Self-help

Syrian Farid Ghadry wants his, and other, Arab nations to learn from Israel.

Israel’s democracy and its economic prosperity are all needed in our midst in the hope that we can learn self-empowerment. It is not hard to imagine our young people learning about empowerment when they watch Israeli democracy on their television sets, but it is hard to imagine they will be able to apply it living under an authoritarian system of government. That is the reason why Arabs send their own young people as suicide bombers instead of nurturing them to grow and become citizens of the world...

Israel has, in less than 60 years, built an economy ten times that of Syria with one-fifth the population. How does one explain this fact? It is very simple: Israel is a vibrant democracy.

He finishes with a fable. May those who have ears listen to the story of two factories built side-by-side.

One is very successful and its employees take a good paycheck and the other is not so successful and its employees are economically deprived. The manager of the not-so-successful factory spends all his time striving to destroy the successful factory when he in fact should be spending his time learning and imitating the successful factory for his people to luxuriate in similar prosperity.

Let it not be said that the Syrian regime is without initiative, however. From Part 2 of Ghadry's post.

An affluent lawyer in Damascus drives his car every other day for about 50 kilometers to buy his fruits and vegetables even though he can buy them easily in Damascus. One can find the largest lettuce heads and the biggest tomatoes in Damascus but he would not buy them for anything in the world. It turned out that the Syrian government uses its sewer water, without any recycling or possibly poor recycling, to water the farms surrounding Damascus. Untreated sewer water contains lots of fertilizers, which explains the size of the lettuce and tomatoes. The lawyer tells me they taste awful.

Part 3 is here. Warning: he does tend to get sidetracked.