O Contraire

How reassured should we be that al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in lawless Yemen by a Hellfire missile fired from an American drone? In the first instant: very. There’s nothing like the elimination of an enemy passionately bent on destroying citizens of the country of his birth to improve the general mood.

Americans—unaccustomed these days, like much of the rest of the world, to excellent news—can be forgiven for assuming initially that the targeting and killing of someone who incited the murderous Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood two years back, as well as the idiotic underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who almost brought down a jet, was on the whole a terrific and praiseworthy accomplishment.

Certainly it seemed that way for about ten minutes.

Personally, I think that King Abdullah’s decision to allow Saudi women to vote in four years’ time in local elections might not, on reflection, be cause for universal celebration. And not only because these ladies will—eventually—be privy to participating in an event so special that you could be forgiven for believing it doesn’t really exist at all. In the past 50 years, as the Daily Beast points out there have been only two municipal elections held in that country. Voting, therefore, is a kind of rarified exotic pastime, no matter what your gender.

Here’s what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should say if he has a tactical bone in his body, which thus far has not been much in evidence:

UN-approved statehood for the Palestinians? Fabulous idea, love it to death. Israel is 1000 percent behind it! Go ahead—give them full membership, not just some puny observer-state status—and we’ll beg our American allies to vote for it! In fact, we’ll suggest, if they’re feeling particularly flush these days, that American taxpayers continue shoveling out $600 million a year in aid to the newly approved state. We’ll also stop building settlements. Hell yes, we’ll ask for recognition from the Palestinians in return, but the other three demands will just be kind of modest appendages to that small request. All we’ll expect is that

Whatever the drawbacks of Western-style democracy, it does have this going for it: Democracy is the art of living in peace with those one despises. It is a hard-won ability, a gift torn from oppression, from years of religious persecution, muzzled speech, the inability to pick your own leaders. And it co-exists always with the sanguine notion that however sure you might be of the supremacy of your own views, at the end of the day you must leave open the possibility that you might be wrong and they, the ones you despise, might be right. In other words, democracy encompasses a truckload of doubt. And I do not know of a more valuable national asset.

And it is for this reason that I believe that Islam might not be able to coexist with democracy, that what we call the Arab Spring will turn, sooner or later, into an icy and cruel winter. In fact, the process has already begun.

When you get right down to it, Italians have long admired and repeatedly elected Silvio Berlusconi because, deep down, he reminded them of an American (well … their notion of an American, anyway). A man who sought—and attained—infinite wealth, infinite means of communication, infinite prospects, infinite women, infinite power, infinite freedom to do exactly as he pleased—a borderless, lawless country, in human form.

Here’s the bad news: At least half of all children in developed nations born within the last four years will live to be 100 years old, according to the Lancet. In the UK, we are told, about 50 percent will hit 104. Today’s Japanese kids will likely end up with three more years of life than their British counterparts. Half the toddlers of the US, France, Canada, and Italy will hit 104. Danes, more modest in their ambitions, can croak at 101.

What the newspaper doesn’t say? Already centenarians are the fastest growing demographic in the developed world. This is not necessarily a good thing.

So now we know that 13 American scholars have been refused entry to China—no official reason given by the Chinese, of course, but the dark suspicion is their PNG status results from a book these professors wrote about Xinjiang, a large and tumultuous region of western China. This area evidently has a big Muslim population that occasionally turns resentful and violent toward the ruling regime. And we all know how happy the Chinese government is to share details of separatist movements with the rest of the world—or with other Chinese, for that matter.

My own personal favorite headline on the subject of the latest problem in Pakistan is this, published Monday in Pakistan’s Daily Times: “Police Clueless Who Kidnapped American.”

Yes, sad to say, Pakistani police have absolutely no idea what happened after Warren Weinstein, an American contractor, was abducted from his residence in Lahore. Or to quote a senior police official from Lahore: “We do not yet have any concrete information that there was a specific threat.”

Although in most instances you could argue a kidnapping constitutes a specific threat….

Of course one is tempted to concentrate just on this latest: China is, as ever, muzzling its media, on this occasion because a train crash that killed 40 in that nation resulted in millions of angry postings on its social network sites, most of them essentially blaming the government itself for the catastrophe.

I’ve always sort of wanted to know the definition of a third-world nation, and how such a nation compares to other countries in loftier categories. This is because for one truly terrible year I lived in a third-world country—at least the United States State Department bestowed that epithet on it—and during that entire time, although I was allowed to make (genteel, sympathetic, clucking) references to the “third world” in which I was stuck and its many problems, I was not permitted to describe the United States, not even once, as a “first-world nation.”

“Calling us first world makes you sound elitist,” I was informed by American embassy personnel on the rare occasions I was able to talk to them about this issue over the phone (that’s because the phones in that country basically never worked), or even in person (because public transportation was almost nil).

Now why would a highly profitable, popular British tabloid owned by a ruthless media czar risk an empire by bribing, blackmailing, and hacking everyone from cops to prime ministers, kidnap victims to royalty?

Two answers—the only answers thus far put forward by rival newspapers and TV commentators—would be: (1) to beat the competition and (2) because that’s how you attract devoted readers in any country. And all that’s true enough. As far as it goes…