect and the US Foreign Policy magazines ranked Swiss-born Islamic scholar of Egyptian descent Tariq Ramadan number eight on their list of the world’s top 100 contemporary intellectuals.

The interview is here

In your book “Islam and the Arab Awakening,” you particularly focus on the question of whether it’s wrong to consider recent events in the Arab world to be revolutions or whether they are more uprisings that are being manipulated and, to some extent, controlled from all sides, not just from the West. Can you please elaborate on this?

I never used -- from the very beginning -- the concept of spring or even revolution, because revolution means much more to me than what we are witnessing. … What we are now seeing on the ground in Egypt and Tunisia, expecting that this movement will change everything -- it’s not happening. All this perception -- that nothing was known by the West and the revolutions came all of a sudden, out of nothing -- was not true. We have facts now and they confirm what is now happening in Syria. We know that Freedom House, Albert Einstein Institute, the State Department in the [US] but also many [other] institutions and international institutions ... trained people to push towards what they were calling the “uprising” in the Middle East.

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Yep, I went ahead and pulled that out so I could skip the ketchup posts. That's right. I'll just go ahead and do this one too.

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

Great got that covered.

If you are still playing ketchup, please also read this :Revolution, Elections, and Betrayal: Hard Lessons from Egypt

ElBaradei called for a second round of protests on top of the death sentence verdict handed out to 21 football fans. Link It's all allegedly under control..

Am I missing anything? Oh, yeah. Agreement between Egypt and IMF to be renegotiated

So, there I was reading and I came across two articles Egypt’s Transition Needs Some Quiet U.S. Help and On Revolt’s Anniversary, Egypt Needs Economic Miracle

and as always the oil

and I came to the conclusion: No, Ramadan the West is not ready.
Just ask them

So, why so quiet on the second anniversary?