The Arab Spring can teach us a lot about our own leaders

The Arab Spring is amongst us. Yemen, Syria, Bahrain (complete with it's 'not about the money' Grand Prix), Oman, Egypt, Libya and, oh yeah, Palestine.

Yesterday, hundreds were injured and a dozen or so were killed when Palestinian and Syrian protesters held a demonstration on the Israeli border in the hotly contested region, the Golan Heights. Israeli soldiers indiscriminately shot live ammunition at the protesters in a similar fashion to the gunning down of protesters we have seen all over the Middle East. A brief analysis of the responses by Western leaders offers us interesting insights into the state of Middle East politics currently.

According to the BBC News website:

“The US state department said it was 'troubled' by the 'loss of life'” “We call for all sides to exercise restraint... Provocative actions like this should be avoided.”

There are a number of issues here. The first being the fact that the US state department seems to label protest against oppression as a 'provocative action' (a bit like a lady choosing to wear a mini-skirt eh Canadian Policeman??). Protest is not provocative. Protest is not a threat. Protest is a positive element of democratic life, crucial to the collective well-being of all societies.

William Hague certainly didn't regard the protests of Syrian's citizens as provocative when on the 11th April this year he urged the Syrian government to:

“respect its people's right to free speech and peaceful protest.”

And as for exercising restraint on both sides, I wonder how NATO would react if we drew this comment alongside the military barbarism in Libya – killing children in the name of freedom, using UN sanctions to protect human life in order to attempt to overthrow a dictator the West has supported for decades. The West it seems, while calling for restraint from others, are happy to use excessive force in its own interests.

Western leaders condemn the violence of Middle East states and fail to condemn Israeli violence. Western leaders then use violence themselves to achieve their own goals and objectives.

What is more, is the convenient use of pro-protest rhetoric at the same time as the UK government works hard to clamp down on legitimate protest on its own streets. It is beyond doubt that this humanitarian discourse of the UK government helped a great deal in forming a tsunami that washed away the clear appearance of unrest and discomfort on its own streets, during the student protests of late 2010 and early 2011. The more the UK cared about protesters on Egyptian streets, the less it had to worry about the public's perceptions of the protesters in parliament square suffering at the arms of truncheons and under the feet of stampeding horses.

This clever use of foreign policy discourse unveils a number of conclusions that must not go amiss amongst the tidal wave of 24-hour news coverage:

1. The West backs Israel 100% even when it oppresses, tortures and murders civilians every day.
2. The West will use violence when it wants to, and will condemn the use of violence by others when it profits them.
3. The West supports protest when it is in their interest and brutally clamps down on protest in its own streets. The act of demanding that Syria respect the right to free speech and to peaceful protest infers that these rights are respected here – they are not.
4. Protest continues to be perceived as a threat, something which it, by definition, is not.