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The 3 Dumbest Things Written by Intellectuals Visiting Libya

I just gave a thumbs-up to Martin Kramer‘s list of the dumbest things written by Western intellectuals who did junkets to Libya. • 3d place: The shores of Tripoli by Stephen Walt http://goo.gl/pkzZu: “Libya doesn’t feel…

Pesach Benson
March 1, 2011
12:00 am

Reading time: < 1 minutes

I just gave a thumbs-up to Martin Kramer‘s list of the dumbest things written by Western intellectuals who did junkets to Libya.

• 3d place: The shores of Tripoli by Stephen Walt http://goo.gl/pkzZu: “Libya doesn’t feel like other police states that I have visited.”

• 2d place: My chat with the colonel by Anthony Giddens http://goo.gl/VCEo4: “As one-party states go, Libya is not especially repressive. Gadafy seems genuinely popular.”

• 1st place: No Democratic Dominoes in the Middle East by Benjamin Barber

“Libya has a tradition of participatory local governance because of Qadaffi’s long interest in participatory democracy and peoples’ committees. Moreover, he is not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested and rules by means other than fear.”

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Tags: Arab uprising, democracy, Gaddafi, Libya, Martin Kramer, Stephen Walt

Pesach Benson

A Baltimore native, Pesach was with HonestReporting from 2011 to 2020. He edited the Israel Daily News Stream and authored the e-book, Red Lines: HonestReporting’s 8 Categories of Media Bias. Before moving to Israel in 1995, he worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Jewish Times. Pesach has a B.A. in political science from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, where he was executive editor of the campus newspaper.

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