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Keeping the Arab Spring Alive
(Washington Post) Editorial - Though the Islamists of Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere say that they are democrats, they are not liberal - and their relations with the West are uneasy at best. The true liberals of the Arab world - those who plotted the uprisings on Facebook and brought the secular middle classes to the street - risk being marginalized. They lack the organization of mosque-based movements or the foreign funding supplied by conservative states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In Egypt, they also remain the prime target of a military establishment that hopes to preserve an outsize measure of power. The best cure for what ails the Middle East is what it has lacked: free debate and democracy. In the short term, that may lead to mistaken policies or greater friction with the West. But over time extremists and fundamentalists are more likely to be discredited. The Arab world's huge and rising young generation wants the freedom and prosperity it sees spreading in much of the rest of the world - and the rest of the world should be betting on that.