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The Arab Spring Is Becoming an Islamist Takeover
(Telegraph-UK) Con Coughlin - Much as I sympathize with the desire of millions of young Arabs to free themselves from the tyranny of autocratic government, I'm finding it hard to draw any positive conclusions from the results of last weekend's elections in Tunisia, where the Islamist Ennahda party has emerged as the main winner. The same goes for neighboring Libya, where NATO has just spent the past eight months helping the rebels to overthrow Gaddafi's regime. No doubt Prime Minister Cameron and President Sarkozy were hoping to replace Gaddafi with a pro-Western regime with whom they could negotiate lots of lucrative oil contracts. Instead they find that the victors of Libya's nasty civil war are planning to set up a new government based on the strict interpretation of Sharia law. Sharia law is the complete antithesis of Western-style democracy, as we have seen in Iran these past 30-odd years. So, who wants to support the Arab Spring now?